The importance of a marketing strategy for business success

A marketing strategy is your chance to get clear on what you want your business to achieve and how your marketing will help you get there. It brings together your goals, the people you want to reach and the activity which will make the biggest impact. With a solid strategy in place, your marketing becomes focused, consistent and far more effective.

Marketing can feel messy when you are juggling competing priorities, so a strategy helps bring clarity to the chaos. To create a marketing strategy, it is important to understand your audience, set clear goals, and choose the message and channels that will connect with them most effectively.

Whilst a strategy provides overarching direction, not the specific details, it remains a comprehensive plan that prevents marketing efforts from becoming fragmented or reactive. By establishing clear intent and structure, it ensures that activity is guided by purpose rather than driven solely by emerging trends or hopeful experimentation.

Why are marketing strategies important?

A good marketing strategy gives a competitive edge to a business, providing long-term guidance tailored to your audience, which can react to market changes. This avoids aimless activity, which wastes money, time and energy for a business. With a strategy, you can stop throwing resources at marketing in the hope that something sticks.

Clearly directed activity can help a business achieve maximum results by staying focused and standing out. A marketing strategy works alongside business objectives, eventually helping increase sales and brand recognition.

At JUMP, we create strategies that go further by matching the right activity to the right goal, since different goals call for different approaches.

What is included in a marketing strategy?

Whilst every strategy looks different, they all start with the same essentials. A successful marketing strategy brings together clear marketing goals, an understanding of the target audience, a strong value proposition, defined brand messaging and a considered channel approach.

Where a marketing plan focuses on the specific details of a campaign for a brand, a marketing strategy takes a long-term, overarching view. It draws on the brand’s mission, goals and objectives and outlines how these will be achieved by understanding customers and shaping business activity around their needs.

How JUMP approaches a marketing strategy

Every marketing team approaches strategy in its own way, and our team focuses on a holistic method. We like to take time to understand the business and get to know the people behind it through a workshop. Afterwards, we carry out thorough market research and develop a clear marketing strategy that recommends activities designed to support our clients in reaching their business goals. We then present the strategy in a way that helps our customers understand our approach, highlighting the key tactics, ideas and recommendations that align with the company's aims.

The strategies we develop give businesses a clear and practical plan that their marketing teams can put into action and adapt as their needs change. We can also support them by implementing the strategy directly, making sure every activity aligns with their goals and moves them forward. Each strategy becomes a framework that guides the work we do together and helps deliver consistent results.

Collaborative marketing workshops

Our workshops help us understand who the business is, how they perceive themselves, and what they aim to do with their marketing. These workshops are relaxed and open, and they give everyone space to share their perspective.

We take time to understand their target audiences, unique value propositions, company goals, marketing objectives and preferences with marketing activity. From here, we take the information and begin conducting our own market research.

Market research

Market research is imperative for a strong marketing strategy. This is where we dig around, ask questions and uncover useful insights that a business might not see from the inside. It helps our marketing team deepen their understanding of the business, its positioning, and most importantly, the customer base.

Sometimes, market research involves reaching out to current and potential customers to develop a sense for who the buyer personas may be. Market research can also include looking into competitor activity to help guide the direction of their marketing strategy and campaigns.

Audit current marketing activity

To work towards understanding the best strategy for a business, it is first important to look at its current marketing strategy and activity. This isn’t a place to pass judgment, but acts as a non-biased activity to see what is working and what isn’t by looking at the metrics behind activities. The key benefit of doing this is that it helps us understand the content preferences of the engaged audience your business already has. It also helps ensure resources are efficiently used.

If the business is new or hasn’t yet marketed itself, the approach may look different, perhaps highlighting what the client does and doesn’t like. Perhaps they love trending TikToks, but dislike long LinkedIn articles or vice versa. This step is a great opportunity to guide the marketing strategy to fit the business and its customers.

Target market and personas

Once we understand the landscape, we get to know the people you actually want to reach. Without a clear understanding of who the activity is for, the work can become unfocused. Creating target audience groups or personas and exploring demographics, behaviours, values and pain points helps reveal the customer journey and the type of messaging that will resonate with the people you want to reach.

At JUMP, personas are informed by both primary and secondary data. We draw on information gathered during the audit and the insights shared by the business during the workshop. To gain an even deeper understanding, we also contact potential audiences and ask specific questions. This ensures strong customer engagement and supports the development of an effective strategy.

Brand messaging

After developing an understanding of the target audience, the next stage of the strategy is to consider the different messages for each audience. For example, the messaging, wording and tone of voice which resonates and converts a teenage audience would be significantly different to the appropriate messaging for an older person.

Creating guidelines within the strategy is imperative for the long term strategy marketing strategy. If the messaging and tone vary between channels and marketing campaigns over time, your business becomes inconsistent and unrecognisable.

At JUMP, we will craft messages to consider as part of your marketing strategy, to help demonstrate implementation of the messaging guidelines and framework.

Marketing channels

The content marketing recommendations within a strategy are meant to give an understanding of all recommended activity attached to the business goals. The channel portion of the strategy outlines content pillars, frequency and analytics. A marketing plan can outline more specific content suggestions and campaigns.

Digital marketing strategies cover social media posts, ads, website, email marketing, referrals and more. Each channel’s activity works towards achieving both the marketing and overarching business goals.

For example, to reach new customers, social media marketing and paid advertisements are key activities, which can be outlined into different campaigns. Activity created by other users, including user-generated content and influencer marketing, can also play an important role in reaching a broader range of target customers.

A strategy can explore how this type of content supports business goals and identify ways to encourage it as a steady and valuable source of customer activity.

Marketing channels go beyond a digital marketing strategy, as they can also look into print distribution, press releases and OOH ads. Although this may be more challenging to track through analytics, it is still relevant to many marketing strategies!

Marketing analytics and frequency

An effective marketing strategy is incomplete without a frequency outline and a plan on how to monitor and assess marketing success. Considering how often social posts should be posted, emails should be sent and blogs should be updated is necessary for allocating resources and staying consistent.

Understanding marketing strategy success is down to tracking metrics and analytics. There are hundreds of analytics which can be tracked on digital platforms, so understanding which are relevant to track is important. While analytics can feel overwhelming, when you focus on the right ones that are attached to business goals, the picture becomes much clearer. This is often guided by the goals outlined within the strategy. Tracking the same analytics each month can highlight the success of the strategy, as well as places to improve.

Adjusting your strategy

To maintain a competitive advantage, an effective marketing strategy should be updated and revisited due to the dynamic nature of the marketing landscape. To ensure activity remains relevant, it is important to stay in sync with your audience to maintain customer relationships. A complete overhaul of a strategy is not necessary, but adjustments to your marketing strategy help to achieve business goals continuously.

Although it can feel overwhelming to think about every element that goes into a strategy and the decisions involved, working with an agency like JUMP can provide guidance and help shape a strong and effective approach.