How to Build a Complete Marketing Strategy: A Complete Guide

Businesses are bombarded with endless marketing trends and digital innovations. Many need help to keep up, resulting in campaigns that miss the mark and investments that don’t pay off. The challenge is clear: How do you create a marketing strategy that keeps pace with today’s dynamic environment and sets the stage for future success?

If you’re feeling overwhelmed and uncertain about where to start, you’re not alone. We’ll help you understand the key components of a robust marketing strategy. All the articles are backed by successful examples and practical insights that you can apply to your own business.

Building Marketing Strategy: What Goals Does It Help Achieve?

A well-defined marketing strategy is crucial for any business looking to achieve a variety of goals. These goals can be broadly categorized into several types, each serving a distinct purpose in the overall growth and success of the company.

1. Market-oriented

A marketing strategy focuses on positioning a company in the marketplace, which includes:

• Expanding Market Share

By identifying opportunities in the market, a marketing strategy helps in capturing a larger share of the existing market. This involves understanding the competitive landscape, differentiating the company’s offerings, and targeting untapped customer segments.

• Increasing Customer Base

A key goal of any marketing strategy is to attract more customers. This can be achieved through targeted campaigns, improving the product or service offering, and enhancing the customer experience.

• Boosting Profits

Ultimately, the aim is to increase profitability by optimizing pricing strategies, reducing costs through efficient marketing spend, and maximizing the return on investment (ROI) from marketing activities.

2. Brand Awareness

A fundamental goal is to make the brand known. This involves:

• Building Brand Recognition

Effective marketing ensures that more people are aware of your brand and can easily identify it among competitors. This includes consistent messaging, visual identity, and presence across various platforms.

• Communicating Brand Values

It’s not just about getting your name out there; it’s about conveying what your brand stands for. This could include your company’s mission, values, and the unique value proposition that sets you apart from the competition.

3. Customer Engagement

Engagement is about creating meaningful interactions with your audience:

• Fostering Connections

A good marketing strategy focuses on building a two-way relationship with customers, encouraging feedback, and responding to their needs.

• Enhancing Interaction

This can be achieved through interactive campaigns, community building, and offering value beyond the product or service.

4. Brand Loyalty

Cultivate a loyal customer base that returns and advocates for your brand.

Marketing strategy allows you to: 

• Optimally manage resources
• Prevent possible marketing mistakes
• Increase the efficiency of the company’s activities

A marketing strategy can be effective for up to 20-25 years. However, in small and medium-sized businesses, planning is usually carried out for up to 1 year. This is because the current situation can quickly change. Therefore, a marketing strategy is not a step-by-step instruction for action. If necessary, it is adjusted to the circumstances.

Interactive Content – Indispensable Ally for Any Marketing Strategy

How to ultimately improve any of the chosen marketing strategies? You can do it with interactive content!

Interactive content offers a dynamic way to engage audiences, capture their attention, and foster deeper connections with your brand. Unlike traditional static content, interactive content requires active participation from users, making the experience more memorable and impactful. Below are examples of interactive content.

1. Quizzes and Polls

You can use BuzzFeed-style personality quizzes that help users discover which product suits their needs best.

2.Interactive Infographics

Try a visual representation of data where users can click on different sections to reveal more information.

3. Calculators

Mortgage calculators, ROI calculators, or health and fitness calculators are great for any business.

4. Interactive Videos

Choose-your-own-adventure style videos are trendy now.

5. Surveys and Feedback Forms

Post-purchase surveys that ask customers about their shopping experience are a great way to improve your business.

By integrating interactive elements from Outgrow, you can enhance user engagement, gather valuable data, increase brand loyalty, and ultimately drive higher conversion rates.

Types of Marketing Strategies

Interactive content is even a universal ally for any chosen type of marketing strategy. There are many types of marketing strategies. We will discuss the main ones below. 

1. Global Marketing Strategy

It aims to develop the company in the worldwide market and constantly expand its activities geographically. The main global marketing strategies are: 

• Internationalization — developing new sales channels internationally 
• Globalization — production of products taking into account common market standards 
• Segmentation — production of goods for different customer segments on a global level
• Diversification — simultaneous development of different types of activities 

Preference for one or another direction of development depends on whether the company is ready to scale. Some choose to increase market share, while others decide to minimize risks.

