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This is an automatic recording for you with Playter by Summurai for the Mayple's blog post "The Ultimate Guide to Marketing Strategy: How to 10X Your ROI", written by Mayple's CEO, Mr. Omer Farkash.

Marketing is a dynamic and ever changing field. The top digital marketing strategies change with the consumer and technology trends of the day. This is why every company needs a good marketing strategy that's well planned and has well defined milestones and objectives. Once you have the right map, the chances you’ll reach the goals you’ve set to your business, are much higher. That means, that while most of us are eager to start launching our marketing efforts the minute after we decide to start a business, we actually need to invest in planning so we won’t waste our limited budget and energies on the wrong things. If you're a company / startup owner or marketer you need a good digital marketing strategy to hit your goals.

In this guide, we've put together the 10 main steps that you need to follow to build the ultimate marketing strategy for your business. Here's what it looks like visually.

As you can see, every step is meaningful, but don’t panic :) this guide will take you step by step through the process, so you won’t miss a thing and get your digital marketing strategy well figured out. We have some very useful tips and examples that will make it easier to understand.

Now, let's define some of the basic terms.

What is marketing strategy?

Marketing strategy is a long term, forward looking approach and an overall game plan of any organization or any business with the fundamental goal of achieving a sustainable competitive advantage by understanding the needs and wants of customers. A marketing strategy is a broad strategy that encompasses everything from how a company positions itself, to the creative, the strategic partners, the media relations, the marketing mix, and the channels and tactics. A marketing strategy refers to a firm's overall game plan for reaching prospective consumers and turning them into customers of their products or services. It also contains the company's value proposition, key brand messaging, data on target audience and customer demographics, and other high level elements. The broad marketing strategy is what used to fall under the term "branding" back in the more ambiguous days of marketing. It's a practical summary of the key details of the strategy and some of the broad goals and methods used to achieve them.

What is the difference between a marketing strategy and a tactic?

Marketing strategies are broader than specific tactics. For example, a business could have a content strategy for their social media channels or for search engine optimization, and then they could have specific tactics they execute for each channel. Here's the correct order to follow: Overall marketing strategy, then Digital marketing strategy and then Specific tactics.

What is the importance of marketing strategy?

Sometimes marketers and eCommerce owners get lost in the weeds, in the bits and bytes. They lose track of the overall vision of the business and the large goals. They lose track of the target audience and the main pain points that their product solves for the customer. When that happens, the specific tactics that the business employs can lost their effectiveness. So, a marketing strategy is not some dusty old document that you put on the top shelf and forget about it. It's a vital process of discovering your company's top goals and objectives, and ways to achieve them. That becomes a blueprint for everything you do to better market your product or service. Excited? Let's jump into it.

Step One: Define your brand value and offering

Your brand strategy is about defining the core values of your brand to make sure that they align with what your prospect and existing customer find important, that they align to your industry trends and competitive environment, and to what you actually offer ie your product. That’s not an easy task, but without it, all the other marketing tasks become much more difficult.

Here are some good marketing strategy examples from data driven brands that succeeded in doing it right:

Let's start with AllBirds - Sustainable, transparent, comfortable:

AllBirds began as a darling brand in Silicon Valley in 2014 and quickly grew to a $1.4B valuation in 2018. The shoe company set out to create the world's most comfortable, and they overshot their goal. Their products are fully sustainable, and made out of wool and bamboo, and their branding is impeccable. Their mission statement reads - "Allbirds is on a mission to prove that comfort, good design, and sustainability don't have to be mutually exclusive". Besides the humor and the spunky brand personality, the brand has really taken advantage of this concept of transparency. They display the materials they use in a creative way and get down to the fine details. And that ties really nicely with their overall mission and their third brand value - sustainability. Ultimately, the quirky brand voice and the incredible brand values of sustainability and transparency lead AllBirds to build a super engaged audience online that has contributed the most to the brand's growth. Yes, it is a really comfortable product (the NY Times called it "the most comfortable shoe in the world"), but without a strong brand and a focus on the user experience, Allbirds would not have been the giant that it is today.

Now let's check Casper - "here to awaken the potential of a well rested world"

Casper is a mattress company that has completely revolutionized the industry. They were the first direct to consumer mattress company and quickly grew to a $1.1B valuation in 2019. Casper's brand values are all about dreaming big, innovation, and bringing joy to a tired industry.

Casper's strong brand helped it launch other successful products, like the Casper Glow, which is an innovative bedtime light that changes its light temperature and brightness automatically and can be remotely controlled through an app.

There are a lot of big and abstract words thrown around when talking about brand value creation, so here's a simple way to think about it. A simple formula to find the right values that define your brand is this:

One - Think about the main pain points/needs/frictions your brand is solving. Two - Translate it into a value based language. And three - Make sure it fits your beliefs and motivations.

Step 2: Identify customer pain points and expectations.

A quote by Theodore Levitt, Harvard Business School Professor says that "People don't want to buy a quarter inch drill. They want a quarter inch hole!".

One of the top reasons why products or services fail is when their makers fail to identify the customers' pain points. In other words, they don't meet the customer's need or they don't solve a vital problem in their lives. Also, those needs may change over time so it's important to continue examining the customer journey and solve your current customer challenges. One of the classic examples is the Segway. It was a device that was said to eliminate walking. It could go up to 12.5 miles per hour, had a lithium battery, and made you look like a dork. It was hailed as the device that will make walking obsolete and it failed miserably. It's a sad story but the creator of the device actually drove it off a cliff and died. The problem with the Segway is that no one wanted to stop walking, people love walking, people loved running, so it failed to meet the customer's need and to identify a pain point.

