7 Reasons Why Marketing Strategy Is Important

Building a Marketing Strategy That’s Effective

Marketing without a marketing strategy is like flying a plane without navigation: You may be able to stay in the air. You might even land somewhere without any major issues. But it’s unlikely that you’ll reach the destination you were aiming for, or even know exactly where you are and how you got there. In the marketing world, a well-thought-out marketing strategy is the navigation system you need to consistently reach your target audience and measure the impact of the marketing work you’re doing.

Maybe you’re not convinced that a marketing strategy is necessary, especially if social media posting and word-of-mouth advertising have gotten you this far. We understand the hesitation, and we know many of you have been burned or had a bad experience with people promising marketing results that never come through. But we also know that the results of an established marketing strategy speak for themselves when it’s implemented thoughtfully, by marketers who take the time to get to know you and your brand. 

In this guide, we’ll walk you through just a handful of the reasons why a marketing strategy is important, regardless of the type of business you’re running. So here it goes: Having a marketing strategy is crucial to business growth because…

1. A Marketing Strategy Clarifies Your Target Audience and Their Priorities

A big part of marketing strategy development is researching your target market and creating buyer personas that accurately reflect this market. From there, you develop an overarching marketing strategy framework that focuses on creating content and touchpoints that matter to and effectively reach this particular audience.

Marketing without a clear marketing strategy can mean that you’re creating the wrong kinds of content and targeting it at the wrong audience, or no particular audience at all. When this happens, your content will likely be unread, overlooked, and ineffective at bringing in customers. On the other hand, marketing efforts that function within a researched marketing strategy framework are more likely to address the pain points of key customers, leading them to purchase and engage with what you’re selling on a more regular basis.

2. A Marketing Strategy Keeps Your Brand Visible, Consistent, and Purpose-Driven

Especially for purpose-driven businesses, a marketing strategy can help you stay focused on what’s important to you and your brand. If you create a marketing strategy in the early days of your business, you can use its development process to help you hone in on your unique value proposition (UVP), as well as the mission, vision, and values that will guide your business forward. Creating your marketing strategy and business’s purpose hand-in-hand is a strategic advantage that you’ll have over most other competitors who figure out who they are and what they care about as they go. 

But even if you don’t craft your marketing strategy from the outset, developing it at a later date will force you to clearly identify your core values and tailor your purpose in a more engaging way. A marketing strategy needs your UVP and other purpose-driven values in writing so you can more clearly visualize where you’re going and what content will get you there. This concrete set of values will benefit everyone — not just your marketing team.

A marketing strategy should be built on other supportive frameworks that keep your content consistent and relevant to prospective customers, including brand voice and messaging guidelines. These guidelines ensure that, regardless of who is creating your brand’s content, it’ll continue to sound like the brand and what the brand values. Customers can often detect insincerity and inconsistency in branding, so having a strong messaging strategy is key. Consistent language and values broadcasting is one of the most effective ways to earn media from loyal customers and brand advocates.

3. A Marketing Strategy Addresses Customer Needs at All Stages of Engagement

If you’re marketing without a plan or strategy, you’re likely creating a lot of content for only a small segment of your audience. Perhaps you’ve focused primarily on existing customers. Or maybe your content is targeted mostly at website visitors who have never made a purchase. These are both worthwhile audience segments, but focusing on just one of them is a huge missed opportunity, and a missed opportunity means reduced sales, donors, and growth potential.

When you have a holistic marketing strategy in place — especially one that includes an inbound marketing strategy component — you’re more likely to understand what each person needs at each stage of their buyer’s journey. From there, you can develop a strategic marketing funnel, which enables you to create content and touchpoints that find them where they are in their current knowledge of and relationship with your brand. At each stage of the marketing funnel, your strategic plans will help you provide the right calls to action, resources, and support to get your customers to the next stage of the funnel. A marketing strategy that pays attention to what a customer wants and needs at all stages of their engagement tends to make customers feel connected and heard, which ultimately improves brand loyalty and trust.

5. Marketing Strategy Aligns With Other Business Goals

Some businesses have marketers working in isolation from the rest of the company, meaning they may not learn what other teams need strategically or how they can help them achieve those goals with the right marketing campaigns. A marketing strategy will help them create better content for business goals, as it typically includes business priorities from across teams, information about how marketing initiatives can tie into each of these priorities, as well as big-picture business goals and strategies.

With this greater knowledge of how the business functions (and how it makes money), marketers can start creating more content and outreach campaigns that will have a greater impact on the bottom line moving forward. It ultimately pays to have a marketing strategy that looks at what the business needs from all angles instead of just considering what the marketing team thinks is important.

6. A Marketing Strategy Helps Prioritize Time, Budget, and Team Efforts

If marketers had all the time and money in the world, they’d be unstoppable, but that’s not the reality. Most marketing teams have limited budgets and time to execute on massive campaigns and marketing goals. If they’re not operating within the confines of a focused marketing strategy, their limited time may be wasted on a project that delivers little value to the business.

A written marketing strategy requires marketing leaders to spell out all the details of their hoped-for marketing projects and ideas, taking a look at what team members will need to be involved, how much of their time will go into each project, and if any new tools, products, or teammates will need to be financed to execute on this plan. In many cases, this process encourages marketing leaders to pare down their plans to the highest-value opportunities that they’ll have the resources to complete. This will save the business money and, even more importantly, prevent some burnout for under-resourced marketing teams.

7. A Marketing Strategy Makes Results Measurable and Actionable

Marketing strategies are all about results. And working with a marketing strategy means that you aren’t simply creating marketing content for the sake of it; you are creating content with specific long-term goals and shorter-term milestones in mind. 

Some common marketing goals, both measurable and actionable, that you might add to your marketing strategy include:

• X number of new email newsletter subscribers by X date.
• X% increase, quarter over quarter, in impressions, reach, and/or share of voice on chosen social media channels.
• X% increase in click-through rate (CTR) on LinkedIn.
• X increase in time on page for strategic website landing pages.
• X% decrease in cost per lead (CPL).
• X% increase in conversion rate (visitors who complete the action requested in a CTA).

These are simply examples that you can use to shape your own quantifiable goals in your marketing strategy. But regardless of what you choose to measure, writing it down in your marketing strategy holds your team accountable to these important goals and reminds them what they’re working toward. 

During a larger project or campaign, measurable milestones along the way can ensure that the project is moving in the right direction and that you’re spending your time and money well. In the aftermath of a successful or challenging campaign, your team can then refer back to these goals and milestones and calculate how you performed against them. From there, marketing efforts can be restrategized to reflect higher or more realistic goals, depending on results. No matter what you’re pursuing or how you end up performing, a marketing strategy gives you the data you need to improve future marketing plans.

A Marketing Strategy That Works for Your Business

Creating a strong marketing strategy is difficult work, especially if you haven’t been measuring the successes of your marketing efforts over time. However, it’s never too late to get started with a real marketing plan and stop flying blind.

At Mane Impact, we’ve sat down with clients across industries and levels of comfort with marketing strategy to help them create plans that align with their values and goals. We recognize the importance of a navigation system on your marketing journey, but we also firmly believe that this system should be designed with your strengths and capabilities in mind. Contact us today to learn more about how our marketing strategy services can help you get where you need to go.