Conducting PEST (political, economic, social, and technological) analysis when developing global startup strategies is crucial. This helps identify the regions’ political, economic, social, and technological aspects.

McDonald’s is a great example. The company actively uses segmentation, introducing local flavors into different countries’ menus. For example, In Vietnam, McDonald’s offers grilled pork with rice. After years of reviewing fast food in the US and UK, the size differences can be mentioned. The dozens of fast food chains differ between the US and the UK.

McDonald’s caters to the local audience’s needs, allowing the company to grow globally. Here’s a comparison table highlighting specific menu items and their differences between McDonald’s in the US and the UK:

Menu Item	McDonald’s US	McDonald’s UK
Big Mac	Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun. Typically larger portion sizes.	Similar ingredients but may have slightly different sauce formulation or seasoning. Portion sizes may differ.
French Fries	Often available in small, medium, and large sizes with optional salt packets or seasoning options.	Sizes may differ, sometimes different seasoning or salt levels.
McChicken Sandwich	Fried chicken patty with lettuce, mayonnaise, and a bun. Various regional variations in sauces or toppings.	Similar, but may have different sauces or regional variations in toppings.
Filet-O-Fish	Fish fillet with tartar sauce and a bun. Available with various promotional variations.	Generally consistent, may have regional promotional variations or different portion sizes.
Drinks	Large sizes are available, often with free refills on soda.	Smaller sizes, no free refills on soda.

2. Basic Marketing Strategy

Basic marketing strategies are fundamental. They determine whether a company will grow, reduce operations, or develop at its current level. Basic marketing strategies can have different directions: 

• Specialization. The company tries to gain leadership in a narrow niche. 
• Differentiation. This is how companies expand their activities in various directions or assortments.
• Leadership. The expenses and ROI in production are carefully controlled. Each new type of product is worked out to the smallest nuances.

Basic marketing strategies are characterized by a choice based on assessing benefits and costs.

An example of a brand that became world-famous due to its narrow specialization is Porsche. The real success came only after 1983 when the company decided to promote itself through motorsports.

Today, Porsche is a globally recognizable brand of premium sports cars, sedans, and SUVs.

3. Competitive Marketing Strategy

There are 4 approaches to competitive marketing strategies: 

a.) Leader

The company dominates the market and seeks a new target audience through advertising, marketing, and expanding the product’s application. 

b.) Leader follower

The company observes the leader and imitates its decisions or takes an offensive stance. In the latter case, it looks for the leader’s weaknesses and unreached audiences.

c.) Challenger

The company challenges the leader. This strategy is followed by brands that go against the market, break stereotypes, and do something fundamentally new. Common to all Challengers is the ability to tell stories and build an emotional connection with the audience. New or non-standard methods and channels of communication help them to do this. Advertising campaigns of Challenger brands are always bright and memorable and are often built around a single idea.

d.) Narrower

Companies with narrow specializations often choose this marketing strategy to serve one or several audience segments. The tactic is to win over segments that the leader has neglected. 

Each of these marketing strategies is based on the company’s competitive advantages, and the goal is to capture new markets and attract audiences.

Harley Davidson focuses on a competitive marketing strategy. Harley Davidson also has theme restaurants in many places, including Las Vegas.

4. Growth Marketing Strategy

Growth marketing strategies focus on scaling the business, expanding production, and continuously increasing market share by sales volume or region of coverage. Options: 

• Market penetration. The company sells an existing product in the same market as before but tries to increase the market share covered. For example, price reductions facilitate market share expansion.
• Market expansion. In this case, existing products are sold into a new market if there are no growth prospects in the previous markets.
• Product expansion. The company increases production volume or adds functionality to the product.
• Diversification. Accordingly, high risks and success directly depend on the quality of market research and finding the right audience.
• Acquisition. To expand operations, a company acquires another company to increase production or enter new markets.

The choice of a particular growth strategy is determined by the company’s financial position, the level of competition in the market, and other factors.

TikTok is using a growth marketing strategy. It implements viral marketing techniques and algorithm-driven content recommendations to grow its user base rapidly. The platform also utilizes influencer partnerships and targeted advertising to boost user engagement and retention.

How to Build a Marketing Strategy in 2024

The process of marketing strategy building can be divided into 3 stages:

• Analytics
• Practice
• Controlling

Let’s discuss them in detail below.

