What is strategic marketing and how it can transform your tech business
Over the years, the marketing landscape has transformed as consumers become less inclined to sales tactics. Today, marketing has become less in-your-face and more nuanced. That’s why now more than ever — attracting consumers to your brand requires a well-crafted strategy.
Strategic marketing acts as your guiding compass, aligning marketing efforts with business goals for success. In this post, we'll explore three key areas:
1) Difference between traditional marketing and strategic marketing
2) Steps to implement an effective strategic marketing process
3) Different forms strategic marketing can take
Read on to learn how a more defined strategic marketing process can help to elevate your business!
What is the difference between marketing and strategic marketing?
Forbes identifies traditional marketing as via its channels of distribution. Traditional marketing relies on conventional advertising methods such as newspapers, magazines, telephone books, radio, and television. Its primary goals are to create brand awareness and drive immediate sales. While valuable for reaching a broad audience, traditional marketing often lacks the depth needed to address complex business challenges in today's dynamic marketplace.
In contrast, strategic marketing takes a more data-driven approach. Thanks to digital marketing, businesses today can analyse consumer behaviour, market trends, and competition to make informed decisions. This style of marketing aligns its strategies with overall business objectives and crafts tailored messages that resonate with the target audience.
Creating an effective strategic marketing process in 7 steps
Strategic marketing comprises different phases of planning. Follow these steps to nail down the right process for your business and take your growth to new heights.
Step 1: Mission statement and goals
Define a compelling mission statement and high-level goals to provide a clear vision for your business's direction. Research by Accenture indicates that 64% of consumers are drawn to brands that actively communicate their purpose, underscoring the significance of a well-crafted mission statement.
Additionally, setting SMART marketing objectives (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound), further enhances the clarity for you and your team. With SMART objectives in place, you can measure the effectiveness of your marketing strategies.
For instance, a startup with a mission to make education accessible worldwide may set a marketing goal of acquiring 10,000 new users in the next quarter. This enables them to track progress and align their efforts with the overall business vision. By incorporating a mission-driven approach, businesses can elevate their strategic marketing efforts and move decisively towards desired outcomes.
Step 2: Have clarity on your target audience
Creating ideal customer personas is a great place to start but if you want to ensure your business has a product market fit, you’ll need to conduct market research. With data-backed research, you’ll gain a deep understanding of your customer’s pain points, preferences, and behaviours.
For instance, consider a tech company that markets a specialised software product. To effectively reach its intended audience, the company can craft precise buyer personas that delve into the nuances of their potential customers' job roles, challenges, and communication preferences. These personas not only serve as a foundation for attracting the right customers but also enable ongoing refinement based on actual user interactions. Regular engagement through surveys and careful analysis of conversion funnel drop-offs provide invaluable feedback for honing these "ideal buyer personas."
This iterative process ensures that marketing initiatives strongly resonate with the target demographic. By leveraging data-driven insights from market research and user engagement, businesses can optimise their strategic marketing approach, fostering enduring connections with their most valued clients.
Step 3: Create your message
When it comes to creating a compelling message, consistency is key. Beyond tailoring a message that speaks to your consumer’s wants, needs, and fears, you need to build trust by having a coherent message across different channels.
Ensure that your messaging maintains consistent language, tone of voice and visual style in all touch points — from social media platforms to chatbots and landing pages. By maintaining consistency, you build a reliable brand that is trusted among your customers.
Conversely, inconsistency in messaging can generate a sense of uncertainty, undermining the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Crafting a value proposition and maintaining a unified message across channels are critical pillars in building lasting relationships with customers and driving business success.
Step 4: Set your budget
When you’re implementing your marketing strategy, having a clear allocation of resources is crucial. For instance, you might choose to designate 20% for content creation, 30% for social media advertising, 40% for SEO efforts, and 10% for performance marketing. This allocation is just an example and best practices differ by industry. Monitor expenses and consistently evaluate the return on investment (ROI) of each marketing channel to determine the best allocation for your business.
