the first step in developing a strategic marketing plan is

Crazy Egg also offers recordings, A/B testing, and more to help ensure your website is offering the best user experience.

Pricing : Basic, $24/month; Standard, $49/month; Plus, $99/month; Pro, $249/month; Enterprise, contact for pricing.

5. Review your media.

Decide what you already have in your arsenal that can help you create your strategy. To streamline this process, think of your assets in three categories – paid, owned, and earned media.

• Paid media means any channel you spend money on to attract your target audience. This includes offline channels like television, direct mail, and billboard to online channels like social media, search engines, and websites.
• Owned Media refers to any of the media your marketing team has to create: pictures, videos, podcasts, ebooks, infographics, etc.
• Earned media is another way to say user-generated content . Shares on social media, tweets about your business, and photos posted on Instagram mentioning your brand are all examples of earned media.

Gather your materials in each media type and consolidate them in one location to have a clear vision of what you have and how you can integrate them to maximize your strategy.

For example, if you already have a blog that's rolling out weekly content in your niche (owned media), you might consider promoting your blog posts on Twitter (paid media), which customers might then reTweet (earned media). Ultimately, that will help you create a better, more well-rounded marketing strategy.

If you have resources that don't fit into your goals, nix them. This is a great time to clean house and identify gaps in your materials.

6. Audit and plan media campaigns.

Cleaning house segues straight into this step. Now, you must decide which content is going to help you.

Focus on your owned media and marketing goals. For instance, will updating the CTAs at the end of your blog posts help you increase RSVPs to your event?

Next, look at your buyer personas. Let's say you work for a video editing software company. If one of your persona's challenges is adding clean sound effects to their videos but you don't have any content that reflects that, make a 15-second demo video for Instagram to show how great your product is at solving that challenge.

Finally, create a content creation plan. The plan should include topic clusters, goals, format, and channel for each piece of content. Be sure to include which challenge it's solving for your buyer persona.

For ideas on content creation or a more in-depth look at how to create a content plan, check out our post, The Ultimate Guide to Content Creation .

7. Bring it to fruition.

At this point, your market research and planning should help you visualize how your strategy will be executed – and by which teams.

The final step is to bring that all together and assign actions to your plans.

Create a document that maps out the steps you need to take to execute your campaign. In other words, define your strategy.

Think long-term when creating this document. A standard strategy document is 12 months. This structured timeline should be the home base for your strategic marketing efforts.

To paint an example, let's go back to the video software company.

Maybe in January, you will launch a software update that improves the exportation process for users. In April, you want to publish an ebook that explains editing terms to your buyer personas, and in September, you plan to launch an integration with other software.

Remember, your digital strategy is unique to your business, so the document should be as well. As long as the strategy includes the pertinent details outlined in previous sections, you'll be set.

Now that we've explored the critical steps of a complete marketing strategy, let's look at some "Why didn't I think of that?" strategies to inspire your own.

1. Regal Movies

Digital strategy: owned media.

Regal Movies took the Halloween spirit to a new level, even renaming its Twitter account to reflect the spirit of the season. This "Monster Madness" poll is a fun, interactive way to get followers invested in Regal's content:

In this case, the consumer is praising the brand’s product. Doesn’t get better than a fantastic review like that.

3. Small Girls PR

Digital strategy: event marketing.

Wait, is that Keke Palmer?

Small Girls PR is a boutique PR company based in New York, and one of the company's talents is throwing amazing events for their clients, like Olay. This event recap carousel on Instagram is an effective event marketing example, as it boosts awareness for your brand and offers social proof by featuring a public figure.

4. Superside

Digital strategy: paid media.

Design agency Superside launched an Instagram ad to promote a lead magnet: Their digital ad design guide. 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 ebook.

Don't forget to share this post!

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Outline your company's marketing strategy in one simple, coherent plan.

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5 Critical Steps to Developing an Engineering Marketing Plan

By: Lee Chapman 1/31/23 10:01 AM

Marketers have a saying: “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.”

Without planning and a sound strategy, how can you know where you are going or what you need to do to get there?

Here are five steps to develop your engineering marketing plan from the ground up.

Step 1: Document Your Business Goals and Budget

Before jumping into the tactics and execution, your marketing team should ask the leadership team to define their business goals for the next 1-3 years. Your goals can be externally focused, internally focused, or perhaps a mix of both.

When developing goals (at the business level or otherwise), write them in the SMART format that ensures accountability. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound .

