Advertising strategy

An advertising strategy can help make your brand better. There are plenty of resources for creating a marketing strategy, and a good one will explain all the details of what your products are, who your potential customers are, and how you’ll reach them.

A proper marketing or advertising strategy will outline all three aspects for your business, and it could also address market research on your brand’s competitors or related companies. Having a marketing strategy will help you answer the question of what to do first: For example, should you begin by raising awareness of your brand’s message, or do you have existing audiences you want to introduce to a new product? Your marketing strategy could also help raise awareness of the pain points customers face and how your brand can help resolve them. Once you have a clear vision of your marketing goals, you can begin achieving them and measuring your progress every step of the way.

Marketing plans fall within marketing strategies. The marketing strategy is the big-picture view of a company’s goals for potential customers, and marketing plans fall within the strategy as smaller steps for achieving these goals. For example, a touchpoint in a marketing strategy would be to expand reach, and an effective marketing plan would outline how to utilize social media to increase reach by a certain percent as an initial goal.

Marketing strategies provide an overarching view of your brand, but if you want a more specific option, an adaptation marketing strategy is one that adjusts your brand’s marketing to steer it toward a new goal. Adaptive marketing considers the specific needs of audiences and custom tailors your ads and content marketing toward them, and an adaptation marketing strategy can help hone in on the specific goal you want to achieve. For example, brands looking to reach new demographics would use an adaptation marketing strategy to outline their updates, or acquired brands may use an adaptation marketing strategy to become integrated within their parent company.

A go-to-market strategy falls within a marketing strategy. It’s a plan that outlines the steps from ideation to launch of new products or services for your brand. Required elements of a go-to-market strategy include planning, of course, to outline how it fits within your brand’s overall strategy. It should also include competitor analysis, and it can include both internal and external resources, such as distribution partners. Naturally, different products or services will have different go-to-market plans, but all should fall beneath the goals outlined in your market strategy.

A market penetration strategy illustrates a plan to integrate your brand or products into an existing market. Initial research for a market penetration strategy should try to assess the areas of opportunity for your brand, and then it should outline the steps to both start and maintain that growth. Examples of market penetration strategies would include brands adjusting their prices based on demand or updating products based on gaps where there are consumer needs.

An effective marketing strategy should address all channels your brand plans to utilize to reach audiences. That could include in-store channels as well as digital content marketing channels such as apps, email marketing, social media, video advertising, display advertising, and digital advertising. Each of those could have their own strategy, as well, and specific tactics assigned to each to fully optimize them. For example, online news publications can create a content marketing strategy that addresses email campaigns, social media shares of blog posts, and external content collaborations as well. You don’t need to only provide physical products; marketing strategies can apply to a wide variety of companies and customers.

It could also help to map out a plan for omnichannel marketing, which is marketing to all available channels, or for multichannel marketing, which is a marketing strategy aimed at more than one channel. These two types of marketing strategies include the channels within your overall marketing strategy and are organizational descriptors.

Here are four steps to get started with creating the template for a marketing strategy for your brand.

Marketing strategies can cover a wide variety of products and content, but here are just a few examples of how brands in specific industries can use a marketing strategy to achieve success.