Creating a Marketing Strategy That Works.

Hello everyone. I hope you've had a good morning so far. It's good to see some familiar faces and some new ones too. I hope you've had a chance to grab a coffee or a tea or maybe some lunch and sit back for the next 25, 30 minutes while we just talk about marketing strategy and why that is so important. While I was putting this marketing webinar together,

I came across this quote “Without strategy, content is just noise”. And if you're creating content without a clear purpose behind it, it just kind of becomes, uh as it says there, like noise in this great crowded scene of everybody publishing content. So the purpose of this webinar is to understand how we can create content that really resonates with our audience and makes a real impact.

Hello, thank you for joining this webinar on crafting a marketing strategy that works. My name's Lewis. I'm the marketing manager here at GEL Studios. We're a B-Corp purpose-driven creative agency based in Swindon. I've worked in marketing for eight years. Four of those have been here in the agency, helping businesses to align their marketing with their organisational goals so we can achieve return on investment. Before that, I also worked in marketing and communications in the public sector too. Just before we start, there will be time at the end for questions and I'll open the chat and all slides are going to be emailed to you afterwards. There's no need to be screenshotting or taking notes throughout.

Just a quick bit about GEL. So we deliver impact through strategic thinking, creativity, and collaborative partnerships that drive sustained success. And what that means is we really help businesses to deliver the results that truly matter to them. By immersing ourselves in the businesses, we get to understand their goals, their challenges, and discover the opportunities to help them grow.

And we really are a collaborative powerhouse of branding, graphic designers, marketing, and website experts. And we combine our skills and expertise under one cohesive strategy that helps businesses to achieve their goals with confidence. Working with our clients enables us also to give back. And in 2024, GEL supported 17 local good causes and donated over a thousand hours of resources to projects that really was a lifeline to those businesses in their time of need. And it all ties into our vision statement, which is to inspire change through creativity.

So why are marketing strategies so important? You're working hard, you're doing lots of good stuff, but all you hear from the sales team or your leaders, we need more sales, we need more enquiries. And the reason it's probably not working is because there's no real strategy in place. And even if there is a document called strategy final, final version, use this. Usually it's just a wish list of things that you could do if you had a budget and signoff.

A good marketing strategy should be an action plan that outlines where the business is now and where it needs to get to in 12, 24 months time. All the things that are going to happen in that time period, the resources and budget that is needed, but ultimately it's there to give us clarity.

The biggest mistake you can make when starting out creating a marketing strategy is not linking it to the organisation's objectives. The organisation's objectives are key to the owners, the stakeholders, the founders, and it's ultimately what they care about most. Us as a marketing department, we're there to support the business to achieve its goals. So we need to ensure that our work is also contributing to the overall organisation's goals.

And how do we do that? So there are four key phases to creating a marketing strategy. And I'm going to take you through those today. The first step is the fact finding that helps us to inform our strategy. The second part is solidifying the goals that we actually need to achieve, creating a plan of how we're going to get there and measuring the success of our work.

So phase one, the background research. As I said, this is the fact finding exercise. It helps us to inform our strategy and we can use these insights to set out our approach moving forward. And the simplest way to start this exercise is just to create a simple document and answer these questions. Looking specifically at internal factors and kind of internal processes.

First of all, note down your organisation's objectives. Then note down the key services that you offer and the cost to the customer. Average spend a customer might spend with you over a certain period of time. If you work with customers on a kind of retained basis, you might look for like how much they spend with you over 12 months. How did you get new customers in the past 12, 24 months? What were the pieces of content or channels that worked best? What happens after a lead comes in? What is the process? We can spend our time getting enquiries in, but what is the process afterwards? Is there a sales team? Is there a CRM who you can track the progress from enquiry to actual sale?

What is the conversion rate? We're generating enquiries into the business, but what is the conversion rate of those enquiries to sale? And who are your competitors and why? It's obvious we want to be aware of who our competitors are, what they're doing, but we're not going to be copying them. It's just useful to be aware of them. So make a note of the answers to those questions. Then we want to look at who our ideal customers are. So...

Do you work with specific industries? Where are those kind of companies based? What job titles tend to be enquiring with you or getting in contact with you? And ideally you want a one pager that clearly defines who your ideal customers are. So as an example for GEL Studios, we tend to target six specific sectors in the B2B space who are along the M4 corridor. So between Reading and Cardiff, we obviously work with businesses outside of that, but that is our main focus. We tend to target marketing managers, founders and business owners who tend to start looking for our services in September, October time, ready for the new budgets in April. That's ideally you want to get to a place where you really understand who you want to be targeting.

And then you want to look at what's working and what isn't. How many leads did you get last year? Ideally, you should look at how many leads you got in the last couple of years, but certainly the last 12 months. And how much budget did you use to get that amount of leads? When we know the answers to those two questions, we can work out how much on average we need to spend in order to get more inquiries. Can you pinpoint any specific themes or topics, pieces of content that went out over the last 12 months that has generated more enquiries than others. 

