As a marketer, I know that a marketing strategy is essential to nurture future clients, improve my business’s bottom line, and increase the ROI of my efforts. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy — 74% of small and medium businesses say they lack confidence in their marketing strategies.
To stay consistent and see powerful results, you need a clear roadmap for your objectives, audience, positioning, and tactics.
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Here, I’ll share the critical components of an effective marketing strategy, complete with data from HubSpot’s latest State of Marketing report and a free marketing template so you can hit the ground running.
Table of Contents
A completed marketing strategy typically includes brand objectives, target audience personas, marketing channels, key performance indicators, and more. Overall, 82% of marketers say they believe their marketing strategies are effective.
I’ve found that a marketing strategy will:
- Align your team to specific goals
- Help you tie your efforts to business objectives
- Allow you to identify and test what resonates with your target audience
- Empower you to capitalize on emerging consumer trends
Marketing Strategy vs. Marketing Plan
I like to think of a marketing strategy as outlining the long-term goals and overall approach, while a marketing plan covers the specific actions and tactics to achieve those goals.
In other words, marketing strategy guides a business's overall approach to marketing. It includes goal-setting, market and competitor research, and messaging and positioning for a brand.
For example, say you’re creating a marketing strategy for a new fashion brand. Your strategy might target young Gen Z students and position the brand as trendy and affordable.
But, a strategic marketing plan is a detailed tactical roadmap that outlines the specific actions and tactics that should achieve the marketing strategy’s goals.
For example, the marketing plan for the fashion brand mentioned above might include:
- Targeted social media campaigns
- Influencer partnerships
- Online advertising timeline
Both a marketing strategy and a marketing plan are essential for a business’s success.
To succeed with the fast pace of change, stay relevant with your audience, and integrate AI in marketing, it’s vital to stay ahead of the curve.
Below, I’m going to show you step by step how to create a comprehensive marketing strategy. But first, let’s go over the individual components that make up a strong marketing strategy.
1. Marketing Objectives
Believe it or not, “gaining more customers” isn’t the only marketing objective to consider. While one company may want to focus on lead generation and customer acquisition, another may want to increase brand awareness and industry authority. Others may prioritize customer engagement, loyalty, and referrals.
I always recommend that you outline your marketing objectives before building upon your strategy. Why? Because your goals will inform other components of the plan, including the budget and content creation process.
With every objective, be as specific as possible. Aim to create SMART marketing goals divided by channel or promotional tactic, and don’t forget that you can always come back and revise your goals as your priorities change.
2. Marketing Mix
The marketing mix, also known as the four Ps of marketing, is the preliminary framework you must create to understand what you will be marketing, where you’ll be marketing it, and how you’ll be marketing it.
The following P’s make up this framework:
- Product: What are you selling?
- Price: What is the price?
- Place: Where will you be selling the product?
- Promotion: Where will you be promoting the product?
Once you have these broad strokes, you can extrapolate this information into a full-fledged marketing plan for each promotional channel.
3. Marketing Budget
A marketing budget is an essential element of your strategy. Without allocating funds to hire the right talent, use the right software, advertise on the right channels, and create the right content, your marketing strategy can’t succeed. To get a high return on investment, you must first invest.
Pro tip: Remember that you can always start small — hyper-focusing your budget on one or two efforts — and build upon them once you generate an ROI.
4. Competitive Analysis
Knowing your competition is key when creating a marketing strategy. With a competitive analysis, you will know where your marketing and positioning stand in relation to the market.
You might already have an idea of who your competitors are, but I think it’s still essential to sit down and analyze them. You may end up uncovering a surprise competitor who’s vying for your target buyer’s attention and engagement.
With this analysis, you can position your brand alongside other brands. What do you do better than your competitors? It’s essential to map this information when creating a marketing strategy— grab HubSpot’s free competitive analysis template to get started.
5. Audience Segmentation, Targeting, and Personalization Strategy
Segmentation and targeting refer to the process of delivering more relevant, personalized messages to target audiences. In other words, rather than blasting out generic campaigns to everyone, you’ll go through a methodical process for creating content that resonates with specific audiences.
Personalized marketing is more important than ever: 96% of marketers report that personalized experiences have increased sales. Segmentation and personalization at scale are game-changers for B2B marketers using AI to boost engagement and conversion rates.
During this process, you’ll take three steps:
- Identify your target audience. Carry out market research, interview customers, and create buyer personas detailing your audience’s needs, wants, and pain points.
- Target a segment of your target audience. It’s better to speak to a narrow group of highly qualified buyers than to send your message out to everyone.
- Outline a segmentation and personalization strategy. Document how you will reach different audiences, including how AI and other tools will help you personalize at scale.
6. Content Strategy
Once you have your budget, competitive outlook, and targeting information, it’s time to create a content strategy. First, refer back to the marketing channels chosen in your marketing mix.
A content strategy should outline the content formats best for your audience and the goals for your content— whether that’s to educate, entertain, or generate conversions.
7. Metrics & Key Performance Indicators
Last but certainly not least, your marketing strategy must include metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure how well you’re performing.
The KPIs you choose will vary depending on your business type and preferred customer acquisition channels. Examples of KPIs include:
Now, let’s dive into why it’s important to follow the steps of a marketing strategy.
Why is a marketing strategy important?
Without a defined strategy, you’ll essentially be throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. And that process will cost you money, time, and resources.
A robust marketing strategy will reach your target audience and have the power to turn people who’ve never heard of your brand into loyal repeat customers.
Here are just a few of the top reasons I think a marketing strategy is essential:
Offers Direction
A marketing strategy outlines clear goals and defines the path to achieve them. It pulls together all marketing efforts within an organization for optimal effects.
Targets the Right Audience
A well-defined marketing strategy helps you find and understand your target audience. This helps your business tailor your messaging and positioning to reach the right people at the right time.
Builds Brand Identity
A marketing strategy helps you create a consistent and cohesive brand identity. This makes it easier to align all marketing initiatives for increased brand recognition and loyalty.
Maximizes ROI
With analysis of market trends, competition, and customer behavior, marketing strategies help businesses find the most effective marketing channels and tactics to invest in. This helps businesses get the maximum return on investment.
