Gartner 2022 CMO Spend and Strategy Survey shows that marketing budgets for companies have increased to 9.5% of their total revenue from 6.4% in 2021.
It’s easy to identify why. More and more companies are entering all sectors, this increasing competition. Marketing is indispensable to stay in the game, no matter how large or small a business is.
Unfortunately, many businesses don’t have a full-proof marketing strategy. They tackle marketing problems and when they occur. This isn’t a good strategy for long-term growth and sustainability.
Both marketing problems and solutions are changing in 2022. Many methods have become obsolete within the last few years. Take keyword stuffing for example. Earlier, websites would stuff a page with keywords and expect to excel in search engine marketing. With Google’s revised SEO policies, this is no longer possible.
7 steps to develop a complete marketing strategy in 2022
In this guide, we will show you how to create a complete marketing strategy in 2022 in 7 steps. Make sure you tweak these steps/tips depending on your present needs and goals. Without further ado, let’s find out how to develop an effective marketing strategy in 2022.
- Establish your goals
You can’t reach your goals if you don’t know what your goals are. This holds true for marketing as well. The first step of your marketing strategy should be to figure out your goals. Your goals can be specific or broad. For example, they could be something like:
- Increase website visitors
- Get more social media engagement
- Get mentions and features from other brands
Or, they could be more specific. For example, your marketing goals could be:
- Get 1000 monthly website visitors
- Reach 1 million people on social media platforms
- Collaborate with at least five brands
As you can guess, it’s much easier to achieve specific goals because you know exactly what you want. Once you have created your main goals, it’s time to move to the second step.
- Select KPIs
KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, are metrics against which you can measure the success of your marketing strategy. KPIs include sales growth, leads, landing page conversion rates, lead-to-conversion ratio, etc. Growth in these specific areas will indicate the overall growth of a business.
There are plenty of key performance indicators that you can use. However, you cannot and should not use as many KPIs as possible. Narrow down on a few areas where you see a lot of promise. Focus your efforts on improving these KPIs.
If you want to reach the goals you’ve set, you must do it systematically. KPIs are the best ways to accurately track progress.
- Search engine marketing
Search engine marketing (SEM) is getting tougher and more important at the same time. We often mistake search engine marketing for search engine optimization (SEO) of websites. SEM is a much broader term that includes components of SEO, paid advertising, and other ways of increasing the chance of people finding you on search engines.
Search engine marketing is essential for a few reasons. First, consumers still research their purchases on search engines. Second, many purchases are a direct result of brand awareness and positive reviews. Third, search engine marketing is a sustainable and long-term approach to brand building.
Here are a few things you must do to perform well in search engine marketing:
1. Focus on content
Content marketing through both websites and social media channels is essential for growth. In 2022, content is the gateway through which buyers reach brands. Invest in informative and valuable content to see striking growth.
2. SEO
Search engine optimization involves techniques to make your website more visible on the internet. Most SEO strategies are built for the long run. If you do SEO correctly, it will give you amazing returns on investment.
3. User experience
Your website should have a beautiful and easy-to-understand user interface. If there are many issues like loading time and broken links, you’ll have a hard time getting attention from buyers.
Many businesses make the mistake of ignoring search engine marketing and investing all their resources in other areas. Businesses that do invest in search engine marketing see long-term, sustainable growth.
4. Social media marketing
Social media marketing is an umbrella term that refers to everything that brands and businesses do on social media platforms to increase awareness, engage, and increase sales. Unlike search engine marketing, most businesses are aware of the importance of social media.
The biggest challenge of social media marketing is to be consistent while maintaining creativity. You have to constantly engage with other people and brands to keep your brand name relevant.
Various social media management tools help us better track our social media performance. As with search engine marketing, you must have specific KPIs for social media marketing as well.
Email marketing is a subset of social media marketing. While many consider it outdated, email marketing is still relevant.
According to a HubSpot survey, email engagement has increased for 77% of marketers in the past year. It’s always a good idea to run an email marketing campaign along with a social media campaign.
There are plenty of email marketing tools in the market. MailChimp is among the most popular of them, but if you find it too expensive or overwhelming as an option, you can learn more about Mailchimp alternatives which serve better in growing your business without putting in too much of effort. One such example is Flodesk. Designed for small business owners, this fastest growing email marketing platform has a plethora of templates and automated workflows that help you design emails that your customers would love to receive in their inbox.
Social media marketing has the ability to take sales and engagement through the roof. However, it’s also very easy to fail on social media platforms. The only way to deal with this problem is to be consistent, track progress, and engage with the audience.
Both social media marketing and search engine marketing are the pillars of digital marketing. Good performance in these areas is a promising sign for businesses.
5. Create a print marketing strategy
Print marketing is not effective for all businesses. For example, a SaaS company based out of a small city won’t get much from print marketing because its buyers are in far-off places.
However, print marketing can do wonders for certain businesses. Take a cake shop for example. People are much more likely to check out a local cake shop if they see a pamphlet or billboard. On social media platforms and search engines, your cake shop would be lost in a sea of cake shops.
The trick to succeeding in print marketing is to use it at the right time and in the right place. Businesses can get a lot of local attention from print marketing, especially if it’s well done.
The primary tools of print marketing are pamphlets, brochures, billboards, magazines, and so on. If your business can benefit from print marketing, you should definitely use it.
6. Adopt best practices from competitors
The goal of marketing is to be better than the competition. But there’s no rule that says you can’t learn from your competitors. If you are in a highly competitive sector, you should always be aware of what your competitors are doing.
For example, many brands launch special social media campaigns to boost sales. You can track these campaigns and see how they have performed over the last few years.
If they haven’t performed well, analyze the reasons.
Was it because of poor content?
Was the audience disengaged?
Did they spend too much money on paid ads?
Once you answer these questions, you’ll have a better idea of what to do and what to avoid in your own campaigns.
While it’s important to learn from your competitors, you should never copy them. You cannot establish domain authority with copied strategies.
7. Review your marketing budget from time to time
The last thing you must know to develop a complete marketing strategy in 2002 is the dangers of overspending on marketing. As we noted in the beginning, businesses are spending almost 10% of their revenue on marketing in 2022. However, that’s an average figure skewed by the extremes on both ends.
Many businesses spend as much as 50% of their net revenue on marketing. This isn’t a good idea for several reasons:
- More money doesn’t necessarily mean better content and reach
- Paid ads lack the impact of organic searches
- Other aspects of the business could suffer due to marketing overspending.
- Expensive marketing strategies are unsustainable
Using available resources judiciously is the key to overcoming these problems. Set a percentage of your total profit/budget that you will spend on marketing and don’t cross. There are many inexpensive marketing avenues that you can explore for this. For example, creating high-quality and relevant content for your website blog doesn’t have to be expensive. You can also use an affordable social media management tool to manage all your social handles.
With the right strategy, you won’t need to invest large sums of money in marketing. Remember that marketing won’t do much if consumers don’t enjoy the product. Word-of-mouth marketing is the most powerful marketing tool, and it’s essentially free.
Conclusion
Marketing is an ever-evolving field. Practices that were considered acceptable and beneficial are no longer useful. We must change with the times to create and implement a great marketing strategy.
We hope this guide helps you identify where you are lacking in terms of marketing.
Author bio
Atreyee Chowdhury is a freelance content writer with more than 10+ years of professional experience. She is passionate about helping SMBs and enterprises achieve their content marketing goals with her carefully crafted and compelling content. She loves to read, travel, and experiment with different cuisines in her free time. You can follow her on LinkedIn.