Marketing Strategy Consultant

Marketing strategy best practices are evolving at a rapid rate. The rise of digital marketing has transformed the way businesses most effectively reach their audience, creating lead generation opportunities that were never possible with traditional marketing methods. The most impactful digital channels are constantly shifting, making it critical to stay on top of these trends as they change over time. In addition, the wealth of data provided by digital marketing makes it easier than ever to objectively evaluate the effectiveness of your efforts in order to make the adjustments necessary to maximize the ROI on your efforts.

With so many different pieces to the marketing puzzle, it’s critical to establish a cohesive strategy that guides your efforts and have this strategy implemented by an experienced professional who can set your business up for success. More than ever before, a marketing strategy consultant is essential to achieve your marketing goals.

Webolutions is a marketing strategy agency with nearly three decades of experience working with businesses of all sizes in a wide range of industries. We offer comprehensive marketing strategy services to ensure your campaign aligns with your business goals and helps you achieve your desired growth over time.

What Is Marketing Strategy Consulting?

Marketing strategy consulting is focused on developing the plan for your marketing efforts. It takes a holistic approach that evaluates all potential marketing channels at your disposal to arrive at the right combination of tactics to achieve your desired goals.

Working with a marketing strategy agency will provide your business with a variety of benefits, including:

• Specialized knowledge in a wide range of marketing tactics, ensuring your strategy includes the most effective approaches to address your specific needs and reach your target audience
• Objective, third-party assessments of your existing strategy and efforts that aren’t clouded by the views of internal stakeholders who may be too intimately involved in the current process to objectively assess performance
• Infusion of new ideas rooted in the latest marketing best practices
• Development of a cohesive, long-term strategy intended to not only drive results in the moment, but position your business for continued growth several years down the road
• Customized recommendations based on the unique opportunities and challenges associated with your specific business and industry
• Data-driven approach that ensures all recommendations are based on established performance metrics and improves your ability to maximize the ROI on your marketing efforts

Establishing a Strong Brand Identity

In order to effectively market your business, you must first establish a strong brand identity. Your brand consists of a group of positive associations that connect your business and your core values with the moments of happiness in people’s lives. Your brand creates an emotional connection with your audience that goes beyond logic, product attributes or the reasons why your company may be better than your competitors. It forges deep connections and experiences that help define your business in the eyes of your audience.

There are several reasons why establishing a strong brand identity is critical to both the success of your marketing efforts and your ability to achieve sustained business growth over time:

• It clearly differentiates your experiences compared with those offered by your competitors
• It develops long-lasting relationships built on credibility and trust
• It elevates your reputation in the eyes of your audience even before they have experienced your offering
• It shifts the focus of your audience from the price of your offering to your overall brand experience, making price less important in their decision making process
• It delivers a consistent look, feel, tone and experience that your audience immediately recognizes

Once you’ve established your brand identity, you can craft a marketing strategy around your brand, ensuring that all your marketing efforts accurately convey your brand and connect with your audience.

Knowing Your Target Audience

The goal of your marketing efforts is to generate more leads that you can convert into paying customers/clients. But in order to generate these leads, you must first connect with the people most likely to need your products/services. Therefore, knowing your target audience is critical to crafting an effective marketing strategy.

Knowing your target audience will allow you to:

• Focus your marketing efforts and budget on the people who are most likely to become customers
• Understand the pain points of people in need of your products/services and craft the most effective messaging to convince them to choose you over your competitors
• Cultivate a user experience that resonates with the people seeking your products/services
• Identify the channels that are most likely to reach the people searching for your products/services

Setting Clear, Attainable Goals

An effective marketing strategy must always be goal oriented. Before you can create your strategy, you must first establish the goals you’re trying to achieve. These goals should be very clear so your entire team understands them, and they should also be attainable. While aggressive goals can be a good way to push your team to reach its potential, you want to avoid setting the bar so high that your goals become unrealistic and set your team up for failure.

When setting your marketing goals, make sure they are SMART:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

Defining these parameters will help your team understand what needs to be accomplished, and it will help you determine the correct metrics to measure the success of your efforts. You can then craft a marketing strategy that aligns with your goals, ensuring that your efforts help you achieve your desired outcome.

Making Data-Driven Decisions

One of the greatest benefits of digital marketing compared with traditional marketing methods is that you’re able to generate an enormous amount of data. This data can tell you about:

• The types of messaging and calls to action (CTAs) that resonate the best with your audience
• Which marketing channels generate the most leads
• Which of your current efforts are performing the best, and which aren’t delivering results
• Changes in the performance of your marketing campaigns over time, allowing you to identify important trends which can guide future efforts

You can then use this data to refine your marketing strategy over time so that you’re able to improve your ROI, generate more leads and more effectively achieve your goals.

Making Your Website the Foundation of Your Marketing Efforts

People have become increasingly reliant on the internet to learn about the products and services they need, and to evaluate which provider to choose. In most instances, the first step in a person’s purchasing decision is to research options online. Therefore, it’s no longer enough to have a website; your website must now be the foundation of your marketing efforts.

When you have a strong business website that is optimized for search engines and conversions, you’ll be able to generate more leads and grow your business faster. Your website will also improve the effectiveness of your other marketing efforts since you can use these other channels to drive traffic to your website, where you’ve crafted an engaging user experience that will address the needs of your audience.

Optimizing Multiple Marketing Channels

The success of your marketing strategy will hinge on your ability to capture the attention of your audience in the places where they’re seeking information about the types of products/services you offer. This often requires you to implement a strategy that leverages multiple marketing channels, especially if you have several different target audiences with different needs and behaviors.