For early-stage startups, monthly evaluations are recommended, while growth-stage startups may perform quarterly assessments. This analytical approach allows businesses to identify strategies that deliver superior results and channel more funds towards areas that maximise marketing outcomes.
Step 5: Know your marketing channels
Try new platforms to find the best marketing channel to reach your desired audience. For example, a company could focus on LinkedIn and Twitter for B2B customers, while using TikTok, Instagram, and influencers for everyday consumers. This customised approach ensures that your content speaks to your audience, setting the stage for future targeting efforts.
Next, continually iterate and improve content based on how well it does on each platform. Companies can use data to help guide the optimisation process. Techniques like A/B testing can help you assess the optimal content strategy for each platform. For reference, this is the email marketing performance template that the OtterHalf team uses to track and optimise email campaigns using A/B testing — available free for download here.
Step 6: Implement your plan
To make sure our strategic marketing plans work well, we need to stick to our planned schedule for running marketing campaigns and strategies. It's essential to work together with different teams so that our approach is organised and coordinated.
For example, let's think about launching a content marketing campaign for a new product. We'll create content around the product and share it on platforms like blogs, social media, online ads, and distribute it via press releases to reach our target audience. To keep the messaging consistent, we'll make sure that the content that the influencers or partners promote during the same period is aligned with our campaign messaging. By working together and by having the various channels promote the same campaign, our marketing efforts will be more cohesive and impactful, sending a clearer brand message to the people we want to reach.
Step 7: Set up success-measuring metrics
Success metrics are integral to strategic marketing. Objective and Key Results (OKRs) or, in some cases, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for each marketing channel help you study how your campaigns are doing. It also helps you understand other aspects of your business such as your website traffic, sales, or how engaged people are on social media.
Regularly compare your results with the industry’s benchmark. For example, a 5% engagement rate on Instagram might not seem like a lot, but that’s the average engagement rate across industries! By setting clear goals, you can see exactly how your marketing strategies are working, helping you make smart choices as you optimise your strategies.
Type of strategic marketing
Knowing the process of running a strategic marketing campaign is just the first step. To take your business to the next level, you’ll need to know and implement diverse forms of strategic marketing to grow your business.
Social media marketing
Social media marketing thrives by harnessing the power of community platforms like Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Instagram to engage your target audience and foster meaningful interactions with them. Social media marketing gives your brand a more informal space to reach your customers through short-form micro-content. Unlike landing pages or long-form blog posts, social media content can easily be consumed by your customers on the go. It also helps to build your brand personality online.
With social media, visual content takes centre stage in your brand’s storytelling. Your business can post short videos, images, or even authentic User Generated Content (UGC) to create trust and credibility with your customers.
Source: buffer.com
“I’ve found that generally speaking, the most popular posts across Facebook can be categorized as Edu-tainment. They are either entertaining or educational. For example, silly GIFs might fall into the entertainment category, while data, how-tos, and infographics fall into the educational category.
The best posts of all tend to have a mix of both entertainment and education and those are the ones I’m constantly on the hunt for on social media.”
Buffer, a social media SaaS platform, exemplifies the impact of effective social media strategies. Instead of posting more frequently, Buffer reduced posting frequency on Facebook by over 50% and prioritised quality content. They focused on sharing “Edu-tainment” content rather than driving website traffic. In the following months, Buffer’s reach on Facebook skyrocketed, surpassing 150,000 people per week, a remarkable increase from 44,000.
Partnership marketing
Partnership marketing involves collaboration between two or more firms, enabling all involved parties to achieve a mutually beneficial outcome by aligning with their respective business goals. When executed effectively, partnerships can serve as a cost-effective strategy to boost your brand’s growth, leveraging each other’s resources for cross-promotional needs.