If we know what they are, we have a good idea of what other pieces of content we need to be publishing in the future to get more inquiries. And then we want to look at how our channels are currently performing, what one brought in the most enquiries, collate all of that information into that document. And that really gives us a good starting point for where the business is now and how we can help it move forward.

So in phase two, we're looking at setting our objectives and solidifying what we actually need to achieve, not what we want to achieve. First of all, make sure your goal is financially focused. It's ultimately what your business cares about, growing finances. Your business wants to see return on investment. So setting a financially focused goal is the best way we can demonstrate in marketing our value and our return. And at the end of your strategy, you'll be able to say, the marketing department has generated you X amount of revenue in the financial year. So that really solidifies our return on investment and as I said, our value.

You might already be aware of the SMART frameworks, but SMART goals help us understand what's important to the business. They keep us focused and motivated, enabling us to kind of track our progress, make changes when it's needed, and it also ensures that everyone is on the same page too. So we want to be creating a SMART objective for our marketing.

A SMART goal, for those that don't know, is specific. Everyone knows what success looks like. Measurable, the goal has clearly defined measures of success. Achievable, the goal might be challenging, but it isn't completely unachievable. Is it relevant? The goal should be linked to the organisation's priorities, as I've said before. And time bound, the goal has a deadline. There's a specific timeframe in which we need to achieve this goal.

So how do we go about working out what our kind of measurable goal should look like? Taking our notes from phase one, we know what our growth goal for the business is, and we know how much on average a customer might spend with us. So that tells us how many new customers we need to generate.

As an example, if our growth goal is £300,000 over the next financial year, and on average a customer spends with us £1,000 a month or £12,000 a year, we can then work out that we need 25 new customers in order to reach that goal. But we need to remember what our conversion rate from enquiry to actual sale is give us a clearer picture of what we actually need to achieve. So taking those figures again, we've got our growth goal, our average customer spend and the number of customers needed. But if your conversion, whatever your conversion rate is, that's only a kind of obviously a percentage of those sales. 

Let's say our conversion rate from leads coming in to actual sales is 50%.  We then know that in order to get to our growth goal, we need 50 enquiries to generate 25 new customers. This formula kind of works for any kind of business, whether you're looking to increase your sales, generate more donations, need more enquiries, there will be a value to all of your kind of enquiries. You just need to be aware of it and make sure that it is put down in that first phase so you can kind of work out your measurable objective.

So if we take these figures and put them into a SMART goal, so the first step, specific, between April 25 and March 26, generates 50 new leads of which 25 become customers, increasing the company revenue by £300,000. So that's a specific goal to achieve. Measurable, we've got our measures of success there, achievable and realistic. From our background research just before, we know that generating 25 new customers, it is an increase on previous years, but it isn't wildly out of proportion and we're not setting ourselves up to fail. So we've got that achievable and realistic goal. And we've set our time frame in which we want to achieve that goal too.

Examples of kind of unsmart goals is again, if you're being completely unrealistic, ambition is good. But being completely unachievable goals is just going to set yourself up to fail. Also, if you've got no measurable figures, how are you actually going to know if you have achieved what you set out to achieve? And if there's no timeframe, the goal is just going to kind of lack urgency, drag on until you actually reach that goal. So we need to make sure that we have a timeframe in which we want to achieve the goal too.

Phase three, the implementation planning. So we've done our research, we've got our goal. Next we want to actually start mapping out our campaigns and what we want to be achieving. This might sound obvious, but always pick the best performing channels first. Do the things that work well. Instead of spreading yourself thin, focus on what can help best help you achieve your goal. And using your research from the first phase, you'll know what channels work best and why for your specific audiences. And once you know what those channels are, you can then start looking at other different channels that you might want to be using. 

Obviously it'll be different for everyone on this call what channels work best, depending on your goal. But you may find this breakdown of kind of purpose of channels useful. So if you're looking to increase more traffic to your site because you need more form fills or you want more phone call enquiries, then you may look at using things like SEO or PPC to generate traffic to the site.

If you're looking to demonstrate your authority in the sector, showing you kind of understand the pain points that the sector is facing and you have a solution that helped them to solve those issues, then you may look at things like webinars or insights pieces to really demonstrate your expertise.

If you're looking to grow and kind of nurture existing clients so that they buy from you again and again, rather than going to your competitors, you may look at things like using email marketing, holding events. And if you're looking to enhance your reputation, so more people are aware of you and aware of your business, so that when they're in the market to buy your products, you'll be front of mind. You may look at things like press releases or entering industry awards. So like I said, this will be different for everyone, but those are some kind of use cases of why you might use each specific channel. But it all comes down to your organisational goal.

Once you have the channels, you know which ones you want to be using. It's really useful to understand and make note of why you're going to be using that channel. So as we see here, I'm sure most of you will have a website. You should have a website. The website is going to, for this campaign, the website is the end destination for all of our marketing. We're going to deploy all of our marketing channels that are happening outside.

