Marketing Strategy

What is a marketing strategy? 

A holistic marketing strategy involves three major components:

1. A plan: A great marketing strategy successfully integrates the many facets of communication that you as a company need to make to your various audiences and stakeholder groups and articulates them in an easy to understand clear plan.
2. A pathway: A great marketing strategy then provides a pathway to executing and fulfilling the plan broken down into smaller chunks to assist.
3. Objectives: A great marketing strategy then asks the questions ‘what does success look like’ and provides a series of measures to help us identify when we’ve reached that success.

The secret to a great marketing strategy

The secret to exceptional marketing is not in the latest fads or trends that exist. These channels and strategies can be effective and should be considered in the creation of a marketing strategy but the secret lies in our disciplined approach and commitment to the data.

Discipline demands a process and methodology to creating a marketing strategy. Truthfully, most organisations either don’t have the skillset or the time to ensure that a marketing strategy is developed and executed with discipline. A plan may get developed but no pathway is then generated to ensure that each task is executed and fulfilled, as it should.

A great marketing strategy also requires a commitment to understanding the data needed to make great decisions around activity and spend. There are many things that can go into a marketing strategy but an effective one relies on interpreting the data to where results are being achieved with the purpose to align activity and spend to those areas.

The Red Meets Blue marketing approach

At Red Meets Blue, we believe that the word marketing is one dimensional because it often just relates to lead generation activities like search engine optimisation or Google Ad Words, online display ads, mail outs and email marketing campaigns for example. These things, though still very important, only make up part of the picture. Equally important are disciplines such as experience optimisation, which impacts conversion; brand culture, which impacts retention and reputation management, which impacts the sustainability of a brand over the long term. We invest time and strategy into building what we call our brand management plans to encompass all aspects of the way an organisation communicates to the market.

In every sense of the word, it contains and revolves around a marketing strategy and we believe that every great organisation looking to grow needs an effective marketing and brand strategy.

Step one – set goals

As part of the first step to building a great marketing strategy for our clients, we walk through a Brand Strategy process that focuses on understanding the objectives and goals of your organisation. Every marketing strategy must first and foremost be dedicated to helping your organisation achieve these goals. Its express purpose is to assist in the growth objectives that you have and achieve a return on investment. For this reason, understanding what you hope to do in the coming one year, three years and five years is pivotal and impacts the way we approach the development of your marketing strategy.

Step two – create a plan and a pathway

Once we uncover who you are, what you stand for and where you are going, we work towards developing a plan that utilises your budget in the best way possible to achieve your goals. Using a variety of strategically chosen channels and strategies, we develop a marketing strategy and a critical pathway that focuses on activity in 90-day periods.

Step three – execute the plan 

Every marketing strategy requires a world-class execution that focuses on engaging messages, exceptional content and innovation design. Whether for print or online, Red Meets Blue marketing strategies are not just documents but action plans that are executed by our design and digital teams for print and online publishing.

Step four – analyse the data

Marketing metrics are key to every marketing strategy as part of identifying what strategies are performing and which ones are not. At Red Meets Blue, we have developed a range of dashboard processes and products to help inform our clients of the meaningful data to help make good decisions around where to invest time and budget. A marketing strategy should be an evolving and organic plan designed to change and adjust based on the data and metrics we uncover.

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