As your business grows, creating a strong marketing strategy is the thing that will keep you sustainable and soaring. Here are six steps to developing an all-star marketing strategy. 

1. Research your market and customers

Any good marketing effort starts with research. You need to figure out who your customers are, where they live, how they spend their time, what problems they face, and more. You also need to know your industry inside and out: who the competitors are and what they’re doing, what trends exist and what the future looks like. 

There are three ways you can conduct this research: 

• Look at online sources that already exist

• Conduct a survey to get data from a specific group of people

• Use interviews and focus groups to get specific info from your target audience

There’s no right or wrong way to do research, and you may end up using a combination of methods. 

2. Research your competitors

Researching your competitors may include examining their digital presence and marketing efforts, looking at their prices, reading reviews from their customers, and even visiting them in-person (incognito, of course) if possible. 

Find information on things like:

• Which products and services they offer

• How they price

• What their customer service looks like

• Why customers love or hate them

• What their brand looks and feels like

• Which marketing strategies they’ve tried

Gathering this information can help you identify what sets you apart: do you solve the common problems customers complain about? Offer more comprehensive services or more affordable products? 

3. Set your marketing objectives

This may seem straightforward—the goal of marketing is to get more customers, right? Ultimately, yes, but you need a more specific objective when you’re just starting out. Here are a few goals you might have based on where you’re at in your business journey: 

• Build brand awareness

• Generate leads

• Increase sales volume

• Improve customer retention

Make sure your goals are measurable and time-bound. For example, instead of setting a goal to get more leads, set a goal to increase your leads by 25% by the end of the year. 

4. Break your audience into segments

You’ve done the research from step one and identified your target audience; now it’s time to look at that audience more closely. Marketing will be easier and more effective if you break your customers into segments—by age, location, salary, or other demographics. Put these segments in order of priority, then create a customer persona for each. 

5. Define your brand

With your research done and your objectives set, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and start defining your marketing strategy. Step one is to define your brand. 

But this is about more than just designing a logo and coming up with a memorable catchphrase. It’s about pinpointing the key value you provide—in other words, why do you exist and how can you communicate that to customers? 

It’s a good idea to come up with a brand guide: a document that includes information like your mission and vision, tone, color scheme, and any other relevant information.

6. Get to work on your marketing campaigns

The final step is to start marketing! Look back at your competitor research, your marketing objectives, customer target segments, and brand guidelines; and use all that information to figure out which marketing efforts you should prioritize for the time being.

Marketing is a continual process of reviewing, improving, and fine-tuning. Look at the data to see which marketing efforts are most successful, and use that to inform your future efforts. Soon, you’ll have an all-star marketing strategy.