Evaluates Performance
A marketing strategy defines key metrics and performance indicators. This makes it easier for your business to measure and track the success of marketing initiatives. It also gives you what you need to make data-driven decisions and optimize future campaigns for better results.
1. Conduct market research.
Before you can begin creating your marketing strategy, you need to gather useful data to make informed decisions. Market research is like playing detective, but instead of solving crimes, you uncover juicy details about your customers.
I believe that market research is important because it helps your business make data-driven decisions for your marketing strategy. It also makes it easier to understand your target market, find gaps, and make the most of your resources.
This process is essential for understanding your customers and adapting to changing trends. If you’re new to this process, this complete market research guide and template can help.
Once you have the data you need, you’ll be ready to set some marketing goals.
2. Define your goals.
What do you want to achieve through your marketing efforts?
Well-defined goals will guide your marketing strategy, whether you’re increasing brand awareness, driving sales, or diversifying your customer base. Your marketing strategy goals should reflect your business goals. They should also offer clear direction for marketing efforts.
For example, say one of your business goals is to increase market share by 20% within a year. Your goal as a marketer could include expanding into new target markets, updating your brand, or driving customer acquisition.
Other marketing goals might be to increase brand awareness or generate high-quality leads. You might also want to grow or maintain thought leadership in your industry or increase customer value.
I find that defining clear goals provides direction and clarity, guiding marketing efforts toward desired outcomes. It helps with resource allocation, decision-making, and measuring the success of marketing initiatives.
I recommend this SMART goal guide which can help you with more effective goal-setting.
3. Identify your target audience and create buyer personas.
To create an effective marketing strategy, you need to understand who your ideal customers are. I suggest taking a look at your market research to understand your target audience and market landscape. Accurate customer data is especially important for this step.
But it’s not enough to know who your audience is. Once you’ve figured out who they are, you need to understand what they want. This isn’t just their needs and pain points. It’s how your product or service can solve their problems.
So, if you can’t define who your audience is in one sentence, now’s your chance to do it. Create a buyer persona that’s a snapshot of your ideal customer.
Buyer Persona Example
For example, a store like Macy’s could define a buyer persona as Budgeting Belinda, a stylish working-class woman in her 30s living in a suburb, looking to fill her closet with designer deals at low prices.
With this description, Macy’s marketing department can picture Budgeting Belinda and work with a clear definition in mind.
Buyer personas have critical demographic and psychographic information. This can include:
- Age
- Job title
- Income
- Location
- Interests
- Challenges
Notice how I included all those attributes in Belinda’s description.
For B2B SaaS companies, keep in mind that buyer personas don’t apply solely to the end user. When you’re selling a product to another business, you also have to address the decision-maker, the financial buyer, and the technical advisor, among other roles, says Head of Marketing at Entrapeer, Hillary Lyons.
“You need to be able to tailor your message to each of these unique personas even though most of them will never actually use the product,” says Lyons. “You have to sell each of them on the unparalleled benefit you provide without muddling your [overall] message.”
You don’t have to create your buyer persona with a pen and paper. In fact, HubSpot offers a free template you can use to make your own (and it’s really fun).
You can also use a platform like Versium, which helps you identify, understand, and reach your target audience through data and artificial intelligence.
Buyer personas should be at the core of your strategy.
4. Conduct competitive analysis.
Now that you have an understanding of your customers, it’s time to see who you’re competing with to get their attention.
To begin your competitive analysis, start with your top competitors. Reviewing their websites, content, ads, and pricing can help you understand how to differentiate your brand. I think it’s also a useful way to find growth opportunities.
But how do you know which competitors are most important? This competitive analysis kit with templates will walk you through the process. I like it because it will help you choose and evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, and strategies of your competitors.
This process will help you find market gaps, spot trends, and figure out which marketing tactics will be most effective. Competitive analysis can also offer valuable insights into pricing, positioning, and marketing channels.
5. Develop key messaging.
You’ve figured out who you’re talking to, what they’ve already heard, and what they want to hear. Now, it’s time to share your brand’s unique value proposition.
In this step, you’ll craft key messaging that shows the benefits of your product or service that resonate with your target audience. This process should show off the research and work you have done up to this point. It should also incorporate your creativity, inventiveness, and willingness to experiment.
In my experience, well-crafted key messaging:
- Sets businesses apart from the competition
- Resonates with the target audience
- Is flexible enough to be consistent across all marketing channels
- Builds brand credibility
- Creates an emotional connection with customers
- Influences buying decisions
The key messaging in your marketing strategy is critical to driving engagement, loyalty, and business growth. These value proposition templates can help if you’re not sure how to draft this important messaging.
6. Choose your marketing channels.
You know what you want to say. Now, decide on the best marketing channels for your message. Your top goal for this stage of your strategy is to align your channel choices with your target persona’s media consumption habits and interests.
Start with media channels you’re already using. Then, consider a mix of traditional and digital channels. The top channels used for marketing in 2025 according to Salesforce are social media, website/app, digital ads, email marketing, and email.
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For social media, you’ll need to determine which specific channels are best to reach your audience. Consider your audience’s demographics when making a choice and limit yourself to social channels where you know you can produce high-quality, consistent content.
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To streamline this process, I like to think of your assets in three categories— paid, owned, and earned media.
Paid media is any channel you spend money on to attract your target audience. Most of this spending is on advertising. This includes online and offline channels like:
Owned Media
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Owned media refers to (mostly) online channels your brand owns, including:
It also refers to the media your marketing team creates, such as
Earned Media
Another way to say earned media is user-generated content. Earned media includes:
- Shares on social media.
- Posts about your business on X or Threads.
- Reels posted on Instagram mentioning your brand.
- Organic news stories about your company.
To decide which marketing channels are best for your marketing strategy, look carefully at each channel. Think about which channels are best for reaching your audience, staying within budget, and meeting your goals.
For example, a business targeting a younger demographic, like Gen Z, might consider using TikTok or Reddit to reach its audience.
It’s also important to choose a number of channels that’s manageable for your team and budget. 82% of small and medium businesses agree that using multiple marketing channels generates better results, but it’s important to avoid taking on too much. It’s much better to market on three channels well than on 10 channels poorly.
