Hi, I’m Peyvand Azadi
a Marcom Manager Digital Marketing Manager

7 Steps to Create a Complete Marketing Strategy in 2023

Creating a marketing strategy is essential to effectively nurture your customers, improve the bottom line at your business, and increase the ROI of your efforts.

A marketing strategy is especially critical if you want to leverage the highest-ROI trends for 2023: short video, influencer marketing, and branded social media. To get powerful results, you must carefully weave both emerging trends and proven strategies into your plan.

Let’s dive into the critical components of a complete marketing strategy in 2023, followed by some examples for inspiration.

A marketing strategy is a detailed, structured plan of a company’s promotional efforts across a wide range of platforms and channels. A marketing strategy typically includes objectives, target audience profiles, content creation steps, key performance indicators, and other components.

Marketing Strategy

A marketing strategy will:

• Align your team to specific goals.
• Help you tie your efforts to business objectives.
• Allow you to identify and test what resonates with your target audience.
• Empower you to capitalize on emerging trends.

The last one is especially important for this upcoming year. Keeping up with marketing trends is important for your strategy, but could be a full-time job.

Why? Because in one year alone, we’ve seen a major shift to short-form video content; the rise and fall of new platforms (looking at you, Meta); and the continuing impact of the global pandemic. In short, what worked for your marketing strategy in the past might not fly today.

To succeed in the fast-paced marketing world — and maintain a sense of relevance with your audience — it’s vital to stay ahead of the curve.

To help ease some of that uncertainty, we’ve going to show you step-by-step how to create a marketing strategy that leaves no stone unturned. But first, let’s go over the individual components that make up a strong marketing strategy.

What does Performance Marketing mean exactly?

As it is clear from the name of this model, this type of marketing and advertising processes is dependent on the performance and results obtained. Performance marketing takes place in the online world where the results are fully measurable and the advertiser will only pay for the desired results. Sometimes you are looking for specific sales from your advertising and marketing, and sometimes you want your application to reach a significant number of installs. For this reason, the intended performance is measured to see how much you have been able to achieve the desired results.

Many companies have forgotten they sell to actual people. Humans care about the entire experience, not just the marketing or sales or service. To really win in the modern age, you must solve for humans.

Dharmesh Shah, CTO & Co-Founder, HubSpot

Performance marketing is applicable to all businesses that are present online and the results of their advertising programs can be measured. Small and large businesses can use this method depending on their desired goals to be more visible, increase their sales or achieve other defined results. On the other hand, sites that can guarantee future results due to their visits or high capabilities will also benefit the most from performance marketing.

Who is the target of pragmatic marketing?

If you want to achieve the desired results, especially more sales, the best audience for actionable marketing is the people who spend the most time on the Internet and spend more time online. Usually, many businesses go to performance marketing; Because the fee is paid after reaching the goal. But you should be careful, based on the available information, go to the people who are exactly your target audience and there is a higher probability that your goals will be achieved with their help.

Who is the target of pragmatic marketing?

• An impression is the number of times your ad is shown. If you want a certain number, you can pay when this number of impressions is achieved and the target audience sees your ads. In this case, only brand awareness is important for you.
• Sometimes the click rate and the number of clicks are important to you, and simply displaying ads is not enough. So you pay for a certain number of clicks.
• User participation is very important. Naturally, the more they interact with you and your ads, the more valuable your marketing plan will be. So try to increase audience participation. Of course, this amount is calculated differently in different platforms.
• It’s not enough to just get a few leads, it’s important to see how many of them are high-quality and can turn into leads. Then you try to convert leads into buyers. The higher the number of leads generated and the higher the quality, the higher the chance of increasing the conversion rate.
• This mode is actually the main model that managers and marketers are looking for. In this system, the cost is based on a certain amount of sales, and it is undoubtedly more expensive than other models.
• Sometimes you want to take a specific action. Apart from selling, this action can be registering for an event, downloading an application, or filling out a form.

How to Create a Sales Plan?

Do you have a sales plan? Entrepreneurs, sales executives, and sales managers all benefit from writing sales plans — whether for their business, department, or team. You must know where you’re going before you can hit your key targets, and from there, you must break down the strategies and tactics you’ll use to do it.

A sales plan lays out your objectives, high-level tactics, target audience, and potential obstacles. It’s like a traditional business plan but focuses specifically on your sales strategy. A business plan lays out your goals — a sales plan describes exactly how you’ll make those happen.

Sales plans often include information about the business’ target customers, revenue goals, team structure, and the strategies and resources necessary for achieving its targets.

What are the goals of an effective sales plan?

The purpose of your company’s sales plan is to:

Communicate your company’s goals and objectives.

Provide strategic direction.

Outline roles and responsibilities.

Monitor your sales team’s progress.

Monitor your sales team’s progress.

You can’t expect your sales team to work well if they don’t know your company’s goals and objectives. It is necessary to make sure the goals are clear and realistic. As they change over time, ensure you regularly communicate your strategy to the entire team.

Provide strategic direction.

A sales strategy is vital to selling your products or services. To execute your plan, your company needs to provide direction. Should your employees focus on email conversions versus social media conversions this quarter? Are you boosting your efforts on LinkedIn instead of Facebook? Your business needs to provide your team with guidance to be effective.

Outline roles and responsibilities.

Your company’s sales plan should outline the roles and responsibilities for your sales team and leadership. The benefits of this include efficient task delegation, improved collaboration, overlap reduction, and increased accountability.

Monitor your sales team’s progress.

Your sales team is the driving force behind your strategy. If they do well, so does the company. Unfortunately, the alternative is also correct. Monitoring your team’s progress on organizational goals allows you to manage your objectives. It ensures you have the people and tools in place to be successful.

Tips for Creating an Effective Sales Plan

We’ve gone over what you should include in a sales plan, including some examples and mockups.

Learn some tips and tricks for creating a sales plan that helps you hit target numbers and exceed your higher-ups’ expectations.

• Use industry trends to strengthen your plan. When presenting your sales plan to a stakeholder, use industry trends to highlight why your plan will be effective.
• Specify the technology you’ll use to track success. You can do this for internal reference or let stakeholders know how you’ll measure success. Some tools you can consider include CRM and dashboard software.
• Support your budget proposal with hard facts and data. If you’re creating a budget as a part of your plan, support it with previous performance data and sales forecasts.
• Create different plans for each team. If you create a sales plan for business development, inbound sales, outbound sales, field sales, and so forth, you can get even more granular and specific in your goals and KPIs.
• Get marketing’s input. Marketing and sales alignment is critical for the success of your sales plan. The more input you have from marketing, the more you can align your lead generation, prospecting, and nurturing efforts.
• Talk with your sales reps to understand their challenges. It might be easy to get lost in numbers and forecasts. But it’s important to know your sales representative’s day-to-day to understand what will and will not prove effective or feasible.
• Complete an in-depth competitive analysis. You must know what the competition is doing well to create a plan that nudges your company in that direction.