Using Marketing Strategy As Your Blueprint for Success

Strategy involves making careful choices regarding what your company does or doesn’t do, where and how you will compete, and who you’re trying to win. Unfortunately, we regularly see strains in the marketing strategy before it even gets out the door. Often, the teams in charge of product development, sales, marketing, distribution networks, and customer success aren’t aligned on a shared definition of success. Marketing is trying to increase brand recognition or drive lead generation, while sales is trying to close deals before the end of the month; and the distribution team is trying to forecast how increased fuel prices will impact shipping costs. It doesn’t work. 

The key is to get all teams to align on the marketing strategy and core objectives early in the process. That means involving decision-makers and stakeholders from revenue operations and revenue enablement to jointly evaluate where and how your business can create a sustainable advantage in-market. Only when each team feels like they are able to provide input and actively contribute to the plan and are accountable for its success do we see effective marketing strategies get off the ground. 

Here’s a quick example: Let’s say you’re a heavy equipment manufacturer in a highly competitive market. Your alignment framework might look something like this: 

• Your business goal: Drive growth by offering a best-in-class dealer network to win high-value customers that seek a differentiated ownership experience.
• Strategic initiatives to support your goal: Dealer recruitment, training, in-store experience programs, co-op marketing support and incentives, sales enablement tools, local listing management, performance measurement, and much more.
• Teams who will make this strategy a success: Field team, dealer sales reps, internal sales team, marketing team, digital team, analytics team, and customer success team. 

In determining specific tactics to pursue, this cross-functional team can assess which activities will make the biggest impact on the customer experience and where they can amplify current strengths or address weaknesses. Together the team maps the marketing strategy they’ll follow. 

When you’re ready to tee up your next marketing strategy — and you have the key team members at the table — follow this blueprint to position your business for success.

Step 1: Define and align on target audience segments

Your target audience comes first. Begin by defining (or revisiting) your decisions around audience segmentation and targeting. The hard reality is that you cannot successfully target everyone, and you will find more success by tailoring to a specific set of audience needs. 

With your cross-functional team, evaluate each segment's potential and commercial attractiveness and clarify who you want to win with. This might be based on segment growth, volume, profitability, product usage, sales cycle length, or competitive position. Marketing and sales should have complete alignment on these identified target audiences before you roll out your integrated marketing strategy. 

After you’ve prioritized audiences, develop buyer journeys and personas. These are critical references that enable the creation of audience-centric go-to-market plans. Don’t let perfection get in the way of progress. Audience insights can be collected quickly to develop these references by evaluating existing research reports, interviewing sales reps and customers, and analyzing first-party data. AI has also become a consistently reliable source for developing personas, but as always, make sure you have a human review to ensure accuracy. 

Step 2: Formulate a go-to-market strategy to attract, develop, and retain target customers 

Once you have defined the audience, you’re ready to outline core strategies for how to attract, develop, and retain these target customers. Think of these in three buckets: 

• Acquisition activities are related to identifying, engaging, and converting the right prospects.
• Development activities involve strategies to increase customer share of wallet, cross-selling, or upselling.
• Retention is driven by customer satisfaction and identifying opportunities to add value to reduce churn. 

Remember: Don’t send your marketing team off into a bunker to determine these strategies on their own. Your product team may have valuable input into how to upsell existing customers. Your sales team certainly has thoughts on identifying prospects. Your customer success team would love to discuss increasing customer satisfaction. In other words, build the blueprint together. 

Step 3: Build the action plan

Guided by the marketing strategy, it’s time to turn to tactics. In the dozens of marketing planning sessions I run each year, this is often where teams have the most fun. Using your business objectives and marketing strategy scaffolding, get creative with the specific activities, campaigns, and initiatives that will bring the strategy to life across the buyer journey and entice your target audience segment. 

By following this well-structured approach, you can navigate the complexities of the modern marketing landscape, make informed decisions, and set your business up for success in a highly competitive market.

When the cross-functional team builds the marketing strategy together, allocating resources to the right places will be much easier. Don’t let the fear of getting it wrong prevent you from trying this approach to building a full-funnel marketing strategy. If your marketing and sales teams haven’t gone through this process together before, it may take some time to get into a groove. But you will quickly see the value of building the blueprint together, and in no time it will be the thing these teams look forward to the most each year.