7 Steps to Create a Complete Marketing Strategy in 2022

Keeping up with marketing trends may be a full-time job, in fact.

In 2022, we’ve witnessed a significant shift to short-form video content; the rise and fall of new platforms (particularly you, Meta); and the impact of the worldwide pandemic on traditional TV. In other words, what worked for your marketing strategy in the past might not work now.

To succeed in the fast-paced marketing environment while also keeping your audience engaged, it’s critical to stay on top of the curve.

We’ve compiled this article to walk you through the process of developing a marketing plan that goes above and beyond.

Let’s go through the essential components of a complete marketing plan in 2022, as well as some instances for inspiration.

The Importance of Customer-Driven Marketing Strategy Steps

A successful marketing plan will reach your target audience, which ranges from those who have never heard of your company to returning customers.

You’ll be flinging items at the wall in order to see what sticks if you don’t have a structured plan. It’s also costing you money, time, and resources.

A marketing strategy will:

• Align your team to specific goals.
• Help you tie your efforts to business objectives.
• Allow you to identify and test what resonates with your target audience.

There are seven distinct phases to building an effective marketing plan: Create a marketing strategy, create buyer personas, identify objectives, choose the tools, review your current resources, audit and plan media campaigns, and finally put it into action.

7 Steps of a Marketing Strategy Process

1. Build a marketing plan.

But wait, I have to develop a strategy for my business? What’s the distinction between conventional and affiliate SEO?

Your marketing plan should detail the reasons why your marketing team will require particular resources, take certain actions, and set specific goals throughout the year. The specific activities you’ll undertake to fulfill that strategy are known as your marketing plan.

A desirable template can assist you in creating a marketing plan that details your yearly spending, the initiatives your marketing team must address, and the marketing channels you’ll employ to carry them out.

Furthermore, it’ll connect everything back to a business summary so you stay on track with the overall company objectives.

2. Create buyer personas.

If you can’t sum up who your target audience is in a single sentence, this is the time to do it. A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer.

A buyer persona might be defined by, say, a business like Macy’s that wants to target more budget-conscious consumers in their 30s who live in the suburbs and are looking for designer deals at low prices.

With this description, the Macy’s Marketing team can picture Budgeting Belinda and form a precise idea.

Buyer personas include age, profession, income, location, hobbies, and difficulties. Belinda’s description contains all of those characteristics.

You don’t need to write your buyer persona with a pen and paper. In fact, HubSpot offers a free template that you may use to build your own (and it’s really entertaining).

You may also utilize a platform like Versium, which uses data and artificial intelligence to identify, understand, and contact your target audience.

The buyer personas that you create should be at the heart of your plan.

3. Identify your goals.

Your marketing strategy objectives should be congruent with your company’s objectives.

If one of your company objectives is to have 300 people attend your annual gathering in three months, your marketing objective should be to increase online registration by 10% at the end of the month.

Increasing brand recognition or obtaining high-quality leads is one of the marketing objectives. You may also wish to expand or sustain your industry’s thought leadership, increase customer value, or develop or improve your company’s products and services.

Determine what you want to achieve in the coming year, and how your marketing organization may help you get there.

4. Select the appropriate tools.

Make sure you have the proper tools to assess the achievement of your objectives once you’ve identified them.

It’s important to know who your target audience is, and what they’re looking for. If you don’t already have a plan in place, do it now! -> It’s critical to figure out who your targeted audience is and what they want. Do it right away if you don’t already have one!

5. Review your media.

Determine what resources you currently have in your arsenal that might assist you in developing your plan. Consider your assets to be divided into three categories: paid, owned, and earned media.

Paid media refers to any channel for which you spend money in order to attract your target audience. This includes offline channels such as television, direct mail, and billboards as well as online channels like social media, search engines, and websites.

Any of the media your marketing team uses to produce: photos, movies, podcasts, ebooks, infographics, and so on are referred to as owned media.

Another term for user-generated content is earned media. Shares on social media, tweets about your company, and Instagram photos mentioning your brand are all examples of earned media.

To have a clear understanding of what you have and how to integrate it, gather your resources in each media type and pool them in one area.

Consider, for example, if you already have a blog that provides weekly material in your market (owned media); you may use Twitter to promote your blog entries (paid media), which consumers may then re-Tweet. As a result, you’ll be able to build a stronger marketing strategy overall.

If you don’t have enough money to complete all of your objectives, get rid of any that don’t fit in. This is an excellent time to clear out your closets and find any gaps in your inventory.

6. Audit and plan media campaigns.

This phase is followed by the cleaning of your home. You must now choose which stuff will assist you in achieving your goals.

Concentrate on your company’s own media and marketing objectives. Will updating the call-to-actions at the end of your blog entries help you improve the number of people who RSVP to your event?

Next, take a look at your buyer personas. Assume you work for a video editing software firm. If one of your persona’s difficulties is adding clean sound effects to their movies but you don’t have any material that addresses it, make a 15-second demo film for Instagram to demonstrate how effective your product is in resolving the problem.

Finally, create a content production strategy. Each piece of material should have a topic cluster, objectives, format, and channel according to the plan. Make sure you indicate which problem it aims to address for your buyer persona.

Check out our post, The Ultimate Guide to Content Production for content ideas or a more in-depth look at how to develop a content strategy.

7. Bring it to fruition.

Your marketing research and planning should have prepared you for this point, allowing you to imagine how your plan will be carried out — and by which teams.

The final step is to combine all of it and give your plans actions.

Create a document that outlines the activities you’ll need to complete your campaign. In other words, lay out your plan.

When writing this document, think long term. A typical strategy document is kept for a year. Your strategic marketing plans should be based on this structured timeline.

Let us return to the video software firm for an example.

It’s possible that in January, you will launch a software upgrade to make the exporting process easier for consumers. In April, you want to release an ebook about contract language for your buyer personas, and in September, you intend to introduce an integration with other applications.

Remember, your digital strategy is unique to your business, so the document should be tailored to fit. As long as the strategy includes the pertinent details outlined in previous sections, you’ll be set. Learn about ecommerce order processing and 3PLs here.