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Guide to Implementing an Effective Marketing Strategy – Part 2

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As we’ve already mentioned in the first part of this article, an effective marketing strategy is one that manages to gain insight and facilitate a thorough approach for all team members. Also, it aligns their creative efforts, provides powerful monitoring capabilities, and guarantees tangible results and flexibility.

In a nutshell, successful digital marketing campaigns offer an in-depth overview of everything necessary and help align the efforts of all the employees. However, to implement an effective marketing strategy you have to first collect large amounts of data. Then, you need to analyze the information to plan everything down to the smallest detail.

An effective marketing strategy should basically focus on key strategic elements (goals, tasks, etc.) and present their relationships and interdependencies. Visualization makes the marketing strategy easy to understand.

However, if not done correctly, your marketing strategy will not bring you the results expected. Moreover, there are so many online guides to creating a marketing strategy, many of which are either too vague, outdated or purely theoretical, making them inapplicable. Thus, we hope to present you with valuable, battle-hardened insight and tips that are the result of years of marketing experience.

Define Your Strategic Goals

One of the most important things you need to do when creating an effective marketing strategy is to define the results that the company wants to achieve. Your strategic planning goals might be increasing brand awareness, implementing a cost-effective approach, organizing the work-distribution process, implementing monitoring capabilities, increasing flexibility, introducing a new product, or entering new markets.

How to Formulate Your Goals

How to Formulate Your Goals

Well, as we’ve mentioned in the first article about implementing a reliable and effective marketing strategy, before starting with your strategy, you have to do competitor research and define your buyer personas. As a result, you’ll most certainly mark areas you need to improve to achieve greater results.

The goals are not precise tasks that need to be performed such as “Create buyer personas” or “Redesign website.” They’re more thorough and address broader issues, serving as a guide to making precise tasks for each goal. A goal should represent all of the tasks needed to be done in a certain area.

While formulating the goals of your company or department, focus on existing problems as well as long-term marketing opportunities. This will help you come up with successful digital marketing campaigns both for the long- and short-term.

Goal Strategies

Each strategic goal is related to another. This way “Optimize service communication in all channels” is directly contributing to “Make the value proposition more attractive for prospects.” It is a good practice to link the goals to one another, symbolizing their relations. This way marketers will be able to know who they are dependent on for desired results and managers will be able to easily monitor processes and tasks.

Strategic Themes

Once you’ve defined your strategic planning goals, it’s advisable to group them into strategic themes. Each theme should represent a broader area of interest. Good exemplary themes are “Product Communication & Development,” “Business Growth,” or “Teamwork and team capabilities.”

This differentiation will help everyone within the team to understand the expectations and what their work output is contributing to. It’ll also mark certain goals as part of the same theme, enabling a more thorough understanding for the viewer.

Add Strategic Initiatives to Each Goal

The strategic initiatives are time-framed projects and programs outside of everyday operational activities. Their aim is to help the company achieve its marketing and business goals. Examples of such initiatives are “Creating and using a dashboard to monitor progress,” “Creating a Blog Space,” or “Planning and conducting an ICO.”

Each strategic initiative is always linked to a goal. If you come up with an initiative but you can’t link it to a goal, you either didn’t formulate your goals adequately. Alternatively, the initiative may not contribute in an obvious way to the results you want to achieve and thus might be unnecessary.

Initiatives give goals in an effective marketing strategy an additional depth, presenting an in-depth view of all creative efforts required. Let’s say we have a goal “Raise Brand Awareness” that is part of the “Business Growth” theme. Strategic initiatives connected to it might be to “Create a Blog Space,” “Optimize Newsletters,” “Create Social Media Content Strategy,” or “Participate in niche events.”

Description

The initiatives put the vision into practice. Each of them should have a description explaining how it will influence the end goal. As a result, employees and stakeholders will have a better understanding of the overall strategy.

Key Performance Indicators

As marketers, you have probably worked with KPIs. Yet, in order for a marketing strategy to be effective, you’ll have a countless amount of those to track. A KPI or key performance indicator is a quantifiable measure that evaluates the success of an organization, employee, or initiative.

