Too many businesses jump straight into marketing tactics, ignoring the key foundation of digital marketing success: strategy. Without a clear strategy, your marketing tactics will have no clear direction, which is simply a waste of time, budget, and opportunity.

Simply ramping up your marketing activity isn’t the route to better results. Disconnected marketing is directionless marketing, and it’s a trap that plenty of businesses fall into time and again.

Before investing in channels, campaigns, and creative, you need clear foundations and objectives. Read on to find out how you determine what that looks like for your brand.

Strategy comes first

This is always, always worth remembering and repeating: strategy is the most important part of marketing. Without it, you’re essentially operating with your eyes closed, with no understanding of what you’re trying to achieve, and no idea of how to get there.

What does strategy actually mean?

Strategy is all about building a deep understanding of your business, your target audience, the messaging, and the customer journey. All four of these elements are essential to effective marketing.

Understanding business

What is the business’ position in the market? Who are the competitors? What are the most pressing needs of the business, and what’s possible with the available resources? A full understanding of the business is the non-negotiable starting point for every strategy.

Knowing the target audience

There’s no point spending money on marketing if you don’t know who you’re trying to reach in the first place. Really get to know your audience and you’ll be able to cut through to them in the right places and in the right ways.

For example, if your target audience is 60+ years old, paid ads on TikTok probably won’t grab their attention. Understand your demographic: Figure out who they are, figure out where they are, and then start devising campaigns that’ll resonate with them.

What happens without a clear strategy?

As we touched on in a recent blog [URL], marketing without strategy will suffer from a severe lack of direction. You won’t know what you’re trying to achieve, who you’re trying to target, and how you’re going to reach them. This then means you’ll waste budget on ill-suited tactics, which can make it harder to correct the mistakes you’ve already made.

You’ll also notice that your messaging will be disconnected, there’ll be a noticeable lack of consistency, and your marketing channels won’t work together effectively. This not only hampers your marketing efforts, but it also knocks brand consistency, which is really important in retaining customer trust. Inconsistent messaging makes your business look a little lost.

Different channels support different goals

Depending on what you’re trying to get from your marketing, you need to allocate resources to certain channels. If you’re trying to build awareness and get a direct line to your audience, social media can be ideal - you can make contact with audiences earlier in the buying journey, using your brand voice and content to attract and keep their attention.

Maybe you’re looking for people who are a little further down the funnel? The search marketing toolbox is a big one, and with the right strategy you can reach high-intent customers who are actively looking for a product or service.

That’s not to say it’s just a case of choosing a channel and throwing money at it. You need to refine your strategy and tailor it to your approach and your goals - what works on TikTok probably won’t work on LinkedIn, for example.

Determine your goals, assess what stage your business is at, and use audience behaviour patterns to identify the people who are most likely to engage with you.

Marketing should be layered

You don’t need every service all at once. You should level up your marketing at a manageable rate, rather than jumping to your ideal setup immediately. Layering your marketing approach allows you to fine-tune it, optimising every layer and seeing how they play off one another.

Once you have reached your optimal setup, it’s not a set-and-forget scenario - as your business grows, the ‘right’ mix will change, which is why staying on top of your marketing strategy is so important. As we’ve said before, different priorities require different approaches, and as your business priorities change, your marketing approach will need to follow suit. That’s going to be much harder if you’re locked into an everything-at-once strategy.

As well as your business needs, marketing trends, platform requirements and audience behaviours change over time, and you need to be ready to adapt to that.

Conclusion

Once the direction is clear, the right channels and services can be layered in based on business needs.

The most effective digital marketing campaigns are underpinned by strong digital marketing strategies. Your strategy will help you establish the direction you want to take, the channels you’ll use, and the digital marketing services you’d like to employ to reach your goals. It’s all about layering them based on your business needs, but it all starts with strategy.

We use detailed strategy to develop campaigns and adapt them on the fly to ensure they’re always working to their full potential. Get in touch with us today to see how we can help you.