SMART goals can propel business goals such as:

• Increase product line revenue by 30 percent to $2 million in the next 12 months
• Double revenue through distributors in the next two years
• Increase profitability from 25 to 30 percent by the end of the year

While you are setting business goals, be sure to also set a marketing budget for your engineering company for the year. A good rule of thumb for setting a marketing budget is 6-to-12% of gross revenue with higher spending in the early phases as you establish your marketing foundation. 

To learn more about how business strategy and marketing go hand in hand for engineering companies, click here . 

Step 2: Conduct A SWOT Analysis

Ultimately, you want marketing that provides a consistent flow of high-quality leads to help fuel new sales opportunities and drive growth for your engineering company. You want your technical engineering target audiences and customers to be happy to hear from you and not dread it. 

The way to achieve all of this is to use a smart marketing approach that builds a marketing strategy and execution plan aligned with your business goals. This starts with a SWOT of your current marketing program.

SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in terms of your competitive position, target markets, target audiences, current positioning/messaging, the maturity of your offerings, channel partners, etc.

Step 3: Identify Your Target Buyer Personas

You may already know the profile of your most valuable engineering prospects and the sales process your company uses to convert them from leads to opportunities to customers. However, as your company grows, you won’t know each prospect’s unique situation, and one message won’t work for all. You’ll need to customize your approach to marketing for your engineering company by creating buyer personas.

Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers based on demographic data, online behavior, and your educated speculation about personal histories, motivations, and concerns.

For example, you may define your engineering customer personas as: 

• VP of Engineering Vince, a business executive who cares most about cost and long-term support.
• Engineer Elliot, an engineering manager or senior staff engineer who is an expert in your technology area and wants to do a deep dive into the technical capabilities of your product or how you deliver a service.

Elliot greatly influences Vince, but Vince makes the final decisions. Vince and Elliot have very different concerns.

Here's a simple guide on how to develop a buyer persona :

• The first step is to brainstorm who they could be and create a list.
• Once you have your full list, identify the ones who have similar needs or roles and consider merging them.
• From here, prioritize your list of personas by considering their impact on the final purchase decision, their relationship to your company, and the size of the audience persona group.
• Once you’ve finished brainstorming, create your actual personas.

Step 4: Develop Your Marketing Goals

Armed with your business strategy, areas of greatest opportunity, and defined persons, you are now ready to create marketing goals. Goal setting is critical to aligning your marketing organization, narrowing your focus, and setting your overall marketing strategy.

Documenting your goals ensures your team is aligned with your top marketing priorities and what you expect to achieve through your marketing efforts. Your goals can be externally focused, internally focused, or perhaps a mix of both.

Write your goals in the SMART format that helps ensures accountability for your marketing team.

For example, your SMART marketing goal could be to “15% increase in the number of qualified leads passed to sales in the military market by Q4”. Develop at least three, and no more than five, SMART marketing goals.

Step 5: Build Your Activity Plan

Now that you’ve created your marketing goals and have a budget, you are ready to develop your activity plan. The most effective way to approach turning your marketing strategy into an execution plan is by using a campaign structure. You can think of campaigns as buckets of activities focused on a common theme or goal.

With limited time and budget, a campaign approach gives you the big picture before you get into the weeds of which new video you will produce, which white paper you will write and promote, and which of your engineering client personas you will target.

Campaigns can run the gamut in scope. They can be anything from a major product launch to building thought leadership in a particular segment to increasing web traffic and leads. Here are two examples of marketing campaigns and their stated goals and KPIs your engineering company can utilize.

Campaign 1: Lead Generation and Conversion

• Description — Through content and partner co-marketing, attract quality leads that convert to opportunities
• KPI — Increase leads by 35 percent to 210 per month
• KPI — Increase lead opportunity conversion from 6 to 8 percent

Campaign 2: Partner Marketing

• Description — Develop and implement a channel co-marketing program
• KPI — Publish at least one lead-generating piece of co-branded content per quarter
• KPI — Generate 100 net new leads through co-marketing activities

Strategy is an evolution, and something that takes a great deal of time to develop. However, mapping out a clear, strategic direction will ensure a cohesive marketing plan that maps to your personas through campaigns and is time bound and budget driven.

Technology Marketing Plan in Practice: A Case Study for Knowles Precision Devices

Back in 2018, Knowles Precision Devices was under new marketing leadership and faced the opportunity to grab market share in a few key markets as they evolved. To meet these business goals, Knowles decided to implement an inbound marketing approach. Content was the heart of their approach, and they looked to TREW to plan, develop and execute their content marketing strategy from the ground up.

We started with a full marketing plan, establishing buyer personas, marketing goals, specific campaigns, and overall marketing strategy that the content plan would roll up and support. We then developed a detailed content plan that focused on four primary content themes targeted to the established personas at various stages of their buyer’s journey. 

