What is a marketing strategy?

The role of a marketing strategy is to map out how you plan to promote and sell a product or service. Its ultimate goal is to reach your target audience through marketing and advertising campaigns and then get them to buy or engage with your service. It can also help you map our your target audience, as well as the best ways to reach them with tracking and insights.

Essentially, a marketing strategy is an overarching plan that anyone deciding how to start a business, or working with an existing business use to increase visibility and ultimately their profits. It can involve anything from creating a strong brand identity to developing innovative products and services. Successful marketing strategies should be tailored to your specific goals and objectives.

Creating strategic marketing strategies starts with defining what is product marketing for your niche, understanding where you are now, identifying key areas of improvement and focusing on achieving specific goals.

Marketing strategy vs. marketing plan

While these terms are used interchangeably, marketing strategies are broader summaries of what your business does to overcome your pain points, meet your goals and reach your audience.

A strategy provides a larger picture of how you plan to stay ahead of your competition. It can reveal threats that you may need to consider for long-term sustainability. By contrast, the marketing plan methodically outlines details of how you will implement your strategies and how you will track your marketing ROI.

Additionally, your marketing plan is highly detailed and involves the four Ps of marketing: product, price, place and promotion. It helps to ensure a more integrated marketing approach—that is, a unified message across all of your promotional channels.

Why marketing strategies matter

There are plenty of benefits to defining your marketing strategies early on. Marketing strategies are essential for businesses as it helps them to identify their goals and objectives, understand their target audience, and develop an effective approach to reach out to them. A well-crafted marketing strategy can help you gain a competitive advantage, improve your brand image and increase sales and revenue. Setting clear goals and objectives and aligning the marketing strategies to achieve them best sets you up for success. To understand more about the theory behind why marketing matters, we recommend the ideas and work of Michael Porter. He is credited with developing the concept of competitive advantage, for example. There's a lot to be gained from understanding his research and incorporating it into your marketing management.

Furthermore, marketing budgets might be limited when starting a business, and a clear plan ensures you won't waste any resources. Besides, how will you measure success if you don't first establish what it looks like or how you'll get there in your small business marketing goals?

The main elements of a marketing strategy

These may vary but generally include:

Establishing your target audience through market analysis
Deciding on your Unique Selling Proposition, Go to market strategy
Creating your market positioning, and establishing product differentiation, how customers will perceive you and your product
Establishing your pricing
Setting the budget for your marketing strategy
Implementation of your chosen strategy
Continuous tracking and improvement of your plan

For more information on what makes an effective modern marketing strategy, we recommend looking to Phil Kotler, whose work on marketing management and the importance of connecting with your audience, has been instrumental in improving marketing strategies.

11 best marketing strategies

One of the biggest challenges in marketing strategies is keeping up with changing market trends and consumer preferences. Developing an effective marketing strategy can also requires significant time, resources, and expertise; the list of the types of marketing strategies out there is extensive. By analyzing the top marketing trends and doing in-depth customer and market research, we've narrowed it down to the top 10 strategies for you.

Remember that no matter which methods you decide to include, they will only be effective if your audience likes and trusts your business. As you carry out campaigns, aim to educate, inspire or entertain your audience, so you'll see the most impactful results.

01. Content marketing

In the past decade, there's been a shift in the marketing mindset. Today we see a rise in blogs, podcasts and webinars that are engaging and inclusive to audiences—so they feel more connected with brands.

Creating valuable and informative content has become a win-win especially when it comes to developing and improving customer engagement. Content marketing creates a strategic opportunity for your business to connect with a customer meaningfully.

Content marketing also helps you generate awareness, become an authority and tell a story. Focusing on this strategy early on is handy for other marketing ideas, as you can share your content on social media or in email newsletters later. The most popular content strategies are:

Content writing
Infographics
Video marketing
Starting a podcast

02. Social media marketing

71% of small-to-mid-sized businesses use social media for marketing. This high percentage comes as no surprise. Social media marketing is one of the most influential ways to use digital marketing to increase visibility and gain traffic to your website. More so, it can be a valuable lead generation method, a sales channel, an audience insights tool and a customer service outlet.

From Instagram Reels to TikTok, your options of getting in front of new audiences are endless. Ensure you strategically choose which channels you focus most on, based on your target audience. If you aim to reach a professional audience, LinkedIn is a must for creating a company page. Social media platforms are a great way to secure first-mover advantage, a concept in marketing and business when companies are the first to market in a specific product category. The speed at which its possible to generate and distribute multimedia content on social media is ideal for this.

Video marketing is a format that is becoming more heavily favored on social media as users consume more content on their mobile devices (this marketing strategy also works well if you're focusing on mobile marketing), so consider this as an important form of content creation in your marketing strategy. This marketing strategy also allows brands to tap into the phenomenon of viral content. While not easy to achieve, it can have a dramatic impact on key marketing metrics and KPIs, such as website traffic, and brand visibility.

Social media advertising is another component that should not be overlooked. For example, advertising on Facebook can drastically increase new customers. Want to try Facebook advertising for your business? Facebook Ads by Wix directly connects to your website to set up and optimize your campaigns. Remarketing on social media channels is a highly effective way to bring people back to your website to complete a purchase.

Popular social networks for promoting a business:

Our recommended reading to improve your social media strategy:

03. Search engine optimization (SEO)