How to build a Marketing Strategy from scratch?

The most important thing is to know your customers. Based on customers, you can create a marketing strategy that aligns with the business model of the company. Create a business strategy for sustainable competitive advantage. This strategy will help you define your customer base and pricing strategy. It will also define the unique value that you are offering to your customer.

I would recommend using the following process to create a marketing strategy. 

Let me explain with an example, Deliveroo.

• Customer research

Find out the needs an wants of customers. Deliveroo is food delivery app in the United Kingdom. Deliveroo targets customers who want to eat food from premium and famous restaurant and are willing to pay a small delivery fee. They understood what customer needs and created a value proposition.

Tools: Surveys, Focus groups, Online forums/groups will help in understanding the needs of customers in that region.

• Market segmentation and targeting

You should target customers once you get a general idea about them. Let’s assume that Deliveroo wants to market their app to customers in the UK where should they promote their products? In this case, you know that dining habits in the UK are pretty much similar so you can segment the market based on high population density regions with high per capita income households. These people would be willing to spend higher on food.

Tools: Secondary research (Information from the research report, government reports, publications), Surveys.

• Value proposition and differentiation

Identify value driver to create unique value for customers. People who work and don’t want to cook food at home or don’t to spend their time waiting at restaurants will prefer to buy from Deliveroo. Deliveroo provides unique value for their customers. (reliable and hassle-free food delivery from premium restaurants)

Tools: Identify Value driver (Technical, Functional, Emotional), Use elements of value from Bain&Company. (For differentiation, identify customer’s value proposition and offer the value that matches customer needs)

Below chart maps the value proposition that enables them to stand out from competitors.

• Product/service design and strong brands

A lot goes in designing products. For physical products, you can use conjoint analysis to learn about features and their effect on the product purchase. For digital products, UX and UI designers will create products based on customer’s needs. For Deliveroo, they knew that customer want a hassle-free experience, so they developed an app and website for ordering food.

Tool: Conjoint Analysis

• Pricing

You can create a pricing strategy that would be a perfect fit for the product or services. Product pricing has three major factors; product economics, customer perspective and competitors. Optimize these three factors to create a pricing strategy. Most of the businesses use market-based pricing strategy. Since Deliveroo is a digital product with higher operations cost compared to competitors, they have a model that encourage customers to subscribe to their service.

Tools: Waterfall graphs for analysis cost per product, Price ladder to map competitor’s prices, Price piano and conjoint analysis for different variants of the same product, (also recommend to check the anti-trust laws)

• Distribution

I am attaching a document (as Distribution Channel) that describes the framework for distribution channel and partner selection. An efficient supply chain is required for customer satisfaction and reduce the probability of customer switching to a competitor’s product. Deliveroo has an app for major mobile operating systems.

• Promotion

A customer interacts with the brand throughout the buying process. At this point, the customer needs some information to make a decision. Product promotion provides a message to the customer to make those decisions. A framework will help you create the map the customer journey. You can use the below flowchart to develop a customer journey map.

Step by step process:

1. Create a customer’s path to purchase/stages of the customer’s journey (communication plan)
2. Identify media/communication channel at each stage
3. Create message (content strategy) for the media
4. Integrate communication media
5. Monitor the performance of communication channels (Customer analytics)

Companies like Salesforce, Hubspot provides software for effective management of marketing communications.

Deliveroo will create a customer persona. For example, a person of the age 26-30 who lives in London. He or she works daily and cooks food at home or dine at a restaurant. Deliveroo will target this group of people by researching more about them.

Needs, Awareness:

The customer needs food at home. They will search for a delivery option online. Google search or maybe they recall some advertisement. They may see the advert on TV, banners/posters on the bus, on a train, in a newspaper hear an advert on the radio or the news or music apps. They can also see the advert on digital media like Facebook, Instagram, Google ads on websites, search ads on Google. They may also see the advert during events. Lastly, they can be aware through word of mouth.

Brand Personality:

The content and images used on the website will also impact brand perception.

Detailed Information:

Customer can get information through Deliveroo's app and website. They will see the app or website, learn more about payment methods, ease of use, available restaurants, delivery time.

The above is marketing strategy and process. After this, you will need a customer relationship management plan.