Keeping up with the latest and most effective marketing trends could be a full-time job. In less than one recent year, we’ve seen both rises and falls of new platforms (Meta is a vivid example), a shift to short-form videos, and a bunch of new marketing approaches that appeared as a result of the global pandemic, etc. In short, it takes much time and effort to craft an effective marketing strategy, which involves building a compelling marketing website design, among many other things. 

Before You Begin

You need to maintain relevance with your audience and stay ahead of the trends if you want your business to succeed in the highly competitive marketing world. The beginning of the strategy-planning process can be daunting for many business owners. To facilitate the process, let’s begin with the basics of the marketing approach you should be aware of. 

First of all, you need to take your time to define the following aspects of your business: 

• What’s your company’s mission? Let’s consider Google’s example for a better understanding of this point. The company has always been pretty transparent in defining its mission - “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” That’s exactly what they do. Every new addon or innovation the company brings to the world perfectly follows and supports its main goal. Try to do the same on your marketing website design. 

• How does your business operate? This point is closely related to the previous one. Volvo Cars is a vivid example of a company that demonstrates how it works. The company pays special attention to the environment and safety. Their consumer-centric approach vividly follows the principles of building a circular economy. 

• Why do people choose your brand? Once you define your company’s mission and operation, you can better understand why people prefer your products over others. For example, have you ever thought about why so many people use Apple products worldwide? Besides the impressive quality of Apple gadgets, people like to be viewed as “thinking differently.” 

With that said, let’s now discuss how you can create an effective marketing strategy and marketing website design that would leave your competitors behind. 

How to Create an Effective Marketing Strategy

There are several key steps involved in building an effective marketing strategy. Let’s discuss them below. 

Building a marketing plan 

A marketing plan is different from a marketing strategy. The marketing strategy provides an overview of the reasons why your company takes specific actions and sets certain goals. A marketing plan, in its turn, is a set of particular steps you will take to achieve your marketing strategy. 

Creating buyer personas 

A buyer persona is a concept of your ideal customer. Let’s use Macy's store’s example of a buyer persona to understand this point better. They define a buyer persona as a stylish working-class woman in her 30s living in a suburb, hunting for designer deals at low prices. Macy’s marketing department can use this description to picture their buyer persona and work on the marketing strategy while keeping a clear definition in mind. 

While working on buyer personas, you need to clearly define demographic and psychographic details, including age, job title, location, interests, challenges, etc. 

Review your media

As a rule, companies use three major categories of media assets when building their strategies. These are: 

• Paid media, like search engines, social media, websites, etc.;

• Owned media, which refers to the assets created by your marketing team, like podcasts, videos, pictures, ebooks, etc.;

• Earned media or user-generated content. 

Review what you have and consider how you can integrate all media assets into your marketing strategy to maximize its efficiency. For example, most companies run websites that feature blogs. Suppose you update your blog with a new article weekly (owned media). In that case, you might also consider promoting your blog posts on social media (paid media), which customers can share (earned media). This way, you can create a more effective marketing strategy. 

Working on the marketing website design

How well is your company’s website designed from the marketing point of view? This point closely relates to your buyer persona and your business's objectives. Once you know your goals and the target audience, you can easily improve marketing website design using your custom-made solutions or some of the paid or free website design templates available in the market. 

Marketing website design is important in attracting new customers and keeping your loyal fans with your brand. Ensure that your website is made according to your brand book and marketing materials. Consider navigating your website as if you were a first-time visitor. It should be easy and intuitive to navigate and seamlessly scale to all screen sizes, providing customers maximum usability.  

Creating content plan 

It’s vital to be aware of your next steps. This is especially useful when you run a blog or share social media posts. Ensure that your content creation plan features media assets that could solve the challenges of your buyer persona. A content plan might include topic clusters, goals, format, and channels you’ll use for each media category you created. 

Bring it to life

Now that we’ve explored the critical steps of a marketing strategy, it’s time to bring it to life. Keep stick to your marketing strategy and plan. Bring your ideas to life and watch your customers’ reactions. If you notice that something goes not work the way you expected, be flexible enough to make the needed changes once it’s already rolling. 

Never be afraid to learn from the example of other big names in your industry. Do not be afraid to make mistakes and learn from your errors. Analyze what you’ve done and find a solution for improvement. 

About the Author: Frank Hamilton is a blogger and translator from Manchester. He is a professional writing expert in such topics as blogging, digital marketing and self-education.He also loves traveling and speaks Spanish, French, German and English.