I suggest looking at your content strategy as a whole to get a clear vision of how you can integrate different content formats and channels into your strategy.
For example, say you already have a blog that’s rolling out weekly content in your niche (owned media). You might consider promoting your blog posts on Threads (owned media), which customers might then repost (earned media). Ultimately, that will help you create a better, more well-rounded marketing strategy.
7. Create, track, and analyze KPIs.
Once you have a clear outline of your marketing strategy, you’ll need to think about how you’ll measure whether it’s working.
At this stage, you’ll shift from marketing detective to numbers nerd. With a little planning and prep, your analytics can unveil the mysteries of marketing performance and unlock super insights.
Review your strategy and choose measurable KPIs to track the effectiveness of your efforts. Pick a marketing analytics software solution that works for your team to collect and measure your data.
Ideally, I recommend choosing an analytics platform that allows you to track data across all of your marketing channels — from emails to social media and your website. This centralizes all of your data, which makes it easier to understand how each channel contributes to your overall strategy.
You can then plan to check and analyze the performance of your strategy over time and identify the channels that bring the best results. This can help you refine your approach based on results and feedback.
Lexi Boese, an ecommerce growth strategist and co-founder of The Digital Opportunists, recommends making data a priority when building your marketing strategy.
“The more data you can use, the easier you can track your success,” she says. “This could be as simple as understanding which channels convert the highest amount of customers (to determine how your team should prioritize ad spend), or assessing whether you have a higher amount of first-time or returning customers to [determine] if you should focus on internal or external marketing.”
Analyzing KPIs helps businesses stay agile, refine their strategies, and adapt to evolving customer needs.
8. Create a content strategy.
Think of a content strategy like a plan for how you want to communicate with people through things like social media posts, blog articles, videos, or even emails.
You already know who you're trying to reach, but this determines how you’re going to say it and in which format. A content strategy should outline the type of content you’ll share, goals, how often, and an editorial calendar for planning content.
In 2025, multimedia content and visual storytelling are king. According to the State of Marketing, 30% of marketers use short-form videos as part of their content strategy, and 31% say it generates the highest ROI of all content creation formats.
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It’s even more essential to invest in formats that have a high ROI, such as short-form video, audio content, and user-generated content. Consider adding podcast and audio content to your strategy: 91% of marketers planned to increase their investment in podcasts and audio content in 2025, and 46% of weekly podcast listeners have purchased a product or service after hearing about it on a podcast.
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That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t invest in text-based content like SEO and blogging. It’s simply important to be strategic about where you allot the most resources, in my opinion, especially if you have a limited budget.
9. Create an AI strategy for marketing.
Your boss may have asked you how you plan on using AI this year. If you’re like me, you’re learning on the fly. 48% of marketing leaders have invested in AI tools for their teams, but just 47% of marketers have a clear understanding of how to use AI in their marketing strategy.
Let’s be clear, AI isn’t a marketing strategy on its own.
It’s simply a tool that can make everything else— identifying buyer personas, creating personalized content, prospecting, and even analytics— faster and more effective. 75% of marketers say they use AI to reduce manual task time, and 86% say that AI saves them over an hour a day.
In your marketing strategy, document how you plan to integrate AI into your processes and workflows.
Examples of AI in Marketing Strategy
- Analyzing your target audience and their wants, needs, and desire.
- Writing a first draft of emails, blog posts, or website content.
- Using buyer signals in your CRM to send hyper-personalized campaigns.
10. Present your marketing strategy.
A finished marketing strategy will pull together the sections and components above. It may also include:
Executive Summary
A concise overview that outlines the marketing goals, target audience, and key marketing tactics.
Brand Identity
You may want to create a brand identity as part of your strategy. Brand positioning, voice, and visual identity may also be helpful additions to your marketing strategy.
Marketing Plan and Tactics
Your marketing plan is the specific actions you’ll take to achieve the goals in your marketing strategy. Your plan may cover campaigns, channel-specific tactics, and more.
Not sure where to start? This free marketing plan template can help.
Download for Free
Budget Allocation
Defining a budget for your marketing strategy helps you show that your planned resource allocation aligns with business goals.
I think it’s important to get clear about your spending and how your proposed budget will impact the company’s overall business goals.
Timeline and Milestones
Marketing strategies can be complex and difficult for stakeholders to understand. Creating a timeline that outlines the different tactics, milestones, and deadlines can help.
Your marketing strategy is a living document. It will need constant reviews, revisions, and optimizations to meet your long-term goals. Prepare to revise your marketing strategy at least once a year to address market trends, customer feedback, and changing business objectives.
Examples of Successful Marketing Strategies
Digital Strategy: Owned Media
Regal shares interactive Instagram content that’s not only relevant to its film-loving customers but also encourages them to interact with the content.
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Regal’s Instagram post is an example of owned media because the company was in full control of the answers it shared with its followers. Interacting in the comment section was an opportunity for Regal to showcase its voice and brand to its audience.
And it clearly worked well. The post received half as many comments as it did likes, with an impressive 207 comments.
Best for: I think social media is a great owned channel to experiment with new ideas for your overall marketing strategy.
Digital Strategy: User-Generated Content, Earned Media
I think user-generated content is one of the best ways to gain traction in your strategy.
It demonstrates your appreciation for loyal customers, builds community, and incentivizes other users to promote your products for the chance at a similar shout-out.
Plus, sometimes the content your brand loyalists create is really, really good. In this case, the consumer is creating a handmade needlepoint featuring the brand’s product.
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Pro tip: UGC isn’t reserved for consumer brands with visual products to share. B2B companies can also take advantage of UGC by sharing positive reviews of their product and incorporating them into their messaging.
Digital Strategy: Owned Media
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Small Girls PR is a boutique PR company based in New York, and one of the company’s talents is connecting with amazing clients. This post on Instagram is an effective marketing example, as it boosts awareness for their brand and offers social proof by featuring high-profile clients.
Pro tip: I find that owned media in the form of PR is a great way to spotlight company executives and position them as industry leaders.
