Why you Need a Marketing Strategy

What’s your marketing strategy?

Marketing is an important aspect of any business, from a small family shop to international big box stores. Whether it’s simple word of mouth or targeted commercials during a major sporting event, a business needs to market itself to draw new customers and bring back existing customers.

However, many businesses, especially small to medium-sized ones, don’t have a cohesive marketing strategy. They may be running individual campaigns on different platforms, but without a strategy to guide the efforts, they may be getting poor results, missing audiences, or miscalculating their ROI.

When someone asks you, “What’s your marketing strategy?” and your answer is, “I don’t have one” or “I don’t know,” you are potentially missing results or potential customers.

A compass and measuring tool on a topographic map
What is a marketing strategy?

A marketing strategy, at its core, is a plan of action to increase brand exposure and sell a product or service. Generally, the plan includes a cohesive strategy for a year, broken into quarters, that coordinates the marketing efforts across multiple channels, including traditional media (such as print or outdoor advertising) and digital media (like social media, email marketing, display advertising, and your website, depending on your needs).

The strategy will coordinate content across the various channels, ensuring that every audience receives content that drives the marketing for that period, ideally crafted for each platform and audience. Crafting the content for each platform and audience ensures that audiences that come across your marketing in various channels see a consistent message that is relevant to them, saving you money and time on blanket campaigns that may not be effective on every channel.

Wooden chess figures in their starting positions on the board
Why do I need a marketing strategy?

The biggest reason you need a marketing strategy is to ensure your audience is receiving a consistent message from your business wherever they find you. Whether they hear from you in an email, on a postcard, on Facebook, or on a billboard, you want to ensure they can immediately identify your business.

Additionally, having a marketing strategy helps you identify your best channels for marketing so you can invest your marketing budget more effectively. With a cohesive strategy and robust reporting across channels, you can determine which channels return the most on your investment, or where your audience engages the most with your content. This information is invaluable in making decisions about where to invest your budget, especially when budgets are limited.

Finally, having a marketing strategy with pre-planned content can keep your marketing going and working when things get hectic or urgent issues arise. It’s much easier to adapt a pre-planned piece of marketing than to work on the fly when your mind is focused on other elements than your marketing. The last thing you want is to have all marketing stop because you didn’t have time to think about it! So, by planning ahead, you can avoid missing key opportunities because there was something else on your mind.

A slim laptop sitting on a table with graphs and statistics.
How do I get a marketing strategy?

Give us a call or send us an email. We’ll be happy to discuss where you are currently — either with a strategy or with no strategy — and how fatrabbit CREATIVE can help you plan, develop, and implement a marketing strategy that gets the right message to the right audience in the right channel!

Share this Article

Sign up for our newsletter.

get in touch.