What are the different types of customer pain points?

Let's talk about the financial pain. The most basic pain point is financial. Does your product help your customers save money? Is it more cost effective than the alternatives? Are the savings short term or long term? And if your product is cheaper than the alternatives, does that price difference create enough value for the customer? These are some of the important questions you should ask yourself. An example of this is Target's launch of the brand Smartly with hygiene/cleaning products all under $2 (approximately 70% less than similar products by other brands).

What about Convenience? Another really important pain point is convenience. Does your product make your peoples' life more convenient? The classic example of this is Netflix, a brand that became a household name because it was incredibly more convenient than it competitor Blockbuster. Instead of having to shlep to Blockbuster, for example, and pay all of those late fees customers could now get DVD's straight to their doorstep. Fast forward to 2020, Netflix is worth $203 billion and Blockbuster is is out of business. The company that made me more convenient for people won.

Service is another major factor in solving a customer's pain point. Service refers to the entire customer experience and includes things like - warranty, maintenance, replacements, customer service, and ease of use. A really good example of this is the solar company SolarCity, which was acquired by Tesla in 2016. SolarCity's solar panels weren't cheaper than the competitors they simply had a better warranty and maintenance on them and that's why customers preferred them. This is one of the major drivers that helped SolarCity become the nation's largest residential solar provider.

Here are 5 easy steps to identify your customer's pain point:

Start by creating a customer journey map. Identify what makes your customers buy your product and how they arrived to your physical or online store. This should include the channels that they visited - a search result, a Facebook ad, a social media post, an email, and other online and physical media. At each stage identify possible pain points and uncover the customer's motivation of using your product. This will also help you evaluate your marketing mix and see if there are any channels that you need to add.

Another good way to find the customer pain point is by surveying your customers. Ask your customers what they like and don't like about your product and what are some of the factors that led to their choice. There are a ton of survey tools you could use like Typeform or SurveyMonkey.

If you are thinking of launching a new product you should look at the customer reviews of your existing products. These will tell you a lot about your customers' preferences, expectations and pain points. What's particularly powerful for eCommerce sites are visual reviews - photos or videos that customers post alongside the text of their reviews. You can use tools like Pixlee, Yotpo, or Loox to collect and display visual reviews.

Another good way to find your customer's pain points is to ask your sales team. After all, your sales people are the ones that hear and have to respond to the objections of your prospects and customers, hence they are the most aware of what people are looking for in your products or services. Sit down and have a discussion with your sales team. Try to find out what your customers like/dislike about your product, what are the issues that they bring up the most, and what makes them turn down the product. If your marketing team interfaces directly with your customers you could also ask them for feedback.

The fifth and super important method is to conduct a competitor analysis to analyze the competitor landscape, in any industry. That's how Netflix and Apple began, when they strove to make a product that's better and more innovative than the status quo. Identify where you are, what your market position is. Look at all your competitor products, their marketing mix, the type of promotion and media they publish, and their strategies. Identify the pain points that they are solving and ones that are still unresolved. One strategy is to try to solve the same pain points just better. Another strategy is to go after pain points the remain unresolved, to create something that people haven't seen before.

Another effective marketing technique is to use the STP framework. STP stands for segmenting, targeting, and positioning. Segmenting is where you divide the market into distinct groups (or target market segments). Targeting is where you determine which customer segment you want to focus your marketing efforts on. And positioning is the creation of the brand position, the marketing mix, and other various marketing strategies in order to appeal to your potential customers in your target market and try to influence them to make a purchase decision. The STP framework helps brands identify the types of marketing channels and strategies that will be required to successfully market their product or service to their customers.

Let's dive into step 3: Identify market trends and competition.

That brings us to our next topic - creating a competitive analysis. This is a crucial step in the marketing strategy plan creation because this is where you will identify what differentiates your product or service from the competition. You can do this through a simple SWOT analysis to determine your brand's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Without this step it's going to be very difficult to create a product that provides unique value to the consumer and stays competitive with the market trends of the day. So this analysis is crucial and this is how you go about it:

The first step of any competitive analysis is to find out who your competitors are. Find out all the different companies that have similar products and services. Look at their social media content, search in related or niche online communities, news mentions and product reviews.

Now that you have a detailed list of all of your competitors it's time to categorize them. Put them into different groups - primary, secondary, and tertiary competitors. This will help you get clarity on which of your competitors are directly competing with you and which ones you should focus on in your analysis.

The next step of the competitive analysis is to find out all you can about each competitor. Look at all the various social media pages, the content and the branding that they use on their site and email campaigns. This will give you a visual understanding of their brand positioning and how your product or service differs from theirs. Be sure to check out their influencer marketing campaigns to see the kind of branded image that they try to portray online. Look at their display ads (owned media) and UGC(earned media).

The last part is the more technical side of the branding audit. Use a tool like Ahrefs, SimilarWeb, or Alexa to check the keywords that each competitor ranks for and their various traffic channels. This will give you the precise search terms that the user searches for and the specific needs that your competitors meet. For example, you might discover that a competitor is using a type of media or content that you're not using yet, or a traffic channel that you haven't expanded into. This is super valuable information to have for your online marketing strategy.

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