Digital Strategy: Paid Media
Eye-tracking software company Tobii launched a LinkedIn ad to promote a lead magnet. While the brand may have created the guide specifically for paid promotions, it’s also possible that they repurposed a high-performing blog post into a downloadable PDF.
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In this case, all they had to do was repackage their current content, build an ad around it with creative assets, and run it.
What I like: In previous sections, I discussed the power of leveraging multiple forms of media in your marketing strategy. This is a great example of it.
Digital Strategy: Owned Media, Influencer Partnership
If you’ve got the time for influencer partnerships, I encourage you to take full advantage of it.
Influencer marketing is when you partner with influencers to promote your content on their site. By doing this, your content reaches new audiences you might not be able to reach organically:
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Target recently partnered with fashion expert and influencer Jeneé Naylor to collaborate on its Future Collective line. What made this campaign even more powerful was that Naylor was a former Target Team Member.
I love how this collaboration highlighted Target’s commitment to supporting its team members and influencer marketing strategy.
Best for: Consumer, lifestyle, and retail brands. While just 24% of marketers use influencer marketing, marketers report that it has a high ROI. The channels with the best ROI for influencer marketing are Facebook (28%), Instagram (22%), and YouTube (12%).
Best Marketing Tools to Execute Your Strategy
While a marketing strategy is essential to reach your goals, that’s just step one. You need a robust tech stack to plan, manage, and execute your marketing strategy. Tools can make or break your marketing efforts. Just over half of marketers without a CRM, for example, felt their marketing strategy was effective compared with 87% of those using HubSpot.
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Here, I’ve curated a list of marketing and management tools to help you track and measure the success of your marketing goals.
HubSpot’s Marketing Hub allows you to connect all your marketing tools into one centralized platform, including social media, content marketing, and email marketing.
HubSpot avoids the complexity and headaches of legacy CRM tools. With this tool, you can attract users with blogs, SEO, and live chat tools. You can then convert and nurture those leads through marketing automation, the website and landing page builder, and lead tracking features.
With custom reporting and built-in analytics, you can analyze your data and plan your next move.
HubSpot’s Breeze AI features bring generative AI to your fingertips so you can create great content, automate workflows, and built campaigns with AI-powered intelligence.
What I like: HubSpot Marketing Hub integrates with over 800 tools, making it easy to create a tech stack that meets your specific business needs.
Pricing: Free plans are available; Starter - $15/month; Professional - $800/month; Enterprise - $3,600/month.
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Trello keeps your marketing team on track and openly communicates about the projects you’re working on. You can create boards for individual campaigns, editorial calendars, or quarterly goals.
Built-in workflows and automation capabilities keep communication streamlined, and simplicity keeps your marketing team focused on the work that matters.
What I like: Trello’s visual elements and straightforward organization make it easy for everyone to stay on the same page.
Pricing: Free plans available; Standard - $5/month; Premium - $10/month; Enterprise - $17.50/month for 250 users.
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TrueNorth is a marketing management platform built to help you hit your marketing goals. Built specifically for marketing teams, TrueNorth turns your marketing strategy into a visual projection of your growth, which is used to create monthly milestones that help you stay on track.
What I like: TrueNorth centralizes all your ideas, campaigns, and results in one place, with everything tied back to your goal.
Pricing: Plans cost $99/month, with a free 14-day trial available.
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Everything on Monday.com starts with a board or visually driven table. Create and customize workflows for your team and keep groups, items, sub-items, and updates synced in real time.
You can also transform data pulled from the timeline and use Gantt views to track your projects on Monday.com to make sure you’re meeting your deadlines.
Plus, with more than 40 integrations — from SurveyMonkey to Mailchimp and, of course, HubSpot — you can visualize your data and make sure your whole company is collaborating.
Best for: Companies with locations around the world or lots of remote workers, as it keeps everyone in touch and up to speed no matter where they’re located.
Pricing: Monday.com is free for two seats; $9/month/seat or $90/month for 10 seats; Standard - $12/month/seat or $120/month for 10 seats; Pro - $19/seat/month or $190 per month for 10 seats. Contact Monday.com for Enterprise pricing.
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SEO continues to be a huge factor in the successful ranking of your website. But you need the right tools to do it successfully.
Semrush allows you to run a technical SEO audit, track daily rankings, analyze your competitors’ SEO strategy, research millions of keywords, and even source ideas for earning more organic traffic.
But the benefits don’t stop at SEO. I like that you can also use SemRush for PPC, building and measuring an effective social media strategy, content planning, and even market research.
Best for: Creating, implementing, and tracking your marketing strategy.
Pricing: Pro - $139.95/month; Guru - $249.95/month; Business - $499.95/month.
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BuzzSumo allows you to analyze data to enhance and lead your marketing strategy, all while exploring high-performing content in your industry.
Use the platform to find influencers who may help your brand reach, track comments, and find trends to make the most of every turn.
What I like: As your needs evolve, you can also use their crisis management and video marketing tools.
Pricing: Content creation plan - $199/month; PR & Comms plan - $299/month; Suite plan - $499/month; Enterprise plan - $999/month.
Need to optimize your website?
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I highly recommend getting started with Crazy Egg. You’ll be able to identify “attention hotspots” on your product pages, track ad campaign traffic on your site, and understand if shoppers are clicking where you want them to.
You can even make sure your “Buy Now” buttons are in the best place.
Crazy Egg also offers recordings, A/B testing, and more to help make sure your website is offering the best user experience.
Best for: If your marketing strategy includes optimizing your website, Crazy Egg is the tool for you.
Pricing: Starter - $29/month; Plus - $99/month; Pro - $249/month; Enterprise - $499/month.
Get Started Creating an Effective Marketing Strategy
Ultimately, creating a complete marketing strategy isn’t something that can happen overnight. It takes time, hard work, and dedication to confirm you’re reaching your ideal audience— whenever and wherever they want to be reached.
Stick with it (and use some of the resources I’ve included in this post), and over time, research and customer feedback will help you refine your strategy to make sure you’re spending most of your time on the marketing channels your audience cares most about.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in October 2019. It has been updated for freshness and accuracy.
from Marketing https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/marketing-strategy
As a marketer, I know that a marketing strategy is essential to nurture future clients, improve my business’s bottom line, and increase the ROI of my efforts. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy — 74% of small and medium businesses say they lack confidence in their marketing strategies.
