How To Make A Marketing Strategy Report – Any company looking to attract users or customers needs a marketing strategy. Explore how to create your own and what a good one looks like.

A marketing strategy is a plan on how to launch a new product or service in the market or launch an existing product in a new market. As such, go-to-market strategies tend to focus on the short-term, but effective ones will also consider how any immediate success can be sustained over a longer period.

How To Make A Marketing Strategy Report

How To Make A Marketing Strategy Report

There is no standard format for a marketing strategy. Different companies will need to consider and prioritize different elements, depending on their maturity, their existing presence in the market, their business model, how they are organized and financed, and any exit plans they may have.

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Any project that aims to attract new customers needs a go-to-market strategy. Some of the obvious scenarios include:

Even companies and products that consider themselves settled can benefit from regular marketing strategy reviews, as a way to be aware of and prepare for new competition and other market forces. So should your business have one? Absolutely.

It is possible to succeed without a marketing strategy, but for that to happen you need a once-in-a-generation product or a huge amount of luck. A good marketing strategy is designed to mitigate risk and maximize return on investment (ROI) by gathering knowledge before the event and using those insights to take the most effective action.

Company A and Company B have new software products of equal capabilities. Company A opens for business first, without going to market strategy. It may get a few lucky early sales, but soon new customers dry up. It doesn’t know where to go to get new customers, or indeed what kind of people they should talk to, or what to say even if they find them. They try to cover all the bases but find that their marketing budget is too thin and their advertising messages are not getting through. They quickly become stifled by the competition. Meanwhile, the customers they’ve been getting get increasingly frustrated with the lack of support and eventually go elsewhere.

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Meanwhile, Company B produced a detailed marketing strategy before it even took a dollar in sales. Their marketing budget is concentrated in only a few countries that they have calculated to be most profitable, and its advertising has been designed to resonate with a specific professional group. They also took the time to build a purchase process that is not only easy to follow, but encourages new customers to scale up their use of the product. And by tracking certain key user and financial metrics, they can predict with authority how they will grow, and thus the additional resources they will need to enable this future growth.

But going for a marketing strategy is not enough by itself. Going to market is one of three strategies needed for growth; with product strategy and revenue delivery strategy being the other two.

A product strategy should clearly define the challenges that the solution aims to overcome, who benefits, and how those benefits are realized (eg in cost savings, time savings, higher efficiency or improved security). The product strategy should also compare the product’s capabilities with similar solutions in the market, and articulate how it is better, and where it falls short.

How To Make A Marketing Strategy Report

A revenue delivery strategy explains how the functional elements necessary to support the growth of a product will be organized. A revenue delivery strategy is comprehensive, covering how orders are taken and processed, how customer records are maintained, how users are onboarded, supported, billed and sold to, and what is required to stay on the right side of financial and legal regulations.

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So, the best products (resulting from the product strategy) will fail without customers (delivered by the marketing strategy); and the best products, with many customers, will fail if sales cannot be processed and service levels sustained (step forward the revenue delivery strategy).

But not every go-to-market strategy fits neatly in the middle of this journey. How you approach your marketing strategy depends on what will drive your growth. In simple terms, there are two choices: growth that is product-led; and growth that is for sale.

A product-led marketing strategy puts the product at the heart of growth. The product is not only a solution to a business problem, but also acts as a silent salesperson by letting customers buy, renew and upgrade everything without leaving the product. Key to the concept of this self-service sales model is not only the absence of a salesperson at the time of purchase, but also in the discovery and research phase of the sales journey. In theory, everything a potential customer wants to know – from the functionality and technical requirements of the solution to the pricing options and contract terms – should be available within the product.

Product-led go-to-market strategies are a volume play, with tactics like a freemium offering designed to attract users first, before turning them into paying customers later.

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In product-led marketing strategies, the product is the core sales channel, and so the distinction between product strategy and marketing strategy becomes more blurred. Elements such as website architecture, product design, UX and copy all determine the customer journey, and thus become more important to the marketing strategist.

A sales-led go to market strategy sees sales initiated and closed by a salesperson. Although the product will be a key part of any sales conversation, the sale itself (and any future renewals and upgrades) happens away from the platform. This tends to be the approach taken when the product is so revolutionary, or complex, or expensive that the purchase decision involves many stakeholders and many commitments, over several months. The sales process is resource-intensive, and in turn, the business will focus on achieving fewer sales at higher margins.

Because sales-led marketing strategies are directed by people, the product plays less of a role, and therefore the ongoing link with product marketing is weaker. Instead, in a sales-led growth plan, product marketing and marketing strategies will work closely at the beginning to define the benefits of the solution and the target audience. Equally, in a sales-led go-to-market strategy, where the product is not the vehicle for processing orders, product and revenue delivery strategies are more detached.

How To Make A Marketing Strategy Report

Whether you are launching a new startup or a new product; and regardless of whether you follow a product- or sales-led path to growth, a good marketing strategy includes some core elements. Here we look at four of the main components you should consider when creating a marketing strategy.

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As we saw with the relationship between go to market, product and revenue strategies, these elements are not linear. There are interdependencies, meaning that the answer to one question will inform (or cancel out) another. That said, every marketing strategy has to start somewhere. This will often be driven by the history or culture of a business.

Startups whose founders set out to fix a problem that was frustrating them are likely to start with the product-market fit and build a business case around that; while an enterprise vendor with the resources to innovate quickly may be driven by what their customers tell them they need. Equally, an opportunistic entrepreneur may conclude that every product in a range is overpriced or suffer from poor customer service and try to fix this.

Where you start with your marketing strategy is not as important as making sure you focus on all four elements in parallel. This will ensure that your final marketing strategy is holistic, thorough and consistent.

Markets can be defined in different ways, and each must be considered in a go-to-market strategy. Markets can be a specific sector, profession, demographic or physical location. Sometimes, these need little thought. A software platform for employee management will clearly have to target HR professionals. An app that provides public transport schedules for Japan is unlikely to find much success in any other country. But sometimes there is more than one goal. For example, a user of your product may not be the person who decides to buy it; and there may also be a particular person who must sign the budget.

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Making things more difficult still is the different way businesses are structured and make decisions. In one business, you only need to persuade a single middle manager, while another may require more senior approval. If your product is software or other technology, then it’s likely the prospect’s IT and security people will want a say in making sure it can integrate with their other systems. There may also be influencers – both inside and outside the prospect – whose words have power. The key is to build personas for every possible purpose, which helps move the strategy from the abstract, closer to reality.

The same goes for choosing your market segment. Products that have been designed for a specific vertical – think compliance software for banks or security equipment for construction companies – must cater only to a specific sector. But for a product with multi-sector appeal, (ie because it supports a general business function, such as finance, HR or CRM) the plan becomes

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