Creating a Marketing Strategy in 2023: A Guide for Business Owners

Creating a marketing strategy can be a daunting task. There are many moving parts and pieces to consider, like researching your audience and choosing a marketing channel, budgeting for an ad campaign, and more. But thankfully, there is no need to go it alone.

Our Marketing Strategy Guide will give your business the tools and information necessary to create a comprehensive marketing strategy.

This guide will cover everything from identifying your target market to setting goals and objectives. We will also provide tips on crafting a successful marketing message, understanding your competition, and developing a realistic budget. Plus, you'll get practical advice on measuring and monitoring the success of your efforts.

We will help you create a complete marketing plan that outlines goals, objectives and strategies for reaching them. We'll explain why it is important to set measurable targets, as well as how to use key performance indicators (KPIs) to track progress toward meeting those goals.

By the end of the guide, you will have a comprehensive understanding of developing a practical marketing strategy for your business. You'll be able to identify your target market, craft persuasive messages and measure the success of your efforts - allowing you to get the most out of every marketing dollar spent.

Put simply, our Marketing Strategy Guide will provide you with the knowledge, skills and confidence to create a successful marketing plan that drives business growth. So let's get started!

Setting Marketing Goals

Setting clear marketing goals and objectives is vital for any successful marketing plan. Your business goals should be measurable to track progress with key performance indicators (KPIs).

Your marketing objectives need specific and actionable steps to reach those goals. Setting measurable marketing objectives allows you to measure your success over time and adjust as needed.

Examples of Marketing & Sales KPIs

1. Conversion Rate
2. Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
3. Cost Per Lead
4. Customer Acquisition Rate
5. Customer Retention Rate
6. Email Open Rates
7. Lead Conversion Rate
8. Lead Generation Volume
9. Lifetime Value (LTV)
10. Newsletter Subscribers
11. Number of New Leads Generated
12. Number of Repeat Purchases
13. Organic Search Rankings
14. Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS)
15. Revenue
16. Sales Conversion Rate
17. Site Authority
18. Social Media Awareness Rates
19. Social Media Engagement Rates
20. Website Traffic
    

BEFORE YOU MOVE ON!

1. Stop
2. Select 1 primary KPI
3. Select at least 1 secondary KPI
   

Why Conversions Are The Key to A Successful Marketing Strategy

The simplest way to understand the effectiveness of your businesses' marketing efforts is by tracking conversions (a.k.a. the KPIs you've identified above). It's important to track conversions to determine whether your business efforts deliver positive results and are worth investing your time and energy in.

It would help if you focused on multiple conversions. It enables you to optimize your marketing budget by allocating resources to the most valuable strategies.

In Marketing

In marketing, a conversion is when a customer takes a desired action, such as clicking on an ad, filling out a form or making a purchase. You can track and analyze conversions to measure the success of your company's marketing campaigns.

In Social Media

In social media marketing, conversion typically refers to when a person engages with the content they have seen. A social media "conversion" could include liking, commenting, sharing or clicking on a link. Tracking these conversions can help marketers understand how effective their marketing campaigns are and how much people respond to their messages or post.

In Sales

In sales, a conversion is when a customer completes an action, such as signing up for a free trial, downloading a whitepaper, requesting more information about a service or buying a product. By tracking and analyzing data across various channels, you can identify which marketing campaigns were most successful in driving sales. You can then use the sales conversion data to optimize future campaigns and maximize conversions.

Ultimately, the easiest way to understand the return on investment of your marketing efforts is by tracking conversions, whatever that may mean to your business.

BEFORE YOU MOVE ON!

1. Stop
2. Confirm the KPIs you selected above are the most critical conversion events for your business
   

Identifying Your Target Market

Identifying your target market is essential to creating a successful marketing strategy. To do this, you need to understand who your product or service appeals to and how they can benefit from it. You also have to consider the demographics of your potential customers — age, gender, income level, geographic location and more — so that you can tailor your messaging appropriately.