To stay consistent and see powerful results, you need a clear roadmap for your objectives, audience, positioning, and tactics.
Here, I’ll share the critical components of an effective marketing strategy, complete with data from HubSpot’s latest State of Marketing report and a free marketing template so you can hit the ground running.
Table of Contents
A completed marketing strategy typically includes brand objectives, target audience personas, marketing channels, key performance indicators, and more. Overall, 82% of marketers say they believe their marketing strategies are effective.
I’ve found that a marketing strategy will:
- Align your team to specific goals
- Help you tie your efforts to business objectives
- Allow you to identify and test what resonates with your target audience
- Empower you to capitalize on emerging consumer trends
Marketing Strategy vs. Marketing Plan
I like to think of a marketing strategy as outlining the long-term goals and overall approach, while a marketing plan covers the specific actions and tactics to achieve those goals.
In other words, marketing strategy guides a business's overall approach to marketing. It includes goal-setting, market and competitor research, and messaging and positioning for a brand.
For example, say you’re creating a marketing strategy for a new fashion brand. Your strategy might target young Gen Z students and position the brand as trendy and affordable.
But, a strategic marketing plan is a detailed tactical roadmap that outlines the specific actions and tactics that should achieve the marketing strategy’s goals.
For example, the marketing plan for the fashion brand mentioned above might include:
- Targeted social media campaigns
- Influencer partnerships
- Online advertising timeline
Both a marketing strategy and a marketing plan are essential for a business’s success.
To succeed with the fast pace of change, stay relevant with your audience, and integrate AI in marketing, it’s vital to stay ahead of the curve.
Below, I’m going to show you step by step how to create a comprehensive marketing strategy. But first, let’s go over the individual components that make up a strong marketing strategy.
1. Marketing Objectives
Believe it or not, “gaining more customers” isn’t the only marketing objective to consider. While one company may want to focus on lead generation and customer acquisition, another may want to increase brand awareness and industry authority. Others may prioritize customer engagement, loyalty, and referrals.
I always recommend that you outline your marketing objectives before building upon your strategy. Why? Because your goals will inform other components of the plan, including the budget and content creation process.
With every objective, be as specific as possible. Aim to create SMART marketing goals divided by channel or promotional tactic, and don’t forget that you can always come back and revise your goals as your priorities change.
2. Marketing Mix
The marketing mix, also known as the four Ps of marketing, is the preliminary framework you must create to understand what you will be marketing, where you’ll be marketing it, and how you’ll be marketing it.
The following P’s make up this framework:
- Product: What are you selling?
- Price: What is the price?
- Place: Where will you be selling the product?
- Promotion: Where will you be promoting the product?
Once you have these broad strokes, you can extrapolate this information into a full-fledged marketing plan for each promotional channel.
3. Marketing Budget
A marketing budget is an essential element of your strategy. Without allocating funds to hire the right talent, use the right software, advertise on the right channels, and create the right content, your marketing strategy can’t succeed. To get a high return on investment, you must first invest.
Pro tip: Remember that you can always start small — hyper-focusing your budget on one or two efforts — and build upon them once you generate an ROI.
4. Competitive Analysis
Knowing your competition is key when creating a marketing strategy. With a competitive analysis, you will know where your marketing and positioning stand in relation to the market.
You might already have an idea of who your competitors are, but I think it’s still essential to sit down and analyze them. You may end up uncovering a surprise competitor who’s vying for your target buyer’s attention and engagement.
With this analysis, you can position your brand alongside other brands. What do you do better than your competitors? It’s essential to map this information when creating a marketing strategy— grab HubSpot’s free competitive analysis template to get started.
5. Audience Segmentation, Targeting, and Personalization Strategy
Segmentation and targeting refer to the process of delivering more relevant, personalized messages to target audiences. In other words, rather than blasting out generic campaigns to everyone, you’ll go through a methodical process for creating content that resonates with specific audiences.
Personalized marketing is more important than ever: 96% of marketers report that personalized experiences have increased sales. Segmentation and personalization at scale are game-changers for B2B marketers using AI to boost engagement and conversion rates.
During this process, you’ll take three steps:
- Identify your target audience. Carry out market research, interview customers, and create buyer personas detailing your audience’s needs, wants, and pain points.
- Target a segment of your target audience. It’s better to speak to a narrow group of highly qualified buyers than to send your message out to everyone.
- Outline a segmentation and personalization strategy. Document how you will reach different audiences, including how AI and other tools will help you personalize at scale.
6. Content Strategy
Once you have your budget, competitive outlook, and targeting information, it’s time to create a content strategy. First, refer back to the marketing channels chosen in your marketing mix.
A content strategy should outline the content formats best for your audience and the goals for your content— whether that’s to educate, entertain, or generate conversions.
7. Metrics & Key Performance Indicators
Last but certainly not least, your marketing strategy must include metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure how well you’re performing.
The KPIs you choose will vary depending on your business type and preferred customer acquisition channels. Examples of KPIs include:
Now, let’s dive into why it’s important to follow the steps of a marketing strategy.
Why is a marketing strategy important?
Without a defined strategy, you’ll essentially be throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. And that process will cost you money, time, and resources.
A robust marketing strategy will reach your target audience and have the power to turn people who’ve never heard of your brand into loyal repeat customers.
Here are just a few of the top reasons I think a marketing strategy is essential:
Offers Direction
A marketing strategy outlines clear goals and defines the path to achieve them. It pulls together all marketing efforts within an organization for optimal effects.
Targets the Right Audience
A well-defined marketing strategy helps you find and understand your target audience. This helps your business tailor your messaging and positioning to reach the right people at the right time.
Builds Brand Identity
A marketing strategy helps you create a consistent and cohesive brand identity. This makes it easier to align all marketing initiatives for increased brand recognition and loyalty.
Maximizes ROI
With analysis of market trends, competition, and customer behavior, marketing strategies help businesses find the most effective marketing channels and tactics to invest in. This helps businesses get the maximum return on investment.
