Marketing strategy: Steps and Tips to succeed

Marketing strategy is one of the components of B2B prospecting strategy. 🚀 In some cases, marketing strategies can be omnichannel or multichannel, with social networks and emailing, for example. 📩

In this guide, we’ll show you what a company can do to combine different marketing objectives, depending on its field of activity.

Let’s take a look!⚡

What is a Marketing Strategy? Definition

Marketing strategies are derived from marketing plans. 🧩As a result, operational marketing tools are part of your marketing strategy. 🎯

What’s more, a marketing strategy is a performance indicator of all a company’s objectives and how to reach its target audience when promoting a new product or service. 📣

This is usually conveyed in an official document so that all employees can read it and understand the company’s marketing strategy. 🤓

What is Strategic Marketing?

Strategic marketing def can be implemented to achieve various objectives such as: 👇

• Increase sales.
• Acquire new customers.
• Increase sales with existing customers.
• Develop market share.
• Improve customer loyalty.
• Launch advertising campaign.

In addition, a good marketing strategy involves analyzing markets, competitors, ideal customers (“buyer persona”) and many other factors your company wishes to consider. 🔎

Difference between Marketing Strategy VS Marketing Plan

On the one hand, marketing strategy defines your objectives and overall approach to reaching your target audience and improving your market position. 🎯 This includes defining your market segment, value proposition and brand positioning.

For its part, the marketing plan details the specific actions, campaigns, budgets, and timetables to execute the strategy. 💪 This is an operational document that describes how, when and who will perform various marketing tasks to achieve the identified strategic objectives.

How to set up Sales Marketing?

A successful marketing strategy is a prerequisite for successful marketing. A marketing approach is a set of actions aimed at observing, anticipating or stimulating consumer needs, and adapting a product or service to these identified needs. 🧐

In short, it covers all the company’s efforts to establish its market position. This is broken down into several phases, and takes place at both the strategic and operational marketing levels. 🔥

• Strategic Marketing: 👇

To guide the company towards attractive economic opportunities. The aim of strategic marketing is to lay the foundations for operational marketing. 💼

The aim of strategic marketing is to identify the company’s mission, 🎯 define objectives, develop development strategies and ensure a balanced product portfolio structure.

Essentially directing the company towards financial opportunities that match its resources and expertise.

• Operational Marketing: 👇

This is the most visible part, i.e. « action », the creation of marketing tools and support (advertising, discussion, cold emailing, press releases, surveys, dashboards, competitive intelligence, etc.). It is the embodiment of strategic marketing and the implementation of marketing plans.💪

In addition, the marketing approach identifies different phases: analysis and diagnosis, definition of objectives, selection of options, sales prospecting tools and finally the development and evaluation of the marketing mix. 🧪

Examples of Digital Marketing Strategies

Recently, marketing trends have changed the world of marketing, forcing professionals to integrate new approaches into their strategies. 🤗 But new developments need to be open and adapt ever more quickly, with the aim of staying as close as possible to consumers.

However, there are as many marketing strategies as there are companies, and it’s never easy to find your way around. Discover examples of effective marketing strategies to develop your business here. ⚡

#1 Content Marketing

Content marketing is nothing new. The idea behind it is to provide high-quality, non-profit content linked to consumer interests to stay connected and indirectly serve the company’s interests. 😎

Recently, with the advent of the Internet and many other social networks (such as LinkedIn), content marketing has become widespread.

Since then, consumers have found that they are less receptive to advertising, as everyone can choose what content they want to consume and when. 🍝

Today’s content marketing includes methods and techniques for strengthening your brand’s position through the design, production, and distribution of text, image, audio or video-based content. 📹

Just like we do at Waalaxy, we post videos across several platforms, and we discuss all kinds of subjects to draw the attention of a wider audience: 🤩

#2 Social Media Marketing

In just a few years, social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook or even TikTok have become the dominant platform for the media and prospecting industry. ⚡

When members connect and share content among like-minded people, they also offer brands the opportunity to build relationships with consumers and integrate their customers into a community. 🤗

Social media marketing integrates approaches and methods for implementing, maintaining and developing a consistent approach to serving brands on social networks.