Once you've identified your target market, you can start creating content that speaks directly to them. Identifying your target market first will ensure that your messages resonate with the people you're trying to reach.

Analyzing Customer Data

Customer data can be an invaluable tool in marketing. You can better understand your target audience and their interests by analyzing customer data such as purchase histories and browsing behavior. Good customer research helps you tailor marketing messages to specific people, which can lead to higher conversion rates. You can also use customer data to identify trends and track marketing performance, which can help you refine your marketing strategies over time.

Analyzing customer data also provides insights into the most influential marketing channels for reaching and converting customers. Remember, the overall goal is strategically allocating marketing resources to the most efficient channels - driving the most conversions.

Conducting Customer Surveys

Conducting customer surveys are a great way to gain insight into the minds of your customers or even potential user base. With answers to carefully curated questions, you can make data-driven decisions, from product design and pricing to promotional strategies and marketing decisions. Discover how your customers feel about your brand and new ideas you might have, or evaluate if the experience they have with your business compares favorably to other competitors.

Your customers' opinions matter - and it's time to start paying attention! Use survey tools or polling platforms to engage with current customers or target new audiences, measure satisfaction levels, gather feedback on upcoming changes or products pre-launch, and build loyalty programs that keep them coming back for more - there are numerous ways to use research insights when developing market strategies. 

Our favorite survey tools: 

Google Forms (The best 100% free tool)

Google Forms is the perfect tool for creating powerful surveys and forms quickly and easily. With its intuitive drag-and-drop builder, you can set up a survey in minutes—complete with multiple-choice questions, rating scales, advanced logic, and more. Plus, Google Forms is fully integrated into the powerful Google Suite platform, allowing free access to data from any device.

• Maximum number of surveys: Unlimited
• Maximum questions per survey: Unlimited
• Maximum responses: Unlimited
• Easy to use drag-and-drop interface
• Real-time response tracking and data analysis
• Customizable themes and templates
• Mobile friendly design
• Easy to share surveys with a single link
• Ability to embed questions into emails or webpages
• Automated email notifications for responding to surveys
• Multiple question types, including multiple-choice, checkbox, dropdown and more
• Responses are stored securely in Google Drive
  

Survey Monkey (Free & Paid)

Survey Monkey is the premier tool for gathering insights, conducting surveys and polls, and quickly collecting data. With its versatile question types and intuitive design, you can quickly set up surveys to gain valuable feedback and insights from your customers, team members, or Survey Monkey's global audience.

• Maximum number of surveys: Unlimited
• Maximum questions per survey: 10
• Maximum responses: 10 per survey
• Ability to target specific audiences and track responses (i.e. select a demographic and send them your questions) 
• Easy to use drag-and-drop interface
• Ability to embed surveys in emails or websites
• Over 60 customizable and ready-to-use templates
• Advanced logic and branching capabilities
• Ability to add audio, video, and images to surveys
  

Typeform (Paid Only) 

Typeform is the perfect tool for creating beautiful and engaging surveys, forms, and quizzes quickly. With its intuitive drag-and-drop builder and range of customizable templates, Typeform lets you easily create appealing content.

• Maximum number of surveys: Unlimited
• Maximum questions per survey: 10
• Maximum responses: 10 responses per month
• Intuitive drag-and-drop builder
• View results in real-time with the analytics dashboard
• Ability to calculate scores and gather payments securely through Stripe integration
• An intuitive user interface for users to quickly complete the form, making it simpler than ever
• Logic jumps! By taking advantage of logic jumps, survey-takers can easily bypass irrelevant questions and head straight to the most pertinent ones - usually paid features

Engaging On Social Media

Social media is an excellent tool for gathering information about your target audience. Posting is the most straightforward way to engage with consumers and build long-term relationships. You can then analyze your comments and engagement before requesting specific feedback from users on what they like or dislike about your products or services or asking them questions about their experiences. 