Keep in mind that an effective marketing strategy doesn’t try to optimize every marketing channel available. This will most likely water down your results and prevent you from maximizing the ROI on your marketing efforts. Instead, an effective marketing strategy will identify the core channels that will deliver the best results for your budget and leverage these channels to grow your business. Data analysis plays a critical role in identifying the right channels to focus on.

Marketing Strategy FAQs

Why do I need a formal marketing strategy?

A formal strategy provides a concrete roadmap outlining your marketing goals and the steps that need to be taken to achieve them. This not only gives your marketing efforts greater focus, but it also ensures all stakeholders are aligned on your goals and the plan being implemented. It also helps each team member understand the role they play in achieving your marketing goals.

In addition, creating a formal strategy provides a framework for how you will measure success, including the metrics being used and the benchmarks that need to be met for success. Generating performance intelligence data is critical to your ability to evaluate the effectiveness of your efforts and to make the adjustments necessary to improve.

What should my marketing strategy cover?

An effective marketing strategy should contain:

• A brief mission statement
• A summary of your previous year’s performance
• Short- and long-term financial goals (typically for the next year and for a three-to-five-year period)
• An overview of the current trends and conditions impacting your market
• Your marketing goals for the current year and beyond
• A description of your target market, including your most important customer segments
• Your unique selling proposition (USP) and the brand messaging that will be conveyed in your marketing communications
• The components of your strategy (the specific channels and tactics you’ll leverage to achieve your marketing goals)
• Your overall marketing budget as well as specific budgets for each component of your strategy
• ROI forecasting
• Detailed plans and schedules for the specific tasks each team member will be responsible for and the timelines for completion of these tasks

How often should I review and update my marketing strategy?

It’s important to constantly review your performance intelligence data to monitor the success of your efforts. This should be done on a monthly basis so that small adjustments to your plan can be made to improve your results.

In addition, you should conduct an in-depth review of your marketing strategy every year as part of your annual planning. This will provide an opportunity to identify:

• Which aspects of your plan are delivering the best ROI
• Which aspects aren’t delivering the results necessary to justify their continued implementation moving forward
• Any changes in your business and your overarching goals that may impact your marketing strategy moving forward
• Any changes in the market which may require you to adjust your strategy to remain competitive
• Any new opportunities that may be worth pursuing over the next year

This annual review will form the basis of the updated marketing strategy you develop and implement in the following year.

How should I track the success of my marketing efforts?

It’s critical to track and measure the effectiveness of all your marketing efforts. The good news is that most digital marketing channels provide robust analytics tools that will help you evaluate the success metrics you established in your marketing strategy.

Monitoring your analytics data on an ongoing basis will help you discover which aspects of your plan are delivering the best ROI and which are having a more limited impact. This will help you determine which aspects of your plan should receive the bulk of your budget and time investment moving forward.

What are the common pitfalls to avoid when creating a marketing strategy?

Common pitfalls that may impact the success of your marketing strategy include:

• Poor time budgeting – Most of your efforts will take longer to implement than you may expect. When budgeting the time associated with each task, build in more time than you think may be required.
• Impatience with results – Similarly, it often takes time for the tactics you implement to generate results. Make sure to be patient when tracking performance and don’t pivot before your efforts have the time necessary to deliver their intended results.
• Lack of flexibility – Even the best thought out strategies may not go according to plan. It’s important to build flexibility into your strategy so that you can pivot as necessary if market forces change, internal factors in your business change, or your data indicates that an adjustment to your strategy may deliver a better outcome.
• Lack of consistent messaging – For your marketing efforts to achieve maximum impact, it’s critical that you convey consistent brand messaging throughout all your marketing communications. This messaging needs to be clearly outlined in your strategy, and you should detail the ways in which you plan to convey it on each channel.
• Focusing your time and budget on the wrong items – Not every aspect of your marketing strategy will be equally effective and deliver the same ROI. Make sure you focus the bulk of your resources on the components of your strategy that will deliver maximum impact.
• Spreading yourself too thin – There are so many different marketing channels you can utilize that it may be tempting to take a broad approach that leverages each one. However, this will often prevent you from achieving maximum impact. It’s more effective to streamline your strategy and focus on the most critical items that will achieve your goals.

Why Choose Webolutions as Your Marketing Strategy Consultant

Webolutions has been Denver’s top marketing strategy agency since 1994. During this time, we’ve helped companies of all sizes in a wide range of industries develop and implement effective digital marketing plans that generate more leads and drive revenue. We’re consistently recognized by Clutch as one of the top B2B companies in Denver, and the Denver Business Journal ranked us as a top digital marketing company in 2022.

Our data-driven, holistic approach to marketing strategy ensures your plan will focus on the channels and methods that will maximize your lead generation potential and deliver the best ROI on your efforts. In addition, we’ll constantly monitor your results after implementing your plan and will leverage the performance data to make any adjustments that will improve your results.

You also benefit from our transformational Intrinsic Multiplier™ Approach which helps you grow your business faster, smarter and easier. This exclusive approach has been designed and refined based on 30 years of experience working with hundreds of companies, allowing us to deliver extreme marketplace success and highly relevant competitive differentiation based on your core values, purpose, mission, specific set of strengths and unique culture.

Contact us today to schedule a consultation. Webolutions provides marketing strategy services to clients nationwide from our offices in Denver, Colorado.