Implement Marketing Strategy

The marketing strategy guides your business decisions to achieve goals. Once you have defined your vision, business goals and target audience, you can use the action plan to guide you throughout the year.

Communicating roles and responsibilities in marketing strategies to everyone involved, ensures that all staff and stakeholders involved in the marketing strategy have a clear understanding of their roles and responsibilities and therefore a better chance of achieving set goals. To communicate roles and responsibilities to those involved you need to:

• Provide a clear description of the responsibilities for each role
• Issue KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to ensure all team members are clear on the expected outcomes
• Develop a communication plan that outlines how information, data and knowledge will be communicated and what communication methods will be used (emails, meetings, training sessions etc).

To create a winning marketing plan, you should:

• Take each outcome goal that requires marketing and analyse what you will need to do to achieve that goal
• Break it into two-week segments to focus on what needs to be done in a shorter, manageable timeframe
• Get feedback every two weeks. It enables you to pivot and move in another direction if things are not going as planned. Two weeks might be too frequent for many businesses; therefore, you should use a hierarchy that will help you break down what needs to be done.

There are eight steps when implementing the marketing strategy:

1. Set the right expectations upfront
2. Build the team and secure resources
3. Communicate the strategy
4. Build the timeline and tasks
5. Set up a dashboard for tracking the success
6. Monitor and check-in regularly
7. Be willing to adapt
8. Communicate results and celebrate success.

Further Reading

Visit Click, 2021 to read and develop your understanding of the recommended eight steps involved in the implementation of your marketing strategy.

Consider:

What are some of the techniques you could use to communicate?

1. To the marketing team – the roles and responsibilities of each team member?
2. To the core management team – to create excitement and make them feel a part of the overall project?

Marketing objectives should be established in consultation with all the required people in the business, and they should adhere to the business plan, including the marketing objectives and workplace procedures. An example of marketing objectives for a digital marketing plan can include:

Your organisation may have a policy and procedure with guidelines for creating marketing objectives and the marketing mix.

Good reasons for doing this include:

• It clarifies expectations
• A procedure lays out the required steps to perform job tasks or provide a service to a customer
• Procedures can be used as a tool to measure an employee’s performance – a checklist
• When procedures are followed, there is consistency in practice for work processes
• Using policies and procedures as part of employee training reinforces the organisation’s expectations
• Policies and procedures are created from the lessons learned, which are essential to incorporate and strengthen the market approach.

You know what you want to achieve, so you are ready to implement your marketing plan. As you develop an implementation schedule for a business project, develop an implementation schedule to keep the marketing plan on track. You can do this by:

1. Identifying the tasks, resources and timing
2. Defining the tasks to be completed
3. Setting realistic goals and resources
4. Allocating responsibilities for required tasks
5. Evaluating results by measuring interactions with online content
6. Focusing on outcomes – all the marketing activities should support the outcomes.

Print, TV and radio commercials were used in traditional marketing to reach customers before the internet and e-mail were adopted to get marketing messages out to consumers.

Today, marketing strategies include a combination of conventional marketing and digital marketing. Organisations can increase their reach and analyse their customers’ experience through marketing by looking at other ways to adopt new technology and assessing other avenues beyond social media and digital ads.

Digital advertising provides an instant connection to customers. It can be used in social media feeds through ads based on the interest the customer has shown, and poor reviews can be responded to resolve any problems quickly.

This section covers techniques you could use to assess the use of digital devices, platforms and technologies when implementing marketing activities. Rival IQ’s 2020 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report provides a comprehensive report on the study of more than 2100 well-known brands and companies, analysing what makes them successful on social media. It provides you with what you need to measure your social media success against your competitors on the most popular social media platforms across 14 industries. The report provides suggestions for different sectors to improve their performance on social media platforms.

Social media platforms can post surveys or polls to existing and potential customers. Social media platforms can be used to improve customer service by:

• Answering customer queries promptly
• Providing direct responses to customers for all posts on Facebook and Twitter
• Resolving complaints online, acknowledging the customer’s query and providing a follow-up response
• Reviewing online customer ratings and feedback
• Being honest and open with customers online.

A digital marketing strategy is a plan that helps your business achieve specific digital goals through carefully selecting online marketing channels, such as paid, earned and owned media. The process includes:

Source: Digital Marketing Institute (2016)

Further Reading:

Explore 5 Steps to a Powerful Digital Marketing Strategy on the Digital Marketing Institute website, and make sure you know the difference between a digital marketing strategy and a digital marketing campaign. Watch the following video (7 Key Steps to Planning and Launching a Successful Marketing Campaign | Marketing 360, 2018) to help you understand the principles of the steps needed to ensure a winning marketing campaign.

Elements of a Successful Digital Marketing Strategy

Consider the following elements of a successful marketing strategy:

1. An engaging website
2. Search engine optimisation (SEO)
3. Content marketing
4. E-mail marketing
5. Social media marketing
6. Pay-per-click (PPC).

Explore a further explanation of these six steps in the infographic below. Read more about them in The Elements of a Successful Digital Marketing Strategy.

Visit Websites, social media and digital marketing  to explore how to market your business online using social media. The Business Queensland website is an excellent resource that looks at how websites can be used for selling online; including, building and managing your own website, managing online sales and payment, and utilising search engine optimisation to assist customers to find your business online. The section on social media and digital marketing is useful too.

Research One Element of a Digital Marketing Strategy

Research further information about one of the elements of a digital marketing strategy, listed below, to understand how it works.

• Pay-per-click (PPC)
• Web design
• Content marketing
• E-mail marketing
• Influencer marketing

Create a Digital Strategy

Business Queensland suggests that a digital strategy is made up of nine key components:

1. Online presence
2. Digital Marketing
3. Selling online
4. Customer interaction
5. Online security
6. Supplier interaction
7. Mobile-based solutions
8. Efficiencies through technology
9. Cloud computing

Depending on your business type and industry, some components will be more relevant than others. To remain competitive, Business Queensland suggests researching similar businesses to see how they use digital technologies. Consider the digital marketing trends which will give the most significant commercial benefits.

Introduce digital technology that may lead to cost savings. Automate how to manage timesheets and pay; order office supplies and stationery using an online procurement system; manage rosters and employee leave; plan and resource work; provide real-time performance appraisals for your team.

The key features of digital devices, platforms and technologies that achieve marketing objectives by engaging and responding to customers are imperative to building a successful business in the virtual environment.

Consider smartphones / browsers such as Facebook and even e-mail. What else could you consider? How can a marketer use smartphones, browsers and e-mail to maximise their audience and sales?