One of the first challenges is to establish customer relationships based on the exchange of ideas, discussion, and collaboration. 🤝 That’s why social platforms are also the gateway to the buying process! 💰

Don’t lose any more customers, and create a hyper-performing prospecting strategy by automating your LinkedIn campaigns. 😏

Regarder la démo 🪐

#3 Storytelling in Marketing

Storytelling is now an important part of an effective marketing strategy. Whatever market you want to position yourself in, there are always more competitors, and you need to differentiate yourself. You can play with the emotional value of your brand or company. 😯

Therefore, the aim of emotional marketing is to create a set of emotions and values so that your target audience connects with your brand or company.

Storytelling, which aims to convey a message by creating a sense of identity for the reader, is an important emotional marketing tool and contributes to your brand awareness. 🤩

Creating a unique story for your company, what inspired it, its value, or even creating a history around your brand is a common storytelling theme. The emotions you’re after depend on the goals you’re pursuing with your copywriting. 🎯

Look at our SEO expert, Amandine 🦦 showing how to use storytelling for your posts:

#4 Influence Marketing

From Facebook to TikTok to YouTube, social networks and content platforms have also created «new influencers». Today, brands don’t hesitate to capitalize on the influence of these people to promote their products or reach a well-defined audience. 🧲

Influencer marketing is the implementation of researched approaches to increase brand awareness thanks to these influencers. 🥳

For example, brands can use trade contracts to convince influencers to share your product values and opinions. 💅

At Waalaxy, we developed an Ambassador program to gain more collaboration from existing users and enrolling new leads for us! 👽

You can also develop a more targeted strategy, collaborating to develop co-created content and products with personalities who directly touch your audience. 🗣️

#5 Mobile Marketing

The evolution of the web has changed our approach to marketing, and the rise of mobile devices offers the opportunity to go even further and consider new ways of interacting with customers, wherever they are, whenever they want. 🌍

Today, most people use smartphones. 📱 We use cell phones more than computers.

Mobile marketing is concerned with all the methods that help strengthen the bond between brands and consumers by taking advantage of the possibilities offered by mobile technology.

Marketing strategies can incorporate a high degree of relationship personalization, based in particular on data conveyed by users. 👂 It integrates new communication channels: such as mobile applications and notifications, SMS marketing, MMS, geolocation solutions.

With mobile marketing, it’s increasingly possible to get the right message to the right person, at the right time. 🌟

#6 Neuromarketing

Recently, marketing professionals have turned their attention to neuroscience, with the desire to better understand, predict and influence consumer emotions, choices, preferences, aversions, and behavior. 🧠

This is what we call neuromarketing. 💡 By identifying neural mechanisms, such as the activation of specific brain regions, this emerging discipline makes it possible to study precisely the impact of advertising, messages or packaging, as well as their design and structure, on the consumer.

With these different examples of digital marketing techniques, it is possible to considerably improve the tools of consumer persuasion. 😊

Why develop a Marketing Strategy?

Developing a marketing strategy is essential for identifying and reaching your target audience, differentiating your brand, optimizing resource allocation and measuring the effectiveness of actions taken to achieve specific objectives, thus guaranteeing maximum return on investment.

Marketing strategy or strategic marketing requires the implementation of several steps, as well as adapting your offering according to your business sector. 🤔

That’s why there isn’t a standard strategy for every business, but the principle remains the same. 👇

1) Draw up a Marketing Plan

In the marketing approach, the design of a marketing plan includes a precise, detailed diagnostic analysis and marketing strategies.

It’s imperative to include the company’s SWOT analysis in the marketing plan. It also includes the strategic segmentation and marketing targeting you have defined. 🧲

This marketing plan is generally drawn up over a three-year period, describing and planning sales and marketing actions with their dates, and includes a marketing budget. 💰

The sales action plan is detailed (lead generation, target audience, advertising, etc.). The marketing plan sets out the follow-up procedures for all actions taken.

