Top 5 things you SHOULD have in your marketing strategy for 2024

You have an idea for a great marketing campaign or a new product or service to launch, but what next? I imagine you want to just get going and dive straight in to getting a landing page live or posting the news out on social media, but this is where I would urge you to stop and think about your why, your reasons, your target audience, your pricing, branding and much much more, then putting this all down into a step by step plan. It will be worth it doing it this way, I promise.

The importance of having a clear plan is essentially to make the most of your marketing budget and campaigns, and to ensure consistency with your marketing and the measuring of it. These two pieces of advice (consistency and measuring) are key but what is a plan, what is a strategy and why do you need both to make a success of your marketing?

What is in a marketing strategy?

There are 5 steps or aspects to a strategy, and these are:

Objective Setting – setting goals and knowing your why (including competitor analysis, keyword review, market research, website review, social media profiles review and SMART goal setting)
Defining the messaging – the wording used to attract your audience and understanding your niche/USP
Pinpointing a strategy – this is the blue sky thinking by you before the doing/the implementation
Refining the target audience – your ideal client avatar, plus your prospects, leads and then your customers (niching)
Developing the tactics – what marketing channels to use to reach your audience with your messaging

What is in a marketing strategy?

Implementing the Plan – this section is split into 3 phases along with outline budgets. Phase 1, the foundations. Phase 2, the one off campaign and 90 day marketing activity. And phase 3, a 30 day mini marketing plan.
Measuring & Evaluation – knowing the results, then the ROI to achieve consistency and measuring.

Why do you need both and the benefits of a strategy and plan?

The best times or situations when to create and write a strategy and plan are at the beginning/start-up of a business or when the business is growing has grown through or is planning change eg post pandemic or when a new service is being launched or is looking fir new marketing ideas.

The reason for these times being optimal is before decisions are made at these crossroads to enable the groundwork to be laid out, the foundations set and things to be well thought through before taking action. A strategy will allow better decisions, to be better organised and to make the most of your budget, time and resource.

A plan IS for you if you want stop wasting time and money on the wrong marketing. And a plan IS for you is to avoid overspending, wasting time and making poor decisions and if you want the desired outcomes and ROI.

Pinpoint Marketing’s top 5 things you should have in your marketing strategy for 2024

Clear Understanding of Your Niche

What is niching and why do it? To help with your messaging, to guide you when networking of who to talk to, to help get referrals etc. It’s about knowing your target audience – what markets/sectors are they in, role, how they think, pain points they have etc etc. Knowing all of this will help you define a clear content plan that will get you organised and consistent but will also land well with your prospects and audience.

Clear Goals

Set/know your KPI’s to measure your future marketing against to understand the ROI, to see what is working and what isn’t, and to give all your marketing a purpose, reason and a why.

Know Your Lead Sources & Let Them Define Which Channels to Use

Marketing isn’t a tick box exercise, don’t do everything just because. Know where your leads come from eg not just online but drill down. Does online mean your website and if so, which page and how did they find your site. Or not just google ads, but which ad, which day, which link did they click. Digital/online marketing (websites to social media to SEO to ads and more, all supplied by Big Gun as you know) is ideal for measuring and tracking and allowing you to drill down where leads exactly come from. Then you know what to more of as it works, and therefore where best to spend your marketing budget and time as effectively as possible.

Measure, Follow Up and Be Accountable

Marketing isn’t an exact science but if you follow the steps and tips in this blog and more, you will get to know your business, trends, client buying patterns, keywords that resonate and more. But don’t leave it there. Measure and track then use these findings and results to further tweak and further improve your marketing. And if you don’t think you will do it or follow through, get an accountability partner or someone to outsource the reporting and consultancy too to ensure you remain on track, focused, engaged and seeing results (eg someone like us!).

Sales Process

Define your sales process right from an enquiry to nurturing to quoting to onboarding and after sales, and everything else between. There isn’t much point doing all this marketing if you aren’t going to follow up or dedicate time to sales to convert the leads marketing has generated.

Now you know why plan, how to plan and what to do when it comes to grown up marketing, let’s do it.
If you have questions, want to know more, want an audit or your marketing or simply someone to brainstorm with, book a discovery call.

Who Is Pinpoint Marketing Consultancy?

As a successful marketer, with over 25 years’ experience in marketing agencies and inhouse and running her own business, Nicole Martin specialises in creating, writing and implementing marketing strategies and plans for B2B professional service businesses (with experience covering facilities management, office design and office interiors, engineering, manufacturing, digital marketing and HR and more recently in the field of IT.)

Nicole can and does use the experience gained from other industries to bring a fresh perspective to new industries, which is seen as a positive bonus.