Marketing Strategy: Putting It All Together

Marketing is often treated as a collection of separate activities, but this is not always the case!

Over our How to Explain Marketing 12-part series, we’ve broken it down into individual parts to help you demystify the topic from A to Z. And last, but not least, a full marketing strategy is what brings those parts together and gives them direction.

Here’s how to join the dots for marketing success, including information on how the different marketing disciplines work together and the three main steps to take when creating a marketing strategy.

Defining a Marketing Strategy

A marketing strategy is the plan that connects all your marketing activities into one clear direction. It defines how a brand focuses on one audience, attracts attention, builds understanding, and turns interest into action or sales.

What some get wrong is that a marketing strategy is not just for one single campaign or channel. The best digital marketing strategies underpin the structure behind everything you do, and the logic that decides what matters, and when.

Without a strategy or plan, marketing becomes a set of disconnected actions, which, of course, are not as effective! It’s like building a brand identity, you must do the research and take the time to set it up rather than making random decisions.

How the 12 Disciplines Come Together

Across this series, we’ve explored 12 key disciplines: SEO, social media, influencer marketing, content marketing, PR, publicity, experiential marketing, email marketing, sales, promotion, and advertising.

Each of the above does something different, and some will be more important for your brand depending on your industry and audience, but they all sit inside the same system, just with different focuses. Some are built to generate attention, and others are designed to build trust. And a few even exist to convert that attention into traffic or sales.

However, to broadly group them, you could say:

• SEO, social media, and influencers help people find you.
• Content marketing, PR, and publicity help them understand you.
• Email marketing, sales, and promotions help them convert.

It’s important to note that you may not need every single one. However, it’s very rare for a brand to need only one or two! Together, they form a full journey from when your audience discovers you to when they push that ‘buy’ or ‘contact’ button, and they also set up a pipeline for long-term success.

How To Create a Strategy for Your Business

A good marketing strategy starts with one simple question: How do people move from first discovering your brand to actually taking action?

Once you understand that journey, you can start assigning the right tools to each stage — and which ones matter the most for your audience or niche.

Here are three main steps to take:

1. Define your audience clearly: Start by getting specific about who you are trying to reach. Not just demographics, but behaviours, needs, and where they spend their time. This is what determines which of the 12 disciplines will actually matter to you.
2. Map the journey from attention to action: Break it down into stages. For instance, how people first discover you, what builds their trust, and what finally convinces them to act. This is where SEO, social media, content, PR, email, and sales all start to slot into place.
3. Choose the right mix of disciplines for each stage: You don’t need everything at once. Focus on the channels that best support each part of the journey for your specific audience. Quality over quantity here!

It can be overwhelming to create a strategy, and while we urge you to use a mix of these focuses, it’s critical to remember that you don’t need everything at once. Rather, your business needs the right mix, working together at the right time — and that’s where working with a professional team can help.

Setting Up Your Marketing Strategy

Marketing is a system that grows as your business needs change, and the 12 disciplines we’ve covered in this series only work when they’re connected into a wider strategy.

Across the series, we’ve shown how SEO, social media, influencer marketing, content marketing, PR, publicity, experiential marketing, email marketing, sales, promotion, and advertising each play their own role. Treat them as parts of one system you can actively shape.

Ready to work with a team? Contact Re:View today to learn more about digital marketing strategy.

See the full How to Explain Marketing series now.