2) Set up Marketing Campaigns

This is the active part of the marketing approach. It specifically documents the company’s marketing policies. The implementation of marketing actions is characterized by the marketing mix. 🌀

This is the part visible to the consumer, the mix made up of product, price, distribution, communication. 🗣️ You can then define the product’s characteristics and set the price, according to your target.

The next step is to establish your acquisition channels and the key players to market your product. This phase concludes with promotional activities for your offer and tracking the actions taken. 🤖

This can be reinforced with an SEO/SEA strategy to showcase your business on the web! 👈

3) Monitor and Control Results

In the marketing approach, monitoring and analyzing results are essential to ensure the success of your project. 🤔 How can you monitor your marketing activities?

Any control must include three fundamental steps: 👇

1. Check that the standards achieved are correct and that the objectives are being met.
2. Compare the actual situation with the normal situation described in the marketing plan.
3. Examine and explain any deviations, through comprehensive audits.

In digital marketing, control often follows the same process. However, the performance metrics or conversion leverage are different. 🧐 We’re talking about bounce rate, website conversion rate, number of clicks, and so on.

4) Adapt and Adjust your Strategy

If it turns out that marketing actions are not achieving the desired results, adjustments are necessary. 🙏 It’s not always a question of changing your strategy; you start by modifying the standards you’ve set for yourself.

However, if the gap between results achieved and expected becomes significant, you can reinforce your marketing plan with a different strategy. 😬

For example, you can use inbound marketing to improve your brand image, build customer loyalty or attract new customers. 👌

Finally, the marketing approach breaks down into several equally important stages. However, it can be summed up in five words: analysis, design, action, control, adjustment (via A/B testing). 🗝️

Moreover, please remember the automation tools that will make your life easier, like Waalaxy! 👽

How do you create a good marketing strategy?

To ensure a coherent approach to the market, marketing plans must be considered structured between strategic and operational elements. 👐 We need to start with an analysis of the context and focus on potential customers to arrive at the ideal positioning of the offering through the value proposition. 🪙

Here are some important steps you can follow to set up your marketing strategy and evolve it over time:

1) Analyze market opportunities

A marketing strategy is directly linked to a company’s objectives, and must translate the company’s ambitions into market size. Its implementation depends primarily on the opportunities that arise. 👁️

Analysis can take the form of a market research of varying degrees of detail. Based on the factors revealed, it will enable you to approach the market with full knowledge of the facts, and determine a coherent approach to entering or strengthening it.

Thanks to market research, different customer segments, their sizes, their resources will be identified and analyzed. 📊

2) Target the right customers

Once the market has been analyzed, it’s important to be able to target the audience and its needs. The same offer, product, or service can satisfy several groups of potential customers, some with different characteristics from others. 🌈

To find the target customer, you need to aim at a group of people with similar customer behaviors.

It would be interesting to extend this analysis beyond potential end-users of the product. In this targeting process, it would be interesting to consider several possible potential customer configurations. 🥸

Each objective can be translated into a “marketing persona”, as mentioned above. 👈

💡 This is a fictitious profile that considers the specific characteristics of each target, as well as the context in which it lives, its expectations and desires, tastes, purchasing power and consumption habits.

It’s a reference file on which to build an adapted marketing method. 🚀

3) Know how to position your product

Once you’ve targeted your customers, you need to position your product or service to meet their needs. This involves establishing a value proposition.

Starting from the customer’s needs and expectations, from the consumer’s perspective, the aim is to highlight the advantages and benefits that the offer will bring. 🔥

While the value proposition must convince users, it must also enable the company to position itself in relation to the competition.