We're going to be pointing them to the website. Why are we using the website? To share information about our brand, our services, employees, our history, et cetera, and to share thought leadership pieces to demonstrate our authority. And then how are we going to measure the success specifically of that channel, of the website, by increasing the number of users and new users to the site? So what you want to do is break down every single channel, and just really be clear why you have chosen to use that channel and how that channel specifically will help you to achieve the wider goal that you've set.

And then once you've done that, you can start building out your implementation plan. I find just a simple Google Sheet, Excel, really a good way to do it. And month by month, break down all of the activities that will be happening, the themes you might be exploring, the resources that are needed, and the kind of expected results so that you can track whether you know whether you're on track to meet your overall goal.

Also highlight any roadblocks that might be coming up and just share this with your kind marketing team if you have one so that everybody else can have their feedback on it and you get others' thoughts. And don't be afraid to amend this plan as you go along. If you get to, so you can see here I've mapped out Q1. If you get to the end of Q1 and you find that something didn't work in Q1 and you were planning to do it in Q2, you can always amend it, but it's just useful just to map everything out like that in a simple document.

Then we need to set our budget. This is kind of a, sometimes a bit of a scary thing. If you go to your founders or your finance team and say, I need a budget for my marketing, they may come back to you and say, okay, tell me how much you need. Generally, businesses will spend between 10 to 15 % of their revenue on marketing. But we also need to consider how much was spent in previous years and what you achieved with that goal.

And the best way that I find to set a marketing budget is to put all of our channels into three buckets. The essentials, the importance and the nice to haves. Everything in the essentials should be, if we don't do this, we won't meet our objective. Everything in the nice to haves are, this will really support us in achieving the objective.

And the nice to haves are things that are kind of on top that would be really useful to have, but won't, if we don't have that, we'll still meet our objective. So if you break your channels down and your spends down m into those three buckets, that will really help you to set a budget and how that might look. I've got on the screen there. It's tough for businesses at the moment. The national insurance increase in April is gonna make it more expensive for businesses to run. So we as a marketing department need to demonstrate that we're using our budgets effectively. We also need to demonstrate that this is a fully-costed exercise. We haven't just plucked a number out of the air.

So breaking it down like this will really help you to demonstrate that. It also helps the finance department to understand why and when payments might be going out. So as you can see here, yeah, we've got the breakdowns of our essentials, important and the nice to haves by month and quarter.

And then you're almost ready to go, but you need to make sure you have the tracking set up. Whatever your SMART goal is, you need a way of being able to track whether you've actually achieved it. You should always have GA4 and Search Console set up as a minimum. But if your goal is to increase sales, how are you going to track whether you've actually increased sales? Equally, form fields, how are you going to track that? You need a way of making sure that you can show progress throughout the 12-24 months. And there's just a few examples of what you might set up as tracking on the screen there.

And then the final phase is the evaluation and measuring our results. There tends to be two different ways that people do this. The first and most common one would be in a manual spreadsheet, which needs to be manually updated as and when things happen, which is okay. But there's also tools such as Looker Studio. I would definitely look at that. It's a free tool from Google, a free AI tool, and it automatically pulls all of your data from Google products into one automated report. The benefits of that, you can send out to your stakeholders or whoever you report into one URL and they can look at the report and it's always up to date. Yeah, just via one URL and you never need to continually manually update in that report.

You are able to pull in feeds from your Facebook as an example or your Mailchimp, but there are additional fees for that. But yeah, Looker Studio, all of our clients, we make sure that they have one of those automated reports every month. One tip on reporting, don't overcomplicate it. Keep it simple. Ask the person who you will be reporting into what they care about and only include that in the version that they see. Otherwise, you're creating a report that's 20 pages long with information that no one but you understands. Make sure the report is simple and concise and exactly what your stakeholders want and need to know. You can always have another version for yourself, which is more detailed, which you can kind of refer back to.

And finally, get your strategy signed off. Present it back to the key stakeholders in leadership so they really understand what you're going to be focusing on and what activities are going to be happening over the timeframe that you've set.

So in summary, do your background research, set a SMART goal aligned with your business objectives, uh focus your efforts on the best performing channels first, and remember to continually measure your results.

Okay, I'm just going to open the chat for any questions. Just give me a second.

Okay, that should be now open and I'll give you a couple of minutes to submit some questions. But while you do that, a quick mention for charities, not-for-profits, hospices, or if you generally want to find out about how you can make the most of £8,000 worth of free Google Ads, my colleague, Jean, will be hosting a webinar in a couple of weeks' time. And I'll send you the link in the email after this webinar.

We're also hosting a drop-in session on the 27th of March from 12 till 5. The whole team will be available. There's no need to book. You can just come in, ask us questions if you need help with your website, looking to kind of strengthen your brand messaging, or you're stuck on something like with GA4. Just pop in on 27th between 12 and 5.

So thank you. If there are any other questions or if you want to chat more about strategy, creating one for your business, then feel free to send me an email or connect with me on LinkedIn.