Evaluates Performance
A marketing strategy defines key metrics and performance indicators. This makes it easier for your business to measure and track the success of marketing initiatives. It also gives you what you need to make data-driven decisions and optimize future campaigns for better results.
1. Conduct market research.
Before you can begin creating your marketing strategy, you need to gather useful data to make informed decisions. Market research is like playing detective, but instead of solving crimes, you uncover juicy details about your customers.
I believe that market research is important because it helps your business make data-driven decisions for your marketing strategy. It also makes it easier to understand your target market, find gaps, and make the most of your resources.
This process is essential for understanding your customers and adapting to changing trends. If you’re new to this process, this complete market research guide and template can help.
Once you have the data you need, you’ll be ready to set some marketing goals.
2. Define your goals.
What do you want to achieve through your marketing efforts?
Well-defined goals will guide your marketing strategy, whether you’re increasing brand awareness, driving sales, or diversifying your customer base. Your marketing strategy goals should reflect your business goals. They should also offer clear direction for marketing efforts.
For example, say one of your business goals is to increase market share by 20% within a year. Your goal as a marketer could include expanding into new target markets, updating your brand, or driving customer acquisition.
Other marketing goals might be to increase brand awareness or generate high-quality leads. You might also want to grow or maintain thought leadership in your industry or increase customer value.
I find that defining clear goals provides direction and clarity, guiding marketing efforts toward desired outcomes. It helps with resource allocation, decision-making, and measuring the success of marketing initiatives.
I recommend this SMART goal guide which can help you with more effective goal-setting.
3. Identify your target audience and create buyer personas.
To create an effective marketing strategy, you need to understand who your ideal customers are. I suggest taking a look at your market research to understand your target audience and market landscape. Accurate customer data is especially important for this step.
But it’s not enough to know who your audience is. Once you’ve figured out who they are, you need to understand what they want. This isn’t just their needs and pain points. It’s how your product or service can solve their problems.
So, if you can’t define who your audience is in one sentence, now’s your chance to do it. Create a buyer persona that’s a snapshot of your ideal customer.
Buyer Persona Example
For example, a store like Macy’s could define a buyer persona as Budgeting Belinda, a stylish working-class woman in her 30s living in a suburb, looking to fill her closet with designer deals at low prices.
With this description, Macy’s marketing department can picture Budgeting Belinda and work with a clear definition in mind.
Buyer personas have critical demographic and psychographic information. This can include:
- Age
- Job title
- Income
- Location
- Interests
- Challenges
Notice how I included all those attributes in Belinda’s description.
For B2B SaaS companies, keep in mind that buyer personas don’t apply solely to the end user. When you’re selling a product to another business, you also have to address the decision-maker, the financial buyer, and the technical advisor, among other roles, says Head of Marketing at Entrapeer, Hillary Lyons.
“You need to be able to tailor your message to each of these unique personas even though most of them will never actually use the product,” says Lyons. “You have to sell each of them on the unparalleled benefit you provide without muddling your [overall] message.”
You don’t have to create your buyer persona with a pen and paper. In fact, HubSpot offers a free template you can use to make your own (and it’s really fun).
You can also use a platform like Versium, which helps you identify, understand, and reach your target audience through data and artificial intelligence.
Buyer personas should be at the core of your strategy.
4. Conduct competitive analysis.
Now that you have an understanding of your customers, it’s time to see who you’re competing with to get their attention.
To begin your competitive analysis, start with your top competitors. Reviewing their websites, content, ads, and pricing can help you understand how to differentiate your brand. I think it’s also a useful way to find growth opportunities.
But how do you know which competitors are most important? This competitive analysis kit with templates will walk you through the process. I like it because it will help you choose and evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, and strategies of your competitors.
This process will help you find market gaps, spot trends, and figure out which marketing tactics will be most effective. Competitive analysis can also offer valuable insights into pricing, positioning, and marketing channels.
5. Develop key messaging.
You’ve figured out who you’re talking to, what they’ve already heard, and what they want to hear. Now, it’s time to share your brand’s unique value proposition.
In this step, you’ll craft key messaging that shows the benefits of your product or service that resonate with your target audience. This process should show off the research and work you have done up to this point. It should also incorporate your creativity, inventiveness, and willingness to experiment.
In my experience, well-crafted key messaging:
- Sets businesses apart from the competition
- Resonates with the target audience
- Is flexible enough to be consistent across all marketing channels
- Builds brand credibility
- Creates an emotional connection with customers
- Influences buying decisions
The key messaging in your marketing strategy is critical to driving engagement, loyalty, and business growth. These value proposition templates can help if you’re not sure how to draft this important messaging.
6. Choose your marketing channels.
You know what you want to say. Now, decide on the best marketing channels for your message. Your top goal for this stage of your strategy is to align your channel choices with your target persona’s media consumption habits and interests.
Start with media channels you’re already using. Then, consider a mix of traditional and digital channels. The top channels used for marketing in 2025 according to Salesforce are social media, website/app, digital ads, email marketing, and email.
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For social media, you’ll need to determine which specific channels are best to reach your audience. Consider your audience’s demographics when making a choice and limit yourself to social channels where you know you can produce high-quality, consistent content.
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To streamline this process, I like to think of your assets in three categories— paid, owned, and earned media.
Paid media is any channel you spend money on to attract your target audience. Most of this spending is on advertising. This includes online and offline channels like:
Owned Media
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Owned media refers to (mostly) online channels your brand owns, including:
It also refers to the media your marketing team creates, such as
Earned Media
Another way to say earned media is user-generated content. Earned media includes:
- Shares on social media.
- Posts about your business on X or Threads.
- Reels posted on Instagram mentioning your brand.
- Organic news stories about your company.
To decide which marketing channels are best for your marketing strategy, look carefully at each channel. Think about which channels are best for reaching your audience, staying within budget, and meeting your goals.
For example, a business targeting a younger demographic, like Gen Z, might consider using TikTok or Reddit to reach its audience.