It’s about highlighting the product or service attributes that will make the product or service unique in the marketplace, and give your offering an edge over competing offerings. 💯

4) Adjust your method if necessary

The marketing strategy must also provide the means to evaluate the relevance of planned actions over time. ⌚

In addition to tracking sales and ROI, it is particularly important to measure the effectiveness of the processes implemented, to ensure optimal distribution, to monitor customer satisfaction through after-sales service, or to be able to gauge the brand’s popularity with target consumer groups. 😃

By carrying out various KPI checks, the company can discover new levers to enable improvements, elements to be optimized, get closer to the market and customers and meet their needs. ✅

Evaluating the relevance of actions and regularly surveying consumers can also be a source of new opportunities for the company. Going out to meet new customers and finding ways to meet their specific needs can lead to new development projects. 🌌

💡 The market, like a company’s objectives, is constantly evolving. Market watch enables us to spot these trends, anticipate changes in offerings and adjust strategy as needed.

A good understanding of the market also enables us to measure the margin for progress and consider the actions we need to take to move forward. 🏃

Depending on the situation, the company may consider new approaches, consider expanding into new markets, such as by implementing an internationalization strategy, or collaborative branding actions to get closer to a new customer segment. 🧨

What are the 4 types of Marketing Strategy?

Below is an overview of the 4 types of marketing strategy, with specific business examples to illustrate each method: ⏬

1) Concentration Strategy:

• Definition: This strategy involves targeting a specific market segment rather than the whole market.
• Example: Porsche focuses on the luxury, high-performance sports car market segment, 🏎️ targeting a group of customers willing to pay more for superior quality and performance.

2) Differentiation Strategy:

• Definition: This approach aims to offer unique products or services that stand out from the competition.
• Example: Apple uses a differentiation strategy by offering innovative products with unique designs and integrated ecosystems, 🍎 clearly differentiating them from their competitors in the technology sector.

3) Skimming Strategy:

• Definition: this involves setting a high initial price for a new product or service, targeting the wealthiest customers or those most willing to adopt innovations, before gradually reducing the price. 🍨
• Example: Sony often uses this strategy when launching new generations of PlayStation consoles, setting high prices and gradually lowering them as the market develops.

4) Penetration Strategy:

• Definition: this strategy consists of setting a low price for a new product to rapidly gain a large market share and prevent competitors from entering the market.
• Example: IKEA applies this strategy by offering furniture at very competitive prices, 🤑 enabling the company to attract a large customer base and maintain its leading position in the low-cost school furniture market.

These strategies represent different ways of approaching the market and achieving specific goals, depending on the company’s strengths and market conditions. 📊

Recap: What are the marketing strategies?

Marketing strategies are essential to ensure the success of your business. 👌 By following these steps, you can develop your marketing strategy and get all the cards in hand to achieve your goals: 🚀

1. Define marketing objectives.
2. Analyze the market.
3. Draw up an ideal customer profile.
4. Monitor competitors.
5. Define action plan.
6. Use high-performance tools.
7. Test, verify, adjust!

As a result, you can be the best performer or the cheapest in your market, but not the best performer and the cheapest.

So, how do you determine positioning: 👇

1. Identify all competitors in the target market.
2. Analyze the competitive advantages of all players in this market, including you.
3. Analyze how consumers value their products/brands in a highly competitive environment, and position yourself accordingly.

There are various marketing positioning strategies to choose from, for example, remaining a market leader, attacking leaders head-on, exploiting leaders’ weaknesses, creating new areas.

So it’s up to you to choose the marketing strategy that’s right for you! 🔥

Marketing Strategy FAQ

Difference between Inbound marketing VS Outbound marketing

If you want to take your marketing knowledge a little further… 🍃 Then let’s take a look at inbound and outbound marketing techniques! ✍️

Inbound marketing, relies on content marketing to attract new leads and is opposed to outbound marketing, which often relies on untargeted and intrusive advertising. 🙊

With inbound marketing, the aim is to create a bond with prospects by offering them enriching content that matches their interests, without any commercial purpose (like this blog)! 😇

Now let’s talk about outbound marketing. 👇

In general, this involves using prospecting and advertising as acquisition channels. 🎯 Often, this contrasts with Inbound marketing strategies, but the two complement each other and are much more effective when well combined. 🧑‍🍳

Outbound marketing allows you to quickly obtain a greater or lesser number of customers. 🧲 While this strategy works well with big budgets, the downside is that it can get expensive and is only effective at the beginning of the sales funnel. 👀

🧑‍🚀 Then use our Waalaxy tool for your outbound marketing strategy, generating new leads on LinkedIn, and creating «cold emailing campaigns». ❄️

What are the 4 components of the Marketing Mix?