Stage 1: Analytics

At this stage, you must analyze:

1. Internal environment (state of the company)

This includes business processes, human capital, product mix (both released and potential), and sales funnels. SWOT analysis can help assess the company’s state.

2. External environment

This includes the region’s income level, inflation, business credit opportunities, legislative changes, business support measures, global and local trends, and the degree of technology development in the region.

3. Market

Assess threats from substitute products and the degree of dependence on raw material suppliers, external logistics, and employees. Explore the complexities of licensing, distribution, and manufacturing. Identify target audience segments, their size, and characteristics. Identify priority segments and segments that they are already working with.

4. Competitors

Study competing products. Examine competitors’ characteristics and capabilities. Determine the competitiveness of their product and the likely share of market capture. 

After this marketing strategy development stage, you can move to the following stage.

Stage 2: Practice

Now, it is time to move to the practice.

1. Set objectives

Determine the final goal of marketing, which is planned to be achieved. For example, to increase profit fivefold, enter a foreign market within six months, or become a market leader in your region. The goal should be realistic and measurable to evaluate the process.

2. Define USP and pricing policy

Identify the most valuable qualities of the product that will be emphasized to consumers. Develop a plan for information policy—how information will be delivered to consumers. Establish a pricing policy—how much the product will cost relative to competitors’ products.

3. Develop a plan of action

Decide how to achieve the goal—expanding the assortment, increasing distribution channels, or changing advertising policy. You also determine possible actions in force majeure—what to do when new competitors appear or prices for raw materials change.

4. Write a marketing plan

A marketing plan is developed considering the set goals and action plan. The process of achieving the goal is divided into stages, and for each stage, an indicator is set to measure the results. If the marketing strategy explains in general how we will move toward the intended goals, the plan includes a specific list of steps to achieve them.

5. Include DSP in your marketing plan

We recommend you pay attention to AdTech solutions, particularly demand-side Platforms (DSPs). They are vital in modern marketing strategies due to their ability to optimize digital advertising. The demand-side platform leverages data to segment audiences based on demographics, interests, and behavior, ensuring ads reach the most relevant users. DSPs dynamically bid for impressions across multiple exchanges by enabling real-time bidding, optimizing ad spend, and ensuring timely and relevant ad placements.

Real-time bidding is awesome. This means they can bid for ad impressions across multiple exchanges in real-time, ensuring that ads are placed at the right moment and reach the right audience. This dynamic bidding helps to optimize ad spend, ensuring that every dollar is used effectively.

Another great advantage of DSPs is their ability to manage campaigns across various digital channels from one centralized platform. This makes it easier to keep messaging consistent and allocate budgets more effectively. Plus, DSPs offer detailed analytics on campaign performance, which helps marketers make informed, data-driven decisions and continuously refine their strategies.

Retargeting is another area where DSPs shine. They can re-engage users who have previously shown interest in a product or service, significantly improving conversion rates. When scaling campaigns, DSPs make it easy to expand reach and enter new markets quickly and efficiently.

Stage 3: Controlling

It is important to constantly monitor whether a particular activity has helped to move closer to the goal. For example, whether the advertising campaign was effective and whether the profit increased due to the implemented changes.

The approved marketing strategy should be regularly monitored for compliance with the market situation. If necessary, you adjust the marketing plan. This aligns with the importance of a business plan, which serves as a roadmap for monitoring progress and making informed adjustments.

Monitoring the profit from each product type is necessary to remove unprofitable goods from production or modernize the product promptly. Customer feedback should be monitored to learn the audience’s needs in time to identify negativity.

Conclusion

Many factors influence the success of a marketing strategy. But there are 3 of the most common mistakes that can bring all efforts to naught: 

• Applying templates. Every company has its own path and internal environment: what worked for one may not work for another. On a case-by-case basis, you must adapt your marketing strategy to your current circumstances and promptly make the necessary changes.
• Focusing on one communication/sales/promotion channel. It is better if your strategy covers as many promotion channels as possible (email newsletters, online and offline advertising, content marketing, and so on). In this case, you will have a better chance of success.
• Lack of control. You can only measure the success of a marketing strategy by the results. You may fail to notice weaknesses if you don’t monitor the consequences. As a result, you won’t be able to improve the strategy and eliminate ineffective actions.

Now, you know how to build a complete marketing strategy in 2024. We hope our guide will help you choose a promising business development direction where all resources work at full capacity and produce positive results.