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The new year is here, with all of the things that come along with it. A new year means looking back, and we hope that, in your case, you’re looking back at a year of success. It also means looking ahead and making plans to ensure that this time next year finds you at the end of a year of growth for your business.

If you haven’t done so already, now is the time to begin building out your marketing strategy for the year. It’s an involved process that requires dedicating some of your time and your team’s time. Throughout the year, you’ll be amazed at how much easier marketing your business is when everyone works off of one thorough but flexible strategy document.

In this article, we explain the importance of a marketing strategy and give you a very basic rundown of the essential steps to building a plan to guide your marketing through 2025!

Why Do You Need a Marketing Strategy?

Too often, businesses handle their marketing reactively:

  • Sales decrease, so there’s a frantic rush to “improve the marketing.”
  • A new trend emerges, and there’s a sudden push to integrate it ASAP.
  • A product line changes, and there’s a sudden need for marketing collateral.

Sometimes, reactive marketing is required. But it’s no way to run a business on a day-to-day basis. When your marketing efforts aren’t coordinated, they’re not effective. When they aren’t built to address specific business goals, they’re rudderless and can’t be effectively evaluated. And when they’re not unified under one singular strategy, different team members can end up working in different directions.

Your marketing strategy addresses all of these issues and more. Your strategy will:

  • Provide direction for your decision-making throughout the year
  • Allow you to anticipate changes in your marketing needs and be proactive instead of reactive
  • Link your entire marketing mix to a set of SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely) business goals
  • Provide a single source of truth for your team in making small, individual marketing-related decisions
  • Allow you to actively assess and evaluate your efforts in unequivocal, data-driven terms

How to Build a Marketing Strategy

This article just scratches the surface. For a more detailed description of the strategizing process, you should check out our Definitive Guide to Creating a Marketing Plan.

Now that you understand its importance, you need to start building a plan. While the process will likely be slightly different for each company, the bones of all marketing plans are roughly the same, and using these steps as a guideline is a great starting point.

Step 1: Evaluate Past Performance

So, how did 2024 treat you? Was your marketing effective? Did you hit sales goals? Did you see new customers coming through the door? Were your offerings getting good reviews online? Do people know what your business is and what you do?

The first step in planning where you’re going is to look at where you’ve been. Look at your business during the past year, and ask yourself and your team questions such as:

  • How did our marketing help our business last year?
  • How did our marketing fall short last year?
  • Do our goals drive our marketing?
  • What kinds of marketing were effective?
  • How has our audience changed over the previous 12 months?
  • How has our business changed over the previous 12 months?

Once you have answers to these questions about last year, it’s time to set goals for this year.

Step 2: Establish Goals

This step starts with one question: where do you want your business to be in 12 months?

Once you have that answer, you can start creating goals. Establish a list of goals for the coming year, making sure that each one is SMART:

  • “Increase sales” is not specific, but “Increase sales of our Spring Fashions line” is.
  • Measurable: Your goals should include a quantifiable, tangible definition of success, such as “Increase sales of our Spring Fashions line by 5%.”
  • Attainable: A goal that’s too ambitious won’t inspire your team; it will demoralize them. Saying that you’ll increase sales by 150% usually isn’t possible, and when the numbers fail to materialize, you and your team will feel defeated.
  • Relevant: “Adopting more stray pets” is an admirable goal but has nothing to do with running a boutique. Keep your goals relevant to your business’s overall growth strategy.
  • Timely: Goals need a deadline. If you plan to increase sales by 5% by some undefined time in the future, you never reach a stop point that forces you to evaluate progress. Goals without a deadline are un-measurable.

Step 3: Strategize

You should now have a list of goals that your marketing efforts need to address. In this step of the process, you’ll connect each one of those goals to a specific marketing tactic and messaging strategy. For instance, a goal to increase sales of men’s sneakers in 2025 might include:

  • Email marketing to existing male customers, heavily promoting new and stylish offerings and discounts on sneakers.
  • Digital ads for new styles targeted specifically at fashion-aware men in the 18-35 demographic.
  • Geofencing campaigns should be centered around places your target audience frequents, such as gyms, sports venues, outdoorsy locations, and others.

Go through your list of goals carefully, and think about what might help move the needle. Bring in fresh eyes on occasion to help you think laterally about specific goals and introduce concepts you might not have thought of.

Your strategy should include, at the very least, a general message for each specific marketing project, a timeline for implementation and evaluation, any platform or technical details, and metrics that will define the project’s success or failure.

Step 4: Cascade

Once you have your plan written down, it’s time to update the whole team. Failure to communicate your strategy internally is a recipe for disaster and a near guarantee that something will be missed or go awry.

By bringing your team on board now, before plans start going into effect, you’re giving them buy-in on the entire strategy. This step helps improve their internal consistency when working on marketing projects and also gives them a chance to be active participants in the process. You’ll be amazed at the kinds of ideas and feedback that can come when you begin communicating top-level goals to everyone on the team.

During this conversation, it’s essential to set expectations and roles for the team in the coming year. Make sure everyone knows their part in growing the business and how they will be held accountable for their work. It’s also important to let them know that they have a voice and that you’re relying on them to bring marketing concerns and ideas to your attention.

Step 5: Implement and Evaluate

With your goal built and cascaded to your team, it’s time to get moving. Throughout the year, your marketing plan will help guide not only your marketing decisions but also your overall business decisions. Any time you’re faced with a decision regarding your marketing or otherwise, you can start with one question: which option is going to help us best meet our goals? When you start with that in mind, the choice becomes a lot easier.

It’s also time to start assessing your work. This step is where the “Measurable” and “Timely” qualities of your goals come into play. Since each goal has a specific end date, you’ll either have accomplished the goal, made some progress, or not made progress by the time it expires. Regardless of the outcome, look back at the specific marketing efforts that supported that goal and evaluate their effectiveness.

Your click-through rates may show that your digital ads weren’t compelling enough. Or, a sales number that’s through the roof combined with a sky-high conversion rate means that your social ads are clearly making an impression.

When you make these evaluations, it helps you determine what’s working and what isn’t. The things that are working can become the basis for your next round of marketing; the ones that aren’t can be revisited and pivoted to improve performance. Remember, your strategy should be flexible to allow for shifts when conditions demand them.

It Only Seems Complex Because It Is – But We Can Help

Even in a short, summary format, the process of building out a marketing strategy can seem overwhelming. For small operations that are already operating on razor-thin staff time margins, it may even seem like an impossibility.

That’s what we’re here for. If you need help turning your business realities into an effective plan for your business future, you need a marketing partner who can research and develop a strategy that works for you. And we’re those partners. Our marketing strategies have helped grow companies of every size in every vertical since 2008. And our services don’t stop there – once we have your strategy built, we’re ready to finish the job, implementing the best marketing practices and producing high-quality, high-impact marketing collateral for your entire business.

Call 478-621-4491 or contact one of our business development managers today, and let us get you ready to grow in 2025!

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