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Strategic
Marketing
Plan
Marketing is an integral part of your ecommerce business, but developing a strategic marketing plan can be challenging. To create a strategic marketing plan, start by thinking about what you want to achieve. For instance, you may have several stakeholders to please, KPIs you want to hit and at the same time, you want to stay true to your brand and customer base. Does that cover it? It might seem challenging, but once we go through the process, you will have a format you can turn to. We will break down your high level goals into something more manageable and go through each step of the process. Although there are many resources available, I’ll try and make it worth your while by guiding you through effective tools that you can use to create your strategic marketing plan.
To create a strategic marketing plan,
start by thinking about what it is
you want to achieve.
To build a marketing strategy or plan, I like to refer back to established industry templates or frameworks because it makes it easier to gain focus and prioritise. With regards to marketing and strategy work, there are a lot of resources you can leverage, so why not pick and choose what works for you? For this blog post, I will start with the SOSTAC model developed by PR Smith and suggest you use this model as your plan and add on any elements you like. I have linked to the main resources I like to work within each relevant section of the post and hopefully you can benefit from them as well.
Start with looking at your current situation, namely your SWOT analysis and review your company’s (marketing) performance in the last year. Ask yourself what went well and what did not? Were there certain activities or campaigns that you could replicate or repurpose? Maybe you can uncover opportunities that were previously untapped. Next, have a look at the market and perform your competitor analysis to see where you can position yourself. If you do not have a competitor analysis set up yet, try this Hubspot template here to get you started. This is also the time to start defining and reviewing your target audience and assessing what your ideal customer profiles (ICP) need to include. If you need a template or process for the customer profile creation, try this one here. The analysis is a big portion of the work and although you may have a lot of this completed already, it is worth revisiting and being thorough here.
Let’s move on to the next stage and break down your objectives and turn what you want to achieve into SMART goals. This is where we can start aligning our company KPIs with our upcoming marketing goals. The next step is to turn each one of them into a tangible SMART goal.
This framework allows you to turn intangible ideas into objectives that are easier to work towards.
SMART stands for:
Here is an example Atlassian provides in creating SMART goal statements: Our goal is to [quantifiable objective] by [timeframe or deadline]. [Key players or teams] will accomplish this goal by [what steps you’ll take to achieve the goal]. Accomplishing this goal will [result or benefit].
So let’s take this goal “More traffic to the website” and turn it into a SMART goal.
Our goal is to increase organic traffic to the website by August 31st. The content team will accomplish this goal by creating content that will rank for more keywords and campaigns promoting the content on social media in specific groups and by using industry specific hashtags. Accomplishing this goal will increase the number of new users to the website by up to 10%.
Now that you’ve identified your key objectives, we’ll look at how to implement the strategy you use to achieve them.
Once you know what you are looking to achieve, the next step is to create your strategy, marketing plan or roadmap of how to reach these specific goals. Here’s where STP - Segmenting, Targeting, Positioning comes into play. Look at your target audience and define how and where you can best reach them. You’ll also shape your overarching content strategy and develop the messaging you want to reach out to each target group with.
If you already have your strategy in place, you can use the STP model to review your current plan. Are you providing your target audience with relevant content? Can you update your content to provide a unified and structured approach that captures your readers biggest challenges and solves them? Understanding and leveraging the pain points or interests of your target group can help you build a compelling strategy. If you’d like an example or template to get you started, have a look at this one here.
Here’s where the real fun begins because we start discussing your marketing mix and look closely at your marketing funnel. This is where you really get to test out your marketing knowledge based on fun acronyms like AIDA, TOFU/MOFU/BOFU, RACE or any others.
A great summary of how to set up your marketing funnel and an overview of the various ways you can dissect your content, set up your marketing channels and choose your promotional tactics can be found on Single Grain here. Additionally, since I mentioned RACE, here is an overview by Smart Insights of SOSTAC and RACE used together.
For the strategy, tactics, and actions, I suggest focusing on integrated marketing campaigns which are multi-channel, entail various content formats, and can be spread out across a longer time frame. Often they also allow you to disseminate one content piece and repurpose it across various channels, allowing you to share one singular, unified message.
Once you have your strategy, including tactics marketing funnel mapped out, you can get started on the execution. Let’s dive into the actual campaigns and what each element could look like and who owns the element and use that to get a campaign plan in place. Although this is the final and most detailed stage of the SOSTAC model and of any strategic marketing plan, all the previous stages fall into place here and lead you to this point. To make sure your execution resonates with your audience, the previous steps need to be conducted. If you need a bit more inspiration and an example that ties everything together, have a look at Econsultancy's Periodic Table of Marketing. I like to use this to gut check my campaigns.
Once your strategy is implemented and your campaigns are up and running, you’ll want to see how they are performing. Controls is the part of the plan where you review performance, set up dashboards and conduct analyses.
Let’s revisit our SMART goal from before:
Our goal is to increase organic traffic to the website by August 31st. The content team will accomplish this goal by creating content that will rank for more keywords and campaigns promoting the content on social media in specific groups and by using industry specific hashtags. Accomplishing this goal will increase the number of new users to the website by up to 10%.
How can we track the results behind this goal? For instance, we can track website traffic for the specific timeframe we are looking for using tools like Google Analytics. We can also check keyword and SEO rankings for our content through Google Adwords or SEO tools like Ubersuggest by Neil Patel. We can also review our content on social media and segment our target audience by checking post engagement, hashtag usage, and who is viewing our content. I would suggest setting up a small set of goals for each campaign to allow for adjustments and flexibility and to opt for no more than three marketing objectives for your overall marketing strategy to make it as manageable as possible.
Meet Lazy Susan, a family-owned brand that sells garden furniture. Having seen a period of immense growth, Lazy Susan’s marketing team was looking for strategic guidance for their marketing strategy. I worked with them based on their situational analysis to establish a high level campaign plan that would resonate with the customers and share the same messaging across multiple channels. I continued advising Lazy Susan and dove into the more detailed work on the actions and tactics that they could implement. These included creating content calendars and focusing on segmentation and automation for social media and email. To ensure control, I worked on setting up a proprietary dashboard for the team to make it easy to track performance across all of their channels. This is an essential tool I advise any marketer to have to keep track of their work.
That summarises creating a marketing plan in six steps. I hope this article was useful for you in getting started on your marketing strategy or updating your existing one. If you are still looking for additional brainstorming or advice, why not have a chat with me?
