Are you looking to implement successful marketing for your business in 2023? If so, this blog post is for you!
We'll guide you through the strategy creation process while sharing essential tips and resources that will ensure a favorable customer experience.
Whether you're just getting started or looking to improve your current strategy, be sure to read on!
Guide To Your 2023 Marketing Strategy
For peak effectiveness, your process should be reviewed regularly. If your business is relatively new, your strategy may need to be changed fairly frequently, as you'll likely be testing various approaches while pivoting throughout the process.
In general, your strategy should be based on your business plan and goals. Specifically, the strategy should run on a clear action plan that includes ongoing testing and analysis to ensure continued growth.
Despite their dependence on each other, your strategy should be established before implementing its action plan. This is because your digital marketing needs to remain guided, strategized, and SMART:
Specific: Set quantitative goals
Measurable: Measure progress and results
Achievable: Consider knowledge, skills, and capabilities
Realistic: Set small, attainable goals
Timebound: Set deadlines that allow for step-by-step progression
In his book Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach, marketing professor/author E. Jerome McCarthy references seven P's contained in the best marketing strategies:
Price: What/how customers pay for your products and/or services
Place: Where your products and/or services are made, distributed, and sold
Promotion: How you communicate your products and/or services to your target audience
People: The resources you have on your team
Process: The specific steps involved in delivering your products and/or services
Physical Evidence: How your business presents to the world (Physical spaces, look and feel, ratings and reviews, etc.)
We've identified seven steps to help you build your digital marketing strategy in 2023:
Step 1: Research Marketing Trends to Reach Your Target Audience
This imperative first step includes researching your competitors using third party data and historical data. Thereafter, you'll determine your customers' current problems and needs with help from first party data.
Understanding your target persona is a key component of a successful customer experience. Conducting the necessary market research and competitor analysis will help you create an effective message tailored to the appropriate audience. After all, collecting data is essential in understanding customer behaviors and preferences, as well as competitive advantages.
Such research can also provide marketing teams with invaluable insight into persona needs, motivators, objectives, and interests, which can all have a major impact on the outcome of the customer experience.
For example, you could research what types of problems people are currently dealing with, as well as what solutions you could provide. Be sure to research what your target audience needs and wants from you, and determine what/how your competitors are providing. This will allow you to stand out and establish your unique selling proposition (USP).
Step 2: Create Customer Personas
It's important to understand who and where your target market is. Compiling detailed information about their habits, behaviors, desires, and needs will help inform and shape the content strategy.
Customers will ultimately be the center of your business, so you'll want to understand their personalities, needs, problems, and goals. As a result, you'll determine appropriate solutions as part of their customer journey.
To truly understand your customer persona, you'll want to know where you stand as a business, as explained in the next step.
Step 3: Define Your Positioning and Brand Identity
In positioning your business, we'll use the SWOT acronym:
Strengths: What are your strengths and how you can make them known?
Weaknesses: What are your weaknesses and how you can improve them?
Opportunities: What opportunities are present and how can they benefit you?
Threats: What threats exist and how do they threaten your business?
As the second part of this step, the brand identity will contain your vision, mission, tone of voice, and communication strategy.
Even if you've already completed these steps, you'll still want to review them regularly to determine any necessary changes for your business or strategy.
Step 4: Evaluate Your Content Marketing Strategy for 2023
You should frequently review and evaluate your marketing objectives to ensure that your goals are SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-based.
There are two parameters for setting your goals:
Based on previous results
Based on ideal results
Analysis of the Previous Year
It can be beneficial to base new goals on those from the previous year with regard to:
Leads and clients
Landing page traffic/actions
Social media marketing analytics
Search Insights
Brand loyalty
Consumer behaviors
Marketing strategies
Digital marketing trends
Consumer trends
First party data
You can choose to set higher goals for each of these areas on a monthly basis, or set new ones that include activities you haven't yet worked on.
At Digithy, we use a spreadsheet containing a quarterly goal for each KPI (website users/sessions, social media platform activity, blog articles, leads, etc.).
In addition to the KPIs above, other common ones are:
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Conversion Rate
Retention Rate
To effectively measure your goals, in addition to a spreadsheet, you'll also want to use a marketing tool that tracks your progress. Check out the analytics tools featured in our free downloadable guide below!
Step 5: Develop Your Action Plan To Reach Target Market Through Various Channels
Effective marketing strategies will allow you to connect with your audience across various channels. Specifically, you'll craft messages tailored to each respective marketing channel while specifically targeting those most likely to engage with your brand.
As part of your general marketing approach, it is important to establish and implement effective marketing campaigns. Specifically, you'll consistently create content in accordance with current content marketing trends.
By consistently creating content, you'll promote your brand to generate engagement, which will ultimately create meaningful connections and capture leads. Such types of valuable content include:
Shortform content
Infographic content
Video content
Regardless of which type(s) you use, it is most important to share quality content.
Once your strategy is in place, you can begin your content marketing efforts, such as email marketing campaigns and targeted social media marketing that reach your desired customers.
It is helpful to organize your marketing plan into long-term and short-term activities, allowing you to effectively allocate your resources while setting appropriate deadlines.
For example, search engine optimization (SEO) would be considered a long-term effort, since you'll be consistently writing articles that target relevant keywords triggered by customized searches. Over time, as your engaging content pops up in search engines, your results will gradually improve.
On the other hand, promoting online content could be considered a short-term strategy, with the paid strategy speeding up the process.
Your marketing budget and resources will help determine how frequently you can run tests, which brings us to the next step.
Step 6: Set Marketing Budget and Test, Analyze, and Improve Strategy
While planning your marketing strategies, you'll want to establish a budget in conjunction with your plans. This budget plan will ensure that your funds are logically and responsibly allocated in aiming for specific results. This allows you to monitor your return on investment (ROI), which reflects the effectiveness of the plan in growing your business.
Once your plan is in place, you'll want to allocate approximately 10% of your budget continuously testing various strategies and audiences. Depending on your action plan, you'll likely run strategy tests every month or two. During this phase, you'll consider conversion time. For example, if your conversion time lap is three months, that's the amount of time required to determine if a test was successful.
Step 7: Implement Retention Marketing Strategies
Retention marketing is a customer-focused method that creates a favorable customer experience. As your following increases over time, customer acquisition costs gradually decrease, so you'll need not allocate additional resources towards generating leads.
Through effective retention marketing, you'll emphasize customer lifetime value over individual transactions, thus maximizing customer relationships.
Retention marketing strategies commonly feature innovative methods, such as loyalty programs and engagement tactics. Such methods have proven successful in maintaining high retention while reducing abandonment.
Conclusions
Marketing can certainly be a daunting task. However, by taking it one step at a time and using the right resources, you can set your business up for retention marketing success.
You'll first evaluate your current marketing strategy, then you'll research your target audience. Once you've developed a plan for reaching your target through various channels, you'll set a marketing budget.
Thereafter, your sales and marketing teams will implement your strategy and track the results so you can make necessary adjustments along the way. Finally, you'll implement retention marketing.
Digithy offers free resources to help you get started (including our Customer Acquisition & Retention Strategy Template). Download them now and please reach out if you need assistance.
Digithy will help you build your brand identity and complete marketing strategy in 1-2 months!
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