Step-by-Step Guide to Developing a Marketing Strategy

Step-by-Step Guide to Developing a Marketing Strategy

Let's get one thing straight. You're probably wasting your money on “marketing.”

You're boosting posts, printing flyers, redesigning your logo for the fifth time, and wondering why the phone isn't ringing. You're busy. You're doing things. But you're not moving the needle.

The problem is that you're confusing activity with progress.

Most entrepreneurs and small business owners treat marketing like a checklist of chores. Post on social media? Tick. Send a newsletter? Tick. Run a sale? Tick. They're just throwing things at a wall, hoping something sticks.

This isn't a strategy. It's gambling with your rent money.

A real marketing strategy isn't a 50-page document full of fluff and five-year projections that you'll never look at again. It's not a binder that collects dust.

It's a series of hard decisions that dictate where you spend your time, money, and energy. It's a filter for every idea, every opportunity, and every distraction.

And it's time we talked about how to build one. Honestly.

First, Let's Be Clear: What Marketing Strategy Isn't

Before we go any further, let's clear out the rubbish. A marketing strategy is not:

• A list of tactics. “Post on Instagram three times a day” is a task, not a strategy. It's the ‘how', not the ‘why' or the ‘who'. You can't start with tactics.
• Your logo. Your branding, colour palette, fancy new website… that's your visual identity. It's important, but it's a vehicle for the strategy, not the strategy itself.
• About “going viral.” Chasing viral fame is like planning your retirement around a lottery win. It's a fantasy. Sustainable businesses are built on systems, not miracles.
• A one-time task. The market changes. Your customers change—your business changes. A strategy isn't a static monument; it's a living, breathing guide you must revisit and adjust.

Get these ideas out of your head. They're holding you back.

The Unsexy Foundation: Answering the Only Questions That Matter

You can't build a house on a swamp. The foundation of any good strategy is built on the answers to a few brutally simple questions. Most businesses skip this part.

Don't be like most businesses.

Question 1: Who, Exactly, Are You Talking To?

If I hear “our target market is everyone” one more time, I might throw a chair.

When you try to talk to everyone, you talk to no one. Your message becomes so diluted, so generic, that it's invisible. It's background noise.

The typical advice is to create a customer avatar. “Meet Jane; she's 35, lives in the suburbs, has 2.4 children, and enjoys yoga.” This is mostly useless. It tells you what people are, but not what they believe or want.

Here's a better way:

If you have existing customers, find the five best ones. It is not the biggest, but the ones who truly get what you do, pay on time, and are a pleasure to work with.

Call them.

Ask them questions:

• What happened in their business or life that made them look for a solution?
• What were the exact words they used when searching?
• What other options did they consider?
• What was the single biggest reason they chose you?
• What outcome did they really get from your service?

Their answers are pure gold. They will give you the language, the pain points, and the hooks for all your marketing. Your job isn't to invent a message; it's to listen to theirs and reflect it back to them.

Question 2: What Problem Do You Actually Solve?

Here's a secret. Nobody cares about your product or service.

They care about their problems. They care about looking good to their boss, getting more sleep, reducing anxiety, or making more money.

You don't sell drills. You sell holes.

Your feature list is not your marketing. “We build custom-coded websites using the latest JavaScript frameworks.” Nobody cares. That's you talking about yourself.

What's the outcome?

I had a client years ago who insisted on selling “hand-coded websites.” His business was failing. We worked together and changed one thing: his pitch. He started selling “a 24/7 online salesperson that never sleeps, never complains, and constantly brings you new leads.”

He was selling the same thing. But he stopped selling the process and started selling the result. His business tripled in a year.

Stop describing what your service is. Start articulating what it does for your customer. What does it allow them to achieve? How does it make their life better? That's the core of your message.

Question 3: Why Should They Choose You Over Everyone Else?

This is where most businesses fall apart.

When asked, “Why you?” they give pathetic answers.

“We care more.”

“We offer great customer service.”

“We're passionate about what we do.”

These are not differentiators. They are the minimum price of entry. Every one of your competitors says the same thing. It's meaningless noise. This is what I call a “we-we” proposition. We do this, we are that. Nobody cares.

Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) must be a specific, provable claim that your competition cannot or does not make.

• Domino's Pizza: “Fresh, hot pizza delivered to your door in 30 minutes or less, or it's free.” That's a USP. It's specific, measurable, and makes a bold promise.
• Toms Shoes: “The One for One Company. With every product you purchase, Toms will help someone in need.” That's a USP. It's about a mission, not just a product.

