Behind a business plan, every business needs a marketing strategy.

It’s a valuable tool for aligning your business objectives with how you’re going to achieve them through efficient, on-brand marketing.

Whether you’re the leading marketing personale for a company of 20 or 200 people, there are some fundamentals that sets every marketing plan up for success.

We asked Tim Paton, director at KingSt Advertising, to provide some top tips for creating your marketing strategy.

What are some key components of a strong marketing strategy?

Your marketing strategy needs to be informed by your business plan. It needs clear, measurable goals, insight-led actions, integrated executional plans and a sense of realistic ambition. Someone should be able to pick it up and implement it without any other input.

What are some common mistakes people make when it comes to their marketing strategy?

There are many! They include not setting clear outcomes, not staying abreast of customer behaviours and perceptions, not optimising media spend, not reviewing activity honestly and making the necessary changes, not tracking competitor activity.

Stripping it back, what is the difference between marketing and brand?

The way we express brand is ‘your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room’.

Put another way, it’s the sum of all the experiences customers have with your business, where the promises you made in your marketing effort are kept or not. This moment of truth is what will determine what is thought and said about you.

Marketing is the effort that goes behind encouraging those experiences via all aspects of the marketing mix. The two are intertwined, but distinct.

Why is it important for your brand, your marketing strategy & your advertising plan to all work together?

Advertising is one component of the marketing strategy and often times forms the bulk of the effort. Unless they are all aligned, you’ll have a whole series of inconsistent activities that present an incoherent, confusing brand to your market.

How has COVID-19 changed the marketing landscape?

A lot of businesses have had a good, hard look at their branding and how they would like to be seen. COVID has changed a lot of our behaviours and attitudes which has meant how we brand ourselves has had to adjust.

Further to this, relationships have become more and more important. Getting the customer experience right is now an even more vital component of marketing.

Why is it important to regularly review your marketing activity and what are some ways to do this?

People change, behaviours change, technology changes, competitors react, conditions get better or worse. There are so many things that can impact not only your marketing, but your whole business, so you need to stay abreast.

Some ways to do this include:

• Reviewing your media performance and refining/adjusting spend accordingly
• Conduct formal or informal research (so often neglected or under-valued) to find out what is being seen, said and what’s working
• Line up activity against sales/pipeline data
• Moniter your social media to gauge commentary
• Talk to as many customers as possible.

Tell us about the MO package – what is it, how does it work, who is it best suited for?

MO can be tailored to fit most business sizes and is effective across all industries. With all the changes that happened in 2020 many businesses have needed to reassess how to present themselves: How they look. How they talk, where to place messages.

The KingSt Marketing Optimiser has been developed to give businesses an independent, holistic assessment of all brand and marketing activity. We provide recommendations on brand positioning and messaging, audience insight and media behaviour, digital best practice and optimal media mix.

We know how to create cut through, optimise reach and maximise ROI. There are eight steps, including a pathway to progress where we will provide a suite of recommendations.

To find out more over a casual coffee, contact tim@kingst.co.nz or phone 021 274 8889.

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