It’s also important to choose a number of channels that’s manageable for your team and budget. 82% of small and medium businesses agree that using multiple marketing channels generates better results, but it’s important to avoid taking on too much. It’s much better to market on three channels well than on 10 channels poorly.
I suggest looking at your content strategy as a whole to get a clear vision of how you can integrate different content formats and channels into your strategy.
For example, say you already have a blog that’s rolling out weekly content in your niche (owned media). You might consider promoting your blog posts on Threads (owned media), which customers might then repost (earned media). Ultimately, that will help you create a better, more well-rounded marketing strategy.
7. Create, track, and analyze KPIs.
Once you have a clear outline of your marketing strategy, you’ll need to think about how you’ll measure whether it’s working.
At this stage, you’ll shift from marketing detective to numbers nerd. With a little planning and prep, your analytics can unveil the mysteries of marketing performance and unlock super insights.
Review your strategy and choose measurable KPIs to track the effectiveness of your efforts. Pick a marketing analytics software solution that works for your team to collect and measure your data.
Ideally, I recommend choosing an analytics platform that allows you to track data across all of your marketing channels — from emails to social media and your website. This centralizes all of your data, which makes it easier to understand how each channel contributes to your overall strategy.
You can then plan to check and analyze the performance of your strategy over time and identify the channels that bring the best results. This can help you refine your approach based on results and feedback.
Lexi Boese, an ecommerce growth strategist and co-founder of The Digital Opportunists, recommends making data a priority when building your marketing strategy.
“The more data you can use, the easier you can track your success,” she says. “This could be as simple as understanding which channels convert the highest amount of customers (to determine how your team should prioritize ad spend), or assessing whether you have a higher amount of first-time or returning customers to [determine] if you should focus on internal or external marketing.”
Analyzing KPIs helps businesses stay agile, refine their strategies, and adapt to evolving customer needs.
8. Create a content strategy.
Think of a content strategy like a plan for how you want to communicate with people through things like social media posts, blog articles, videos, or even emails.
You already know who you're trying to reach, but this determines how you’re going to say it and in which format. A content strategy should outline the type of content you’ll share, goals, how often, and an editorial calendar for planning content.
In 2025, multimedia content and visual storytelling are king. According to the State of Marketing, 30% of marketers use short-form videos as part of their content strategy, and 31% say it generates the highest ROI of all content creation formats.
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It’s even more essential to invest in formats that have a high ROI, such as short-form video, audio content, and user-generated content. Consider adding podcast and audio content to your strategy: 91% of marketers planned to increase their investment in podcasts and audio content in 2025, and 46% of weekly podcast listeners have purchased a product or service after hearing about it on a podcast.
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That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t invest in text-based content like SEO and blogging. It’s simply important to be strategic about where you allot the most resources, in my opinion, especially if you have a limited budget.
9. Create an AI strategy for marketing.
Your boss may have asked you how you plan on using AI this year. If you’re like me, you’re learning on the fly. 48% of marketing leaders have invested in AI tools for their teams, but just 47% of marketers have a clear understanding of how to use AI in their marketing strategy.
Let’s be clear, AI isn’t a marketing strategy on its own.
It’s simply a tool that can make everything else— identifying buyer personas, creating personalized content, prospecting, and even analytics— faster and more effective. 75% of marketers say they use AI to reduce manual task time, and 86% say that AI saves them over an hour a day.
In your marketing strategy, document how you plan to integrate AI into your processes and workflows.
Examples of AI in Marketing Strategy
- Analyzing your target audience and their wants, needs, and desire.
- Writing a first draft of emails, blog posts, or website content.
- Using buyer signals in your CRM to send hyper-personalized campaigns.
10. Present your marketing strategy.
A finished marketing strategy will pull together the sections and components above. It may also include:
Executive Summary
A concise overview that outlines the marketing goals, target audience, and key marketing tactics.
Brand Identity
You may want to create a brand identity as part of your strategy. Brand positioning, voice, and visual identity may also be helpful additions to your marketing strategy.
Marketing Plan and Tactics
Your marketing plan is the specific actions you’ll take to achieve the goals in your marketing strategy. Your plan may cover campaigns, channel-specific tactics, and more.
Not sure where to start? This free marketing plan template can help.
Download for Free
Budget Allocation
Defining a budget for your marketing strategy helps you show that your planned resource allocation aligns with business goals.
I think it’s important to get clear about your spending and how your proposed budget will impact the company’s overall business goals.
Timeline and Milestones
Marketing strategies can be complex and difficult for stakeholders to understand. Creating a timeline that outlines the different tactics, milestones, and deadlines can help.
Your marketing strategy is a living document. It will need constant reviews, revisions, and optimizations to meet your long-term goals. Prepare to revise your marketing strategy at least once a year to address market trends, customer feedback, and changing business objectives.
Examples of Successful Marketing Strategies
Digital Strategy: Owned Media
Regal shares interactive Instagram content that’s not only relevant to its film-loving customers but also encourages them to interact with the content.
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Regal’s Instagram post is an example of owned media because the company was in full control of the answers it shared with its followers. Interacting in the comment section was an opportunity for Regal to showcase its voice and brand to its audience.
And it clearly worked well. The post received half as many comments as it did likes, with an impressive 207 comments.
Best for: I think social media is a great owned channel to experiment with new ideas for your overall marketing strategy.
Digital Strategy: User-Generated Content, Earned Media
I think user-generated content is one of the best ways to gain traction in your strategy.
It demonstrates your appreciation for loyal customers, builds community, and incentivizes other users to promote your products for the chance at a similar shout-out.
Plus, sometimes the content your brand loyalists create is really, really good. In this case, the consumer is creating a handmade needlepoint featuring the brand’s product.
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Pro tip: UGC isn’t reserved for consumer brands with visual products to share. B2B companies can also take advantage of UGC by sharing positive reviews of their product and incorporating them into their messaging.
Digital Strategy: Owned Media
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Small Girls PR is a boutique PR company based in New York, and one of the company’s talents is connecting with amazing clients. This post on Instagram is an effective marketing example, as it boosts awareness for their brand and offers social proof by featuring high-profile clients.
Pro tip: I find that owned media in the form of PR is a great way to spotlight company executives and position them as industry leaders.