Another way to use social media to research your target audience is by monitoring user-generated content (UGC) and hashtags of potential customers. You can identify what topics resonate with them, which influencers they follow, and their opinions on trends and the products they consume.

By leveraging the power of these marketing research tools, business owners can gain valuable insights into their target market and develop marketing strategies tailored to their needs. With these tools, gather information on your target audience to guarantee that your business is tailoring its campaigns to its target audience.

Understanding Your Competition

1. Establish Who Are Your Competitors

The first step in establishing your competitors is identifying industries with overlapping products and services. List out the competitors of your business.

Now it's necessary to investigate them further.

Look at their target markets (i.e. who is their content tailored to?), pricing strategies, promotional methods, and other information that could give you an edge. With the knowledge in this guide, you'll have all the ammunition necessary to stay one step ahead of your competitors. Additionally, monitoring competitors over time is a good practice, so you can stay up-to-date with their moves and adjust accordingly.

2. Analyze Their Strengths & Weaknesses

Another step in building your marketing strategy is to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. The competitive analysis involves assessing a competitor's marketing mix (the four Ps of marketing—product, place, price, and promotion). 

• Product: how do they package their product or services?
• Place: where are they selling, physical and online? how does it look?
• Price: how much are they charging?
• Promotion: what promotions or offers are they currently running?
  

With this information, it can be easier to identify areas where you can outshine your competition!

Tools For Research

i. Google Trends

Google Trends is an excellent tool for researching trends, seasonal variations, and regional interests. Analyzing these trends allows you to identify marketing opportunities and tailor your marketing strategy accordingly. Additionally, the search volume estimates provided by Google Trends help understand how popular a particular keyword or phrase is among potential customers.‍

ii. SEMRush

SEMRush is another helpful tool for marketing research. Although it might be too advanced for most users, it allows you to identify competitors and track domain and keyword volume, ranking, difficulty, ideas, and insights. This information can help identify marketing strategies that are more likely to lead to success.

iii. Facebook Ads Library

The Facebook Ads Library is a handy marketing research tool. It provides access to all the active and recently closed campaigns on Facebook and some demographic information about the audience they are targeting with those ads. Your business can use this site to see your competitors' ads.

Pro tip: if you no longer see an ad, it's likely because the ad didn't work well

iv. AnswerThePublic

Answer The Public is a research tool that helps find questions people are asking about particular topics. This information can help businesses understand the concerns of their potential customers and adjust marketing plans to address their needs.

By leveraging these marketing research tools, you can gain valuable insights into their target market and develop marketing strategies tailored to the keywords and questions that your customers are searching for online.

Monitor Any Changes & Updates

1. Subscribe to newsletters
2. Watch or listen to YouTube videos & podcasts
3. Monitor competitor websites & social media pages
4. Follow news outlets and journalists on social media
5. Join industry groups on social media, Slack or Discord
   

Choosing the Right Marketing Channel

1. Assess Your Resources

Once you have identified marketing opportunities and strategies, it is time to evaluate your resources as a business owner or marketing director, such as your budget, personnel and marketing channels. It would help if you considered whether these resources are sufficient to carry out marketing campaigns effectively within your industry.

In other words, are you willing to put up with the investment to get things off the ground?

A longer sales cycle, or competitive industry, requires businesses to invest in more marketing. For example, customers considering high-ticket items or services with a longer sales cycle take longer to decide and purchase. Potential customers need more information about these products or services before being pushed over the edge to make a purchase decision.

Companies must invest in marketing to convince potential customers that they are making confident decisions. Investing in marketing could include offering more content and resources like product demos, customer reviews, case studies, ads, social media and email marketing.

Quality marketing will increase the chances of success when selling higher-priced items. Still, it will only be successful with the correct marketing content, targeting and budget.

Additionally, business owners need to consider the cost of marketing channels and whether they are cost-effective for their specific needs. For example, marketing through ads may be more expensive up front than marketing through social media, targeted email campaigns, or SEO efforts. However, once fine-tuned, ads are often the most cost-effective way to reach a large audience.