If you don't have a clear, compelling answer to “Why you?”, you leave your customers with only one way to decide: price. And being the cheapest is a miserable, soul-crushing race to the bottom.

Stop everything if you can't clearly articulate who you serve, what problem you solve, and why you're the only logical choice. Stop running ads. Stop posting on social media. Stop redesigning your business cards. You don't have a business yet; you have an expensive hobby. Fix this first.

The Core Strategy: The Three Levers You Can Actually Pull

Once you have your foundation, the strategy boils down to choosing three key levers. You can't do everything. The goal is to apply focused pressure, not to sprinkle your effort around like confetti.

Lever 1: The Message – What Are You Going to Say?

Your message is the bridge between your customer's problem and your solution. It's not a tagline. It's the core idea you will hammer home, over and over again, in everything you do.

It comes directly from the foundational questions.

• Your Customer: The people you want to reach.
• Their Problem: The pain you solve.
• Your USP: Why you are the best choice.

Your message combines these into a simple, powerful value proposition. It should be so clear that a five-year-old could understand it.

Think of famous brands.

• Volvo: Safety.
• Apple (in the 2000s): Think Different.
• FedEx: When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.

What's your one-word or one-phrase? This becomes your North Star. Every blog post, ad, and email should reinforce this idea. Stop talking about a dozen different things. Pick one and own it.

Lever 2: The Market – Where Are You Going to Say It?

Here's one of my biggest pet peeves. The gurus who scream, “You have to be everywhere!”

No, you don't. That is catastrophic advice for a small business.

Trying to be everywhere ensures you are effective nowhere. You'll spread your time and budget so thin that you make no impact on any channel. It's a recipe for burnout and failure.

Strategy is sacrifice. You must choose your battleground.

Go back to Question 1: Who is your customer? Now ask: where do they hang out online or offline when looking for solutions to their problems?

• Are they on LinkedIn looking for professional advice?
• Are they in specific Facebook groups asking for recommendations?
• Are they searching on Google with high-intent keywords?
• Are they listening to niche podcasts?
• Are they attending local industry events?

Pick one, or at most two, of these channels. And aim to dominate them. Don't just show up. Become the most helpful, insightful, and trusted voice in that single space. Instead of dabbling in ten channels, it becomes unavoidable in one. That's how you win with a small budget.

Lever 3: The Model – How Does It Make Money?

Marketing without a clear path to revenue is just art. We are not artists. We are business owners.

You must map the journey from a stranger to a happy, paying customer. This doesn't need to be a complex, multi-coloured funnel diagram. Just answer the question: what happens next?

• Someone sees your ad on Facebook. What do you want them to do? Click on a blog post.
• They read the blog post. What happens next? You offer them a valuable checklist in exchange for their email.
• They are on your email list. What happens next? You send them three helpful emails, building trust.
• After the third email. What happens next? You invite them to book a free 15-minute consultation.

Every piece of your marketing must have a job. It must move a person one step closer to giving you money. If you have dead ends—blog posts with no call to action, social posts that just say “Happy Friday”—you are wasting your time. Make the next step obvious and irresistible.

Getting a professional opinion can be a painful but necessary wake-up call if you struggle to see how your content connects to your bank account. Seeing what a structured digital marketing system involves can bring clarity. If you're curious, you can request a quote to understand what that looks like.

Stop Planning and Start Doing (The Right Way)

The most significant danger after the foundation is “analysis paralysis.” You can create the “perfect” strategy document for six months and achieve nothing.

A good strategy is not about perfect prediction. It's about creating a framework for smart action.

The 90-Day Sprint: Your First Actionable Plan

Forget annual marketing plans. They're a joke. The digital world moves too fast for that.

Think in 90-day sprints. It's long enough to see real results but short enough to stay focused and adapt.

1. Set ONE Primary Goal: Not ten. One. What is your most important metric for moving in the next 90 days? It must be specific and measurable.
   • Bad Goal: “Get more brand awareness.”
   • Good Goal: “Generate 10 qualified sales calls from LinkedIn.”
2. Choose Your Tactics: Now, and only now, do you think about tactics. Based on your single goal and your chosen channel, what 3-5 activities will you undertake?
   • Example Goal: “Generate 10 qualified sales calls from LinkedIn.”
   • Tactics: 1. Post one value-driven article on LinkedIn per week. 2. Send 20 personalised connection requests per day to ideal clients. 3. Engage in 5 relevant comment threads daily.
3. Execute. Relentlessly.

