Must-Have Elements in a Marketing Strategy

Here’s the truth: A surefire marketing strategy doesn’t exist—even if there are people touting it on the internet. And I know you’ve seen the ads. My proven strategy…A foolproof way to…Build a six-figure business…every single one is sort of selling you a lie. Because the fact of the matter is, even if someone shares their recipe with you, marketing is an experiment—and it’s extremely difficult to replicate someone else’s results.

Your marketing strategy needs to be unique to your business and your customers. And you need to be the lead scientist playing with elements in the lab. Trying a combination of things, gathering data, analyzing the results, and making adjustments to perfect your recipe, because there is no one-size-guarantees-success formula. So today, I wanted to make sure you start your experiment with the highest chance of getting what you want because you understand what you have at your disposal. Read on to learn about the must-have elements in a marketing strategy and get started fine-tuning yours.

Element #1: Customers and clients

There is a fundamental flaw to a lot of marketing strategies that people put together, and that’s when they build their plan around their wants over their customers. And I get it. It’s exponentially easier to build a marketing strategy around what you feel most comfortable doing—it takes real effort to get into the minds of the people you are selling to. But all of your marketing efforts should be planned around and tailored to your customers: where they are, what they need, what they need to hear, etc. So, the very first thing you should do before diving into a strategy is create customer maps for each of your ideal client types (it’s typical to have 1-3 since each of your services or products is best suited for different folks).

Element #2: Goals

After you’ve completed your customer maps and research, the next must-have element is defined goals. Why? Because your goals are where you are driving everything towards. Your goals are the reason you spend time and money on things. Your goals are your goals—if you don’t have them for your business, you might just be working really hard on a hobby.

It’s typical to have big-picture and short-term goals as a business owner; the former usually being closely tied to your overall marketing strategy and the latter being tied to specific campaigns. The key here is to make your goals very clear and to not chase too many at one time—1 to 3 goals is a good place to start if you don’t want to feel pulled in a bunch of different directions.

Pro-tip: Have my marketing strategy deck? Use pencil when writing on the goal cards so you can reuse them.

Element #3: Campaigns

The third element you have to play with are marketing campaigns, which you can think of as mini-strategies tied to a specific start and end date. Or maybe you know them better as the things you thought about at one point, said, “I should make a plan for that,” only to have it sneak up on you and make you scramble because you didn’t.  You can plan campaigns around sales, product launches, website launches, booking season, etc., and they typically include some of the same channels/tactics as your overall strategy— often you are simply increasing the pace and/or focusing more of your content/efforts on one topic.

Pro-tip: Pull out your strategy deck every quarter to map out your campaigns for the upcoming quarter—so they don’t sneak up on your anymore! 

Element #4: Marketing channels

The fourth element of any marketing strategy is channels or the places you are going to do your marketing “things”. Some examples are email marketing, social media, Pinterest, advertising, YouTube, SEO, etc., and it’s important to resist the urge to use them all. Because most business owners don’t have the capacity to use more than 1-3 channels effectively—though you can certainly incorporate more if you have help. The key here is to try to go deep on a few vs. shallow on a lot—and you can feel more confident about the ones you choose if you’ve thought about where your potential customers are.

Pro-tip: Start tracking KPIs (key performance indicators) so you have data about your marketing channels; this will help you see what is working and what’s not.

Element #5: Marketing tactics

Which brings us to tactics. Marketing tactics are the “things” you are going to do on your marketing channels. Instagram stories, Reels, TikTok videos, Google Business pages, blogging, submissions, etc. are all examples of tactics. And, like everything else, it’s better to pick and execute on just a few tactics over trying to do it all and being inconsistent—you are only one person, after all.

Element #6: Pacing

The last must-have element (or piece of the puzzle) is pacing—and this is where people typically feel overwhelmed. But rather than trying to keep up with what you think your competition is doing and stressing because you think you should be doing more of everything, the absolute key here is to not bite off more than you can chew. Set a realistic expectation of how often you can complete marketing tasks and know it is better to have a slower but more consistent pace.

Pro-tip: Some of your marketing tactics are more hands-off and don’t have a pace (like advertising). That being said, even if the tactic is more “set it and forget it,” you should be regularly tracking metrics.

Now that you are starting to wrap your arms around the elements of a marketing strategy, here are your next steps. Pick up my customer map template to organize your research and marketing strategy deck or marketing strategy template to build your actual strategy! And if you need more help as you work through it, here are my tips to help you build a marketing strategy in just a few hours.