Source: Partnership Campaign launched by Chope and CapitaLand Malls in 2016
Drawing from our previous experience in strategic partnership, Cassandra, our founder, spearheaded the collaboration between Chope and CapitaLand Malls. At that point in time, CapitaLand Malls recognised that dining was a primary driver for mall visits and sought a food partner with a robust online presence. Concurrently, they aimed to enhance the usage of their newly introduced CapitaStar loyalty app. These objectives aligned well with Chope’s business goals, which aimed to access desirable restaurants associated with CapitaLand Malls.
Eventually, the Chope team launched a few marketing campaigns, one of which is diners’ ability to earn accelerated Chope-Dollars when they book and fulfil their reservations. They can then redeem their Chope-Dollars for STAR$, which is convertible to CapitaVoucher. Through this partnership, Chope managed to enlist sought-after restaurants and also managed to execute co-marketing efforts. This partnership advanced the business objectives of both parties, eventually leading to C31 (CapitaLand Malls’ now-defunct investment arm) investing in Chope’s Series D funding round.
Content marketing
Content marketing is a widely adopted and effective marketing strategy. A whopping 82% of marketers use it to reach their audience through creating blog posts, tutorials, and ebooks. By offering valuable and informative content, businesses can establish themselves as trusted authorities and forge meaningful connections with their audience.
Source: AirBnb’s Neighbourhood Guide
A prime example is AirBnb, which crafted a neighbourhood guide for travellers, resulting in over 10,000 estimated monthly organic traffic and more than 100 referring domains. With the right strategy, content marketing can be a powerful tool that helps build brand visibility, audience engagement, and long-term success.
SEO marketing
Ever done a quick search on Google? You’ll find that certain pages rank higher than others—and it’s not always based on how recently the articles were published. Google works hard to ensure that its top searches are filled with high-quality content that contains the right links and keywords which answer searchers’ queries. The art of ranking in Google’s search engine is known as SEO marketing.
Source: Zapier’s ahrefs Dashboard
Zapier, an automation platform, is a prime example of successful SEO implementation. Through strategic linking, Zapier's blog posts connect to other related posts with automation ideas, and product landing pages. This helps them to target long-tail keywords, enabling the blog to attract a staggering 1.6 million organic visits monthly. Zapier’s blog alone accounts for approximately $3.7 million in traffic value and represents 67.5% of their overall organic traffic.
SEO marketing is often a long-term strategy. Your business will only see results in 6 months or more. That said, once your SEO marketing pays off, you can cut down on the cost of acquiring new customers for your business.
Performance marketing
Performance marketing leverages paid advertising channels like Google Ads and Facebook Ads. Through paid-per-click (PPC) campaigns, performance marketing measures the return on investment (ROI) in business goals such as traffic, sales, and lead generation.
While there are various platforms for PPC campaigns, Google Ads remains one of the most popular channels. As of 2021, Google maintains an astounding 92% global search market share, making it a dominant player in the advertising landscape. With paid advertisements yielding 200% ROI and attracting clicks from 65% of customers, performance marketing can be a powerful and results-driven approach for businesses.
“We saw overall conversions increase by 74% month-over-month after we implemented in-market audiences, which indicates that these were new conversion sources rather than cannibalization from current channels”
Lyft, a ride-sharing company has leveraged Google Ads to create a new campaign and attract in-market audiences. Through harnessing Google data and insights, the company increased conversions by 74% month-over-month.
How strategic marketing can help you?
The list above is not exhaustive, as there are other types of strategies in marketing that companies adopt, such as influencer marketing, email marketing and affiliate marketing. Strategic marketing empowers companies to make informed decisions about their marketing efforts, particularly when resources are limited. By carefully analysing various marketing channels, businesses ensure that marketing resources are optimised, resulting in a higher return on investment.
The OtterHalf team has proven experience building ROI-driven marketing strategies for companies like Foodpanda, Tripadvisor, Atome, and Chope. Discover how our strategic marketing expertise can elevate your business to new heights.