According to a study by CB Insights, 17% of startups fail because they have no business model, and 28% fail because they run out of cash [source]. A 90-day sprint forces you to focus on activities that lead to a viable business model before your money runs out.

Measuring What Matters (Hint: It's Not Likes)

This brings me to another major pet peeve—the obsession with vanity metrics.

Likes, shares, followers, impressions… these are the candy floss of marketing. They look big and impressive, but mostly air and sugar, and disappear instantly. They feel good, but they don't pay the bills.

You need to measure sanity metrics.

Your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is what you spend on marketing to get one new customer. Your Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is the total profit the customer will bring you over time. You have a sustainable business if your CLV is significantly higher (ideally 3x or more) than your CAC.

Focus on the numbers that actually reflect business health. The rest is just noise designed to make social media platforms look good.

The Feedback Loop: How to Not Waste Your Money

Your initial strategy is your best educated guess. Now, you have to test it against reality.

Marketing is a series of controlled experiments. You form a hypothesis (“I believe posting case studies on LinkedIn will lead to sales calls”), run the experiment for a set period, and then look at the results.

Look at your data weekly.

• Which post drove the most clicks?
• Which email subject line got the most opens?
• Which ad creative resulted in the cheapest leads?

The rule is brutally simple: Do more of what works. Stop doing what doesn't.

I once had a client spending £5,000 a month on Google Ads and getting zero results. He was about to give up. We looked at his account for five minutes and found the problem. He was bidding on broad keywords and never checked the “search terms” report. He was paying for clicks from people searching for things unrelated to his business. He wasn't reviewing the feedback. He was burning cash.

Don't be that guy. Check your work. The data is telling you a story. You have to listen.

Common Traps That Will Bankrupt Your Small Business

If you fall into these common traps, you can have the best intentions and still fail. Consider this your final warning.

Trap 1: The “If You Build It, They Will Come” Delusion

This is the most romantic and dangerous lie in business. You slave away for months, perfecting your product, service, and website. You launch. And then… crickets.

You believe your creation is so brilliant that it will market itself. It won't.

Marketing and sales are not an afterthought. They are 50% of the work. You should spend as much time and energy telling people about what you've built as you spent creating it.

Trap 2: Shiny Object Syndrome

You're running your 90-day sprint on LinkedIn. It's working slowly. You're getting traction. Then you read an article: “Clubhouse is the next big thing!” Suddenly, you're convinced you must drop everything and become a Clubhouse moderator.

This is Shiny Object Syndrome. It's a killer of focus and momentum.

Master one channel before you even think about another. Getting good at marketing requires discipline and, frankly, a bit of boredom. You have to stick with what works long after it stops being exciting.

Trap 3: Inconsistency Born from Boredom

This leads us to the final trap. Marketing isn't always exciting. Real marketing is often a grind. It's showing up every day. It's sending that weekly email even when you don't feel like it. It's making those calls.

Many entrepreneurs get bored. They had a great content plan that worked, but after six weeks, they decided to “shake things up.” They torpedo their success because they crave novelty.

Statistics on marketing touchpoints vary, but many sources suggest it takes 7-13+ interactions with a brand before a person becomes a viable lead [source]. If you keep changing your message and channel, you never build up that cumulative effect. You're always starting from zero.

Consistency is more important than brilliance.

Final Thought: Strategy is Saying No

We've covered a lot. But if you remember one thing, let it be this:

A great strategy is not a list of things to do. It's a list of things you have consciously decided not to do.

It's saying no to the five social media platforms that aren't right for you. It's saying no to the “amazing opportunity” that doesn't align with your 90-day goal. It's saying no to serving customers who aren't a good fit. It's saying no to measuring metrics that don't matter.

This isn't about complexity. It's about clarity. It's about having the courage to place a focused bet instead of hedging your way into oblivion.

Stop “doing marketing.” Start thinking like a strategist. Answer the hard questions. Choose your battleground. And execute with relentless focus.

That's the only strategy that actually works.

This is the thinking that underpins a real, results-driven strategy. It's less about flashy trends and more about a robust commercial foundation.

If you've had enough of guessing and want more direct, no-nonsense advice, you can find more of our observations on the Inkbot Design blog.

If you want this level of strategic thinking applied directly to your business to build a system that connects marketing efforts to real-world revenue, then that's what our digital marketing services are for.

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