Looking for additional marketing planning insights for your engineering company?

For more information on Marketing Planning for Engineering, download our B2B Marketing Planning Guidebook to dive deeper into the marketing planning process. 

TREW is a marketing agency dedicated to reaching engineering and technical audiences through a range of marketing initiatives. Contact us today to learn more about the services we offer. 

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Lee chapman.

About TREW Marketing

TREW Marketing is a strategy-first content marketing agency serving B2B companies that target highly technical buyers. With deep experience in the design, embedded, measurement and automation, and software industries, TREW Marketing provides branding, marketing strategy, content development, and digital marketing services to help customers efficiently and effectively achieve business goals.

10 Steps to Developing a Strategic Marketing Plan

• Reading time: 5 mins
• Marketing Strategy

The success of your business depends on your marketing plan. This plan establishes your marketing strategy, and depending on the needs of your business, this plan will change over time. We’ve created a brief guide to get you started on a strategic marketing plan or to update an existing one.

Here are 10 steps to developing a strategic marketing plan:

1. Set goals and objectives. Before you create a marketing plan, you must have a purpose for it. This purpose is based on the long-term goals that guide all of your efforts. Once these long-term goals are established, break them down into specific objectives. Your objectives should be measurable over a period of time. For example, your goal may be to establish a social media marketing strategy. Meanwhile, an objective related to this goal could be to gain 100 followers on social media during the first month on the platform.

2. Analyze your situation. A Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis can give you a snapshot of the situations you face as you market your business. Your strengths are what make your business unique, while your weaknesses are what you can improve on. The economy, your competitors, technology, and other external factors contribute to your opportunities and threats. By analyzing your situation this way, you can improve your marketing strategies, while overcoming challenges that may or may not be in your control. Create customer personas to help figure out who your ideal customers. This will help with your analysis.

3. Map your messages. Your messaging is part of your marketing strategy and your brand. To create a message map, start by writing an XYZ statement or boilerplate that contains basic information about your business. Then, center other messaging related to your products, clients, and services around the XYZ statement. These messages can then be incorporated into your mission statement, press releases, and other marketing materials.

4. Live out your mission. Your business has a set of values that guides it. Creating a mission statement outlines these values and ensures that the people who interact with your business are aware of them. Just be sure that this message reflects your brand honestly so you can actively demonstrate the values outlined in the mission statement through your interactions with clients. This statement and how it is carried out can make or break your clients’ trust.

Pulse takes pride in being your local, friendly marketing team, which is why it is our tagline. We demonstrate those values by being involved in our community.

5. Outline your tactics. A successful marketing strategy is made up of many different tactics, including both online and offline options. Your goals, target audience, and industry factor into this decision. For example, if your target audience is young, focusing on social media is more beneficial as this is primarily where this group consumes content. If your industry is product-based (for example, if you design jewelry), then using a more visual platform would better showcase your products. To be most effective, you have to choose which methods are right for your business. Once you’ve selected your tactics, list them in your marketing plan and determine how they’ll help you reach your goals.

6. Make a timeline. Your time is precious, especially when it comes to your marketing strategies. Based on the goals and objectives you’ve set for your business, create a timeline that will determine what will be completed and when. Remember to allow extra time for unexpected events that may delay some of your goals.

Using project management software can help you to create a timeline. At Pulse, we use Wrike , a program that enables us to schedule projects on a timeline.

7. Mind your budget. Creating a budget for your marketing strategies can inform your efforts by determining what you can and can’t afford. Choosing the most cost-effective options for your business ensures the success of your overall marketing plan. This doesn’t have to limit your options. Paid advertising on social media and search engines allows you to choose the amount you can afford to pay, making them accessible to even the smallest of budgets.

8. Divide and conquer. Once you’ve created a timeline for the creation and distribution of your marketing materials, assign these tasks to members of your staff. If your business is small and doesn’t have the staff required to carry out your plan, you may need to consider hiring another person or a marketing agency. Ultimately, your staff’s size and qualifications will determine this for you.

9. Measure up. Measuring the effectiveness of your marketing strategies will inform your current plan and your future efforts. Your website, social media, and other marketing materials are sources of this information. To help you track this , there are many free online analytics tools available. Just be sure to only track data relevant to your business so these measurements are effective.

10. Stay current. Your marketing goals and needs will change over time. Ideally, you should revisit your marketing plan once a year and make adjustments as necessary. You should write your marketing plan with this growth in mind so you can measure it. In the meantime, follow industry news and trends that you can add to your own strategies.

Establishing a marketing plan keeps your business goals organized and focused, saving valuable time and money. Even if you already have a marketing plan, you can still reap these benefits by keeping it up-to-date.

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