Operational marketing is divided into different segments or the “4Ps of Marketing”, also known as «marketing mix». 🍭

These four complementary points can simplify your marketing decisions, here they are: 👇

How do you create an operational marketing strategy?

5C operational marketing is a strategic segmentation aimed at improving the integrity of analysis and acting more effectively. ⚡

Here’s a detailed description of the characteristics of each element: 👇

• Company: Knowing the company itself is its value.
• Employees: Distributors, suppliers, retailers, etc.
• Competitors: Direct marketing or indirect strategy, market share, strengths and weaknesses, etc.
• Customers: their expectations, sources, impulsive or inattentive buying patterns.
• Context: Defines the context for operational marketing efforts (Christmas, Easter, etc.).

As with the marketing mix or 4Ps, 🙏 these 5Cs will help you stay on the right track in your marketing plan and be able to distinguish each strategic point more easily!

What are the 3 main marketing strategies?

The generic strategy is a type of marketing strategy modeled by Harvard University professor Michael Porter in the 1980s. 📈 It is divided into three subgroups, aimed at establishing a competitive advantage for a company within a particular DAS, these are:

• The strategy of cost domination.
• Differentiation strategy.
• Focus strategy.

Let’s take a closer look at these 3 great strategies! 💥

Marketing strategy No. 1: Domination

The first form of general strategy is cost domination. To implement this strategy of dominance in the SBA (Strategic Business Area), we need to find ways of reducing production costs on a large scale throughout the production chain, but without being imitated by the competition. 🤫

In this case, the surest way is to bring about innovation and market disruption to outperform competitors. The aim of this innovation is to significantly or slightly reduce unit prices and increase overall production with the same investment. 🌍

Consequently, you need to adapt your marketing mix according to the DAS in which you wish to specialize! 🌟

Marketing strategy No. 2: Differentiation

The differentiation strategy is developed by proposing offers that are entirely different from the competition. Differentiation strategies involve either sophistication (luxury or “top-up” differentiation), or purging (or “bottom-up” differentiation). 🏹

For this type of generic strategy to be appropriate, 🤑 companies need to offer products with a viable business model in terms of production volume and cost.

Indeed, the target audience must have sufficient purchasing power for the strategy to be profitable. Market research helps to measure commercial and strategic potential.

Marketing strategy No. 3: Focus

This generic strategy, known as focusing, involves concentrating on products offered in very narrow market segments where companies are certain to break the competition without conflict. 💥

This should enable you to make a profit, despite an inherently tight market. This strategy is often confused with a niche strategy. 💎

Now, let’s take a look at how to choose the right marketing strategy, once your objectives are well-defined. I promise it’ll be easier than it sounds! 🎯

How do you create a successful marketing strategy?

One of the key elements of a good marketing strategy is understanding customer needs and defining target markets. 🏹 This enables you to better manage your campaigns and marketing channels, thanks to:

• Strategic segmentation and targeting: segmentation involves dividing the market into similar subsets. These categories correspond to groups of consumers with the same expectations and similar reactions to marketing activities. 🤗

Once the market has been segmented, targeting can define fundamental objectives. To be a viable target, the segment must meet the following conditions:

• Measurable: easily identifiable.
• Accessible: easy to reach.
• Exploitable: not too many competitors on the market.
• Profitable: offers business development potential. 🏹

These two concepts are key to the success of your marketing strategy because they give you a solid foundation on which to build!

Now that you know the main marketing strategy, you can choose the one that best suits your business!