Digital Strategy: Paid Media
Eye-tracking software company Tobii launched a LinkedIn ad to promote a lead magnet. While the brand may have created the guide specifically for paid promotions, it’s also possible that they repurposed a high-performing blog post into a downloadable PDF.
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In this case, all they had to do was repackage their current content, build an ad around it with creative assets, and run it.
What I like: In previous sections, I discussed the power of leveraging multiple forms of media in your marketing strategy. This is a great example of it.
Digital Strategy: Owned Media, Influencer Partnership
If you’ve got the time for influencer partnerships, I encourage you to take full advantage of it.
Influencer marketing is when you partner with influencers to promote your content on their site. By doing this, your content reaches new audiences you might not be able to reach organically:
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Target recently partnered with fashion expert and influencer Jeneé Naylor to collaborate on its Future Collective line. What made this campaign even more powerful was that Naylor was a former Target Team Member.
I love how this collaboration highlighted Target’s commitment to supporting its team members and influencer marketing strategy.
Best for: Consumer, lifestyle, and retail brands. While just 24% of marketers use influencer marketing, marketers report that it has a high ROI. The channels with the best ROI for influencer marketing are Facebook (28%), Instagram (22%), and YouTube (12%).
Best Marketing Tools to Execute Your Strategy
While a marketing strategy is essential to reach your goals, that’s just step one. You need a robust tech stack to plan, manage, and execute your marketing strategy. Tools can make or break your marketing efforts. Just over half of marketers without a CRM, for example, felt their marketing strategy was effective compared with 87% of those using HubSpot.
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Here, I’ve curated a list of marketing and management tools to help you track and measure the success of your marketing goals.
HubSpot’s Marketing Hub allows you to connect all your marketing tools into one centralized platform, including social media, content marketing, and email marketing.
HubSpot avoids the complexity and headaches of legacy CRM tools. With this tool, you can attract users with blogs, SEO, and live chat tools. You can then convert and nurture those leads through marketing automation, the website and landing page builder, and lead tracking features.
With custom reporting and built-in analytics, you can analyze your data and plan your next move.
HubSpot’s Breeze AI features bring generative AI to your fingertips so you can create great content, automate workflows, and built campaigns with AI-powered intelligence.
What I like: HubSpot Marketing Hub integrates with over 800 tools, making it easy to create a tech stack that meets your specific business needs.
Pricing: Free plans are available; Starter - $15/month; Professional - $800/month; Enterprise - $3,600/month.
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Trello keeps your marketing team on track and openly communicates about the projects you’re working on. You can create boards for individual campaigns, editorial calendars, or quarterly goals.
Built-in workflows and automation capabilities keep communication streamlined, and simplicity keeps your marketing team focused on the work that matters.
What I like: Trello’s visual elements and straightforward organization make it easy for everyone to stay on the same page.
Pricing: Free plans available; Standard - $5/month; Premium - $10/month; Enterprise - $17.50/month for 250 users.
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TrueNorth is a marketing management platform built to help you hit your marketing goals. Built specifically for marketing teams, TrueNorth turns your marketing strategy into a visual projection of your growth, which is used to create monthly milestones that help you stay on track.
What I like: TrueNorth centralizes all your ideas, campaigns, and results in one place, with everything tied back to your goal.
Pricing: Plans cost $99/month, with a free 14-day trial available.
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Everything on Monday.com starts with a board or visually driven table. Create and customize workflows for your team and keep groups, items, sub-items, and updates synced in real time.
You can also transform data pulled from the timeline and use Gantt views to track your projects on Monday.com to make sure you’re meeting your deadlines.
Plus, with more than 40 integrations — from SurveyMonkey to Mailchimp and, of course, HubSpot — you can visualize your data and make sure your whole company is collaborating.
Best for: Companies with locations around the world or lots of remote workers, as it keeps everyone in touch and up to speed no matter where they’re located.
Pricing: Monday.com is free for two seats; $9/month/seat or $90/month for 10 seats; Standard - $12/month/seat or $120/month for 10 seats; Pro - $19/seat/month or $190 per month for 10 seats. Contact Monday.com for Enterprise pricing.
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SEO continues to be a huge factor in the successful ranking of your website. But you need the right tools to do it successfully.
Semrush allows you to run a technical SEO audit, track daily rankings, analyze your competitors’ SEO strategy, research millions of keywords, and even source ideas for earning more organic traffic.
But the benefits don’t stop at SEO. I like that you can also use SemRush for PPC, building and measuring an effective social media strategy, content planning, and even market research.
Best for: Creating, implementing, and tracking your marketing strategy.
Pricing: Pro - $139.95/month; Guru - $249.95/month; Business - $499.95/month.
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BuzzSumo allows you to analyze data to enhance and lead your marketing strategy, all while exploring high-performing content in your industry.
Use the platform to find influencers who may help your brand reach, track comments, and find trends to make the most of every turn.
What I like: As your needs evolve, you can also use their crisis management and video marketing tools.
Pricing: Content creation plan - $199/month; PR & Comms plan - $299/month; Suite plan - $499/month; Enterprise plan - $999/month.
Need to optimize your website?
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I highly recommend getting started with Crazy Egg. You’ll be able to identify “attention hotspots” on your product pages, track ad campaign traffic on your site, and understand if shoppers are clicking where you want them to.
You can even make sure your “Buy Now” buttons are in the best place.
Crazy Egg also offers recordings, A/B testing, and more to help make sure your website is offering the best user experience.
Best for: If your marketing strategy includes optimizing your website, Crazy Egg is the tool for you.
Pricing: Starter - $29/month; Plus - $99/month; Pro - $249/month; Enterprise - $499/month.
Get Started Creating an Effective Marketing Strategy
Ultimately, creating a complete marketing strategy isn’t something that can happen overnight. It takes time, hard work, and dedication to confirm you’re reaching your ideal audience— whenever and wherever they want to be reached.
Stick with it (and use some of the resources I’ve included in this post), and over time, research and customer feedback will help you refine your strategy to make sure you’re spending most of your time on the marketing channels your audience cares most about.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in October 2019. It has been updated for freshness and accuracy.
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