I can’t believe I’m even saying this, but…. Welcome to the first podcast episode of 2023! Today, we are going to discuss how to hit the ground running with a strong marketing strategy to make the new year a success.

Before we talk about strategy, let’s make an important distinction between marketing strategy and marketing tactics. Put simply, a marketing strategy is your game plan for reaching people and converting them into customers, so you can achieve your business goals. Marketing tactics are the activities that you use to execute your strategy. In other words, TikTok videos or Instagram Reels or radio ads are not your marketing strategy, they are your marketing tactics.

Building Your Marketing Strategy

Take a Pulse Check

Before you start trying to nail down your marketing strategy for 2023, take the time to evaluate how your strategy from last year performed. Take a deep dive into your marketing analytics, and ask yourself the following questions:

• Overall, how effective do I think my marketing efforts were?
• What efforts saw results and what efforts did not?
• What messaging resonated with my audience? Do I need to rethink how I’m positioning myself?
• Why did my customers say they chose me?
• How did customers find me?

Once you’ve done this, it’s time to establish your goals. I recommend making one or two overarching goals (such as “increase marketing revenue by 20%) along with a few supporting marketing specific goals (such as “grow email list by 300 subscribers).

Do Your Research

Even if you have done market research before, it’s a good idea to repeat the process every so often to make sure you are keeping up with our ever evolving world. Start by having conversations with at least ten people that represent your target customer demographic. Ask them questions that will help you understand their day-to-day lives, what might influence their decision to do business with you, etc. This is not an opportunity to pitch your business, rather listen and learn as much as you can about your target audience. From these conversations, you can generate 3-5 customer personas, which are something you can reference at any time for inspiration or check in and ask yourself if your marketing is still aligned with what they need.

Craft Your Positioning Statement

Your positioning statement is something to help your customers understand more about your business and should answer the following questions:

• Culture – What does your company stand for and what kind of culture can someone expect?
• Customers – How would you describe the customers you serve?
• Voice – How would your customers describe you?
• Feeling – How do customers feel as a result of your work?
• Impact – What impact do you have on your customers?
• Superpower – What makes you different from your competition?

Write and Disseminate Your Core Messaging

Once you’ve done thorough research, have your customer personas and positioning statement, write your core messages that you want to communicate in your marketing. This is the one cohesive message that should be communicated across all of your social media platforms, website, and promotional materials.

Choose which marketing tactics you are going to use to disseminate your messaging. Keep your target demographic in mind here – what social media platforms are they using the most and therefore most likely to see your messaging on?

Establish Metrics

Make sure you are able to measure your success by establishing which metrics you are going to track throughout the year (i.e. impressions, click-through rates, email list growth, etc.) You can use these metrics to get an idea of what works best for you and your business, and make changes based on this data.

Even though it may seem overwhelming at first, establishing a marketing strategy is the best thing you can do for you and your business in 2023. Use this episode as an outline for doing so, and until next time, keep running your race. 

About the Author

Sydney Chakalos is the owner of Marathon Marketing & Branding, LLC, a marketing agency dedicated to helping local businesses stand out online and grow, and host of the Marketing Your Local Business Online podcast. Sydney helps you get to the root of what makes your audience convert to customers through design thinking methods. If this article got you thinking that it’s time to get your marketing organized, download this free guide, “Create Your Online Marketing System in One Day.”