By assessing available marketing resources and evaluating channels based on where your target audience will make their decisions (i.e. convert), business owners can ensure that their marketing efforts are successful.

2. Research Popular Channels

Doing marketing research can be a daunting task for business owners. It can take time to identify which channel will lead to success. To make marketing easier, take our quiz to discover which marketing channel is best for your business.

The quiz evaluates your goals, industry, and resources to suggest the best channel.

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Crafting A Successful Marketing Message

To maximize the chances of conversion, hone in on the distinguishing features that define your target audience and create marketing messages tailored to their interests.

Your marketing messages should uniquely position your customer's needs and demonstrate how your product or service can help alleviate those needs. Use examples, stories, and testimonials to illustrate how your product or service can help them.

The 3 E's of Content

Entertaining

It helps customers connect with a business, form a positive opinion and ease them into making a purchase decision. It's the key to creating marketing campaigns that are more personal and effective.

Businesses can make their marketing campaigns more engaging by providing relevant, engaging, and fun content tailored to customers' values. Entertaining content could include funny videos, reactions, or memes. 

Emotional

This type of content gets a reaction from viewers emotionally. Content that triggers a response can increase engagement and build stronger positive or sometimes harmful relationships.

We recommended using marketing messages that speak directly to customers' needs while connecting with their emotions. For example, marketing campaigns can include stories of how customers overcame hardships or used a product or service to improve their lives.

Educational

Content marketing is most effective when marketing messages are informational, educational and helpful to customers. Providing valuable information about a product, industry, or service shows potential customers that a business is intelligent and can be trusted.

Including educational content in marketing campaigns also serves as an avenue to introduce customers to a product or service and guide them toward making informed decisions.

Budgeting For A Marketing Campaign

1. Set a Budget

Most business owners, or marketing leaders, need to know how to budget and decide how much they will spend on marketing. We recommend that you approach this by evaluating numerous factors, such as your ad channels, industry competitiveness, and product-market fit.

Your business should be looking at your budget through the lens of your short-term and long-term goals.

By setting a marketing budget, your business can invest its next marketing dollars wisely. That's why we created the calculator below to help you estimate a monthly budget we could standby.

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2. Decide How You'll Monitor Performance

Effective marketing requires tracking marketing performance. Business owners need to track metrics such as website visits, email opens and clicks, conversion rates, and more to determine whether their marketing efforts are practical.

Once you've selected which marketing channels you'll use and set your marketing budget, decide how to track each marketing campaign's performance, this will help you make marketing decisions faster and refine your marketing strategy based on complex data.

1. Track website visits and bounce rates
2. Analyze email open rates
3. Monitor conversions
4. Measure social media engagement
5. Track impressions and clicks
6. Use A/B testing to compare campaigns
   

If you're looking to track web data, Google Analytics is our go-to. It's comprehensive, easily accessible, and can measure marketing performance across all channels. It offers marketing insights and information about website visitors, such as where they are coming from, what pages they visit, and how long they stay on your website. Lastly, you're able to track events and

Need help setting up Google Analytics? Contact us.

Our two favorite A/B testing tools are Leadpages and Unbounce. Both tools offer helpful templates to create custom landing pages with valuable analytics to track which variation performs best. They allow users to track metrics like conversions easily and clicks to measure the success of their campaigns and optimize accordingly. The user-friendly drag-and-drop editor makes it easy for even novice marketers to design stunning pages quickly and efficiently.

Conclusion

You can make informed decisions using marketing analytics that will help guide your 2023 marketing strategy. The key is to stay organized and consistent in tracking marketing performance and to use the data to make marketing decisions throughout the process that will help your business reach its goals.

We hope this guide has provided business owners with the information they need to create a marketing strategy for 2023. With these marketing strategies and tools, you'll be well on your way to marketing success.

Good luck!