The Value of Marketing Strategy

Did you know marketers who document their strategy are 414% more likely to report success than those who don’t? 

That finding from CoSchedule reinforces something many businesses learn the hard way: doing more marketing does not necessarily produce better marketing.

Companies often jump directly into tactics. They redesign a website, launch ads, post on social media, start an email campaign or invest in SEO. Each may be worthwhile, but without a clear marketing strategy connecting those activities to business goals and target markets, they can quickly become a collection of disconnected efforts.

A strong marketing strategy provides the research, direction and priorities needed to decide what to do, what not to do and how everything should work together.

Key Points

• Strategy needs to come before tactics.
• Research replaces assumptions with evidence..
• Strategy creates focus.
• Implementation tactics turn strategy into results. 
• Measurement improves the strategy.
• Strategy should evolve with the business.
• Good strategy creates organizational alignment.

Table of Contents

• What Is a Marketing Strategy?
• Why Marketing Without Strategy Gets Expensive
• Research Should Come Before Recommendations
• Strategy Creates Focus
• Strategy Must Connect to Execution
• Measurement Makes Strategy Better
• When Should You Revisit Your Marketing Strategy?
• The Bottom Line

What is a Marketing Strategy?

A marketing strategy is the framework that connects your business goals with the customers you want to reach and the marketing activities most likely to influence them.

It should answer fundamental questions:

• What are we trying to accomplish?
• Who are our best customers and prospects?
• What matters most to those audiences?
• How are competitors positioning themselves?
• What makes us meaningfully different from competitors?
• Which messages should we communicate?
• Which marketing channels deserve our attention and investment?
• How will we measure success?

Without those answers, marketing decisions tend to be based on assumptions, habits, or whatever perceived opportunity happens to appear next.

Why Marketing Without Strategy is Expensive

One of the biggest risks of operating without a marketing strategy isn't doing nothing. It's doing too many things without knowing why you're doing them.

That can mean investing in social media because competitors are there, buying pricey advertising without clearly defining the audience or conversion path, producing content without knowing which customer questions it should answer, or rebuilding a website without understanding how prospects actually make buying decisions.

Individually, none of these tactics is necessarily wrong. The problem is that there is no framework for deciding whether they are right for your business. They can each make incremental gains and move the needle slightly, but not nearly as much as coordinating efforts behind a research driven strategy with comprehensive marketing campaigns.

Strategy creates that framework and gives leadership a way to prioritize limited time, people, and budget.

Strategy Creates Focus and Acts as a Guide

Creative marketing teams rarely suffer from a shortage of ideas. The real challenge is knowing which ideas deserve time, budget, and attention.

A documented marketing strategy serves as a guide. It connects business goals, audience needs, positioning, messaging, and marketing priorities so every effort moves the company in the same direction. It does not limit creativity. It gives creativity a purpose.

This is the thinking behind Hydrate’s Strategy First Growth Roadmap. Before selecting tactics, we establish where the business wants to go, who it needs to reach, what it needs to communicate, and which opportunities are most likely to support growth.

Instead of asking, Should we be on TikTok? or Should we start a podcast?, the team can ask more useful questions:

Does this support our strategy and move us closer to our business objectives? Where does our target market go for information?

That filter makes it easier to pursue strong ideas, improve promising ones, and set aside distractions. Knowing what not to do can be just as valuable as identifying the next marketing initiative.

Strategy Must Connect to Execution

This is where many strategic plans fall apart.

A thoughtful marketing strategy that ends as a presentation or document sitting on a shelf has limited value. Academic research published in the Journal of Business Research highlights just how persistent this problem is, noting that fewer than one-third of strategy executions are viewed as successful.

The bridge between strategy and results is a detailed marketing plan and implementation strategy.

For example, our approach at Hydrate is to follow research-based strategy with specific processes, schedules and responsibilities for executing the tactics that support it. The strategic recommendation might be to increase visibility among a particular audience, but the implementation plan determines exactly how that happens.

That can include:

• Campaign priorities
• Content calendars
• Advertising schedules
• SEO initiatives
• Email and lead-nurturing programs
• Sales enablement activities
• Responsibilities and deadlines
• Budgets
• KPIs and reporting schedules

Strategy determines where you're going. The marketing plan determines how you're going to get there.

You need both.

Measurement Makes Strategy Better

A marketing strategy should not be treated as a prediction of exactly what will happen.

It is an informed hypothesis about the best way to achieve specific business objectives. Execution generates data, and that data should continuously improve the strategy.

The metrics that matter will depend on the goals. They might include qualified leads, conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, organic search visibility, engagement, pipeline contribution, retention or revenue.

The important question isn't simply, How did our marketing perform?

It's What did we learn, and what should we do differently because of it?

 is broken, but because the business has reached a point where it's ready to raise the bar.

When Should You Revisit Your Marketing Strategy?

Strategy should provide consistency without becoming rigid.

Review it periodically and whenever something meaningful changes within the business or marketplace, such as:

• Entering a new market
• Launching a product or service
• Completing a merger or acquisition
• Changing your brand positioning
• Experiencing rapid growth
• Seeing customer behavior change
• Encountering new competitors
• Seeing marketing performance plateau

The objective isn't to continually reinvent the strategy. It's to make sure your assumptions still match reality.

The Bottom Line

Marketing has become more complex. Companies now have more channels, more technology, more data and more ways to reach customers than ever before.

That makes strategy more important, not less.

A strong marketing strategy turns research into priorities, priorities into tactics and tactics into measurable activity. It helps organizations stop asking, What marketing should we do next? and start asking a much better question:

What should we do next to accomplish the goals we've already agreed matter most?

That's the real value of marketing strategy.