These metrics could be quite simple. Examples include “percentage of employees being HubSpot certified”, or much more complex such as “COCA (Cost of Customer Acquisition” that’s equal to the total marketing investment, divided by the number of acquired customers.”

Here’s an example of the most significant email marketing KPIs:

Top 6 Email Marketing KPIs

You can track the performance of each strategic initiative with at least one KPI. Also, set a target you want to achieve to see the progress made towards completing this goal. Linking KPIs to initiatives will help you monitor their performance, indicating potential problems and weak areas.

Distributing Tasks

The final stage of implementing an effective marketing strategy is to distribute specific activities related to a particular initiative to each team member.

For example, if we have to break the initiative “Create a Blog Space” into tasks, it should look similar to this:

  • Create Page Structure & Design
  • Design Page & Blog Post Template
  • Create Content Strategy for the Blog
  • Pick Topics
  • Write Posts On the Topics
  • Edit Content
  • Add CTAs & Pictures
  • Publish

How To Divide Work In Your Marketing Team?

Effective management is, as any team member can tell you, a key to building an effective marketing strategy. The most critical element of team operations is making sure that tasks are equally shared among members of the group. This can be a challenge for even the most experienced managers, as it requires a delicate balance of experience, rationale, and intuition.

However, when done correctly, dividing work equally can help to ensure that all team members engage and are able to achieve the company goals efficiently. By taking the time to carefully consider how work should be divided among team members, managers can set their teams up for success.

There are a few key things to keep in mind when dividing work among team members:

  1. Make sure that everyone has a chance to contribute.
  2. Avoid giving too much work to any one person.
  3. Be aware of different skills and abilities within the team.
  4. Take into account the workloads of individual team members.
  5. Be flexible and willing to adjust the division of work as needed.

By taking these factors into consideration, managers can ensure they divide work fairly among team members to contribute to an effective marketing strategy. This can help to create a more cohesive and productive team overall.

RACI Matrix

The RACI Matrix is a chart that maps tasks and initiative against 4 roles:

  • (R) Responsible – The person responsible for delivering the task and making the decisions regarding it. The “Responsible” role could be assigned to more than 1 person, but it’s a good practice to keep the number of people involved up to the required minimum.
  • (A) Accountable – The person is both responsible for the task and its completion. They’re not doing the work but are responsible for making sure it’s finalized. It’s highly recommended to have just one accountable person per initiative.
  • (C) Consulted – This person assists the Responsible one by providing information, insights, and guides. For example, if you’re a copywriter writing an article about a complex tech product, it’s advisable to consult the product development team before reading Google and trying to get it all on your own.
  • (I) Informed – A person who’s not directly involved in the task, but the outcome can affect them or their work. Thus, they should be kept Informed regarding the progress on the task. Usually, communication in such cases is one way to ease the internal process of knowledge-sharing.

Exactly the 4 roles of the RACI matrix are responsible for its name.

The RACI is extremely useful when distributing tasks as it gives you a clear view of what everyone within the team or department has to do and makes it easy for managerial personnel to organize the internal processes. It helps to communicate the tasks to each person without overloading them with work they can’t handle. Most importantly the RACI is a great way to present each employee with a clear view of what’s expected of them, thus aligning the efforts of team members across the whole marketing department.

In case you don’t find the RACI to be the perfect fit, there’re other similar role-based matrixes that could serve you better such as:

  • CARS (Communicate, Approve, Responsible, Support)
  • RASCI (Responsible, Accountable, Supportive, Consulted, Informed)
  • RAS (Responsible, Approve and Support)
  • CLAM (Contributes, Leads, Approves, Monitors)

Summary

An effective marketing strategy can drive tangible results and strengthen the individual performance of each employee. It also presents team members with a clear understanding of their responsibilities and the goals they contribute to.

Overall, implementing an effective marketing strategy could greatly increase the results of your marketing department, get you the leads you desire, and drive up your business. Yet, it is a complex process that includes collecting and analyzing large volumes of data, doing weeks of research, and months of planning. So, roll up your sleeves and start defining your strategic goals!

Alternatively, drop us a message, and we can help you increase your market share.