What Should a Marketing Strategy Include, and Who Puts It Into Action?

Your team has ideas. There’s a website update on the list, someone wants to try LinkedIn ads, and the next campaign is approaching faster than anyone would like.

There’s plenty to do. The question is whether everyone is working towards the same thing.

A useful marketing strategy gives that work direction. It connects your business goals with the people you need to reach, the message they need to hear, and the actions your team can realistically deliver.

It should also make one thing clear: what happens next.

Because a strategy can sound brilliant in a presentation and still leave everyone wondering what they’re supposed to do on Monday.

What should a marketing strategy include?

A marketing strategy should define your business goals, priority audiences, positioning, key messages, preferred media channels, budget, and approach to measurement, including ROI. An accompanying action plan should identify the work, the people responsible, and the timeline.

The details will vary by organization. A business entering a new market needs a different approach from an established company trying to attract better enquiries.

But both need decisions that help them move forward.

Here’s what those decisions should cover.

Start with the business problem

“Do more marketing” is a task with a very large appetite.

Before choosing channels or planning content, get specific about what needs to change.

Are you trying to introduce a new service? Attract customers in another region? Improve the quality of your sales enquiries? Help people understand an offering they currently overlook?

Those goals lead to different choices.

A company looking for more qualified enquiries might need clearer service messaging and a stronger conversion path. A company entering a new market may need to build recognition and credibility before expecting people to get in touch.

Start with the outcome. Then decide what marketing needs to contribute.

Get clear on who you need to reach

“Businesses across Canada” might describe your potential market. It doesn’t tell you enough to write a useful campaign.

Which businesses? Who makes the decision? What prompts them to look for help? What are they worried about getting wrong?

Your audience research should help you understand:

• The problems potential customers are trying to solve.
• The language they use to describe those problems.
• Their questions, objections, and decision criteria.
• Who else influences the purchase.
• Where they look for information and advice.

Your sales, customer service and administrative teams can be particularly useful here. They hear the questions people ask before becoming customers, and the expectations they bring with them.

That information should shape the strategy, rather than stay buried in someone’s inbox or brain.

Give people a reason to choose you

Once you understand the audience, you need to establish what makes your business relevant to them.

This is where positioning and messaging come in.

What do you help customers accomplish? Why is your approach a good fit? What can you demonstrate that supports your claims?

“Great service” and “high-quality solutions” are lovely sentiments. They also appear on a really impressive number of websites.

Useful messaging gets more specific. It connects your strengths to something your customers care about and backs that connection with evidence.

That might include a clearly explained process, relevant experience, customer feedback, or examples of your work.

The goal is to make your value easier to understand and remember when someone is comparing options. We always joke about explaining it to your teenage kids. With their short attention spans to consider, keeping things simple and easy to understand can work wonders when helping people make a buying decision.

Choose channels for a reason

Your business doesn’t need to be everywhere. It needs to show up where its efforts can make a useful contribution.

Search, paid advertising, LinkedIn, email, print, events, and sponsorships can all play a role. The right mix depends on your audience, goals, budget, and capacity.

A strategy should explain what each chosen channel is expected to do.

For example, an educational article might help someone understand a problem. A targeted campaign might introduce your business to a relevant audience. An email sequence might help an interested prospect stay connected while they consider their options.

Those activities should support each other.

Otherwise, you can end up with a busy marketing calendar and very little agreement about what it is achieving.

Make the budget and workload realistic

A marketing strategy needs to account for the resources required to deliver it.

That includes paid media spending, but also the time and expertise needed for copywriting, design, development, approvals, campaign management, and reporting.

Who will supply the information? Who will review the work? How much can your internal team take on alongside its existing responsibilities?

An ambitious plan that depends on someone finding an extra ten hours every week has a fairly obvious weak spot.

Prioritizing a manageable amount of work gives your team a better chance of delivering it consistently and learning from the results.

Decide what success looks like

Measurement should be part of the plan from the beginning.

The useful measures depend on the goal. They might include qualified enquiries, booked consultations or appointments, purchases, applications, or another action that matters to your organization.

Traffic, reach, and engagement can help explain what is happening along the way. They need context.

If website visits increase but the enquiries are a poor fit, the next step is to investigate who you are attracting and what they expected to find.

A strategy should establish what you will measure, how you will track it, and when you will review the findings.

Who turns the strategy into action?

Someone needs to own the overall plan, and each activity needs a person responsible for moving it forward.

Your internal team might handle implementation. An agency might manage it. Often, the work is shared.

Nanaimo Foundation is an example of how understanding an organization’s audience and goals can shape its brand messaging, website, and marketing materials. See how we brought it all together.

What matters is that the arrangement is explicit.

A practical action plan should identify:

• The priorities and deliverables.
• Who creates, reviews, and approves the work.
• The budget and timeline.
• Any dependencies that could affect progress.
• Who monitors performance and recommends changes.

Strategy continues to play a role once the work begins. Customer feedback, campaign results, and business priorities can all give you reasons to adjust.

The plan should provide direction while leaving room to respond to what you learn.

How Array connects the thinking with the doing

At Array, we get to know your business, audience, and goals before deciding what the work should look like.

From there, we connect the strategy with the services needed to deliver it, whether that involves brand messaging, content creation and imagery, a website, an advertising campaign, or a coordinated mix.

Our marketing strategy and campaign services bring planning and implementation together. And our approach keeps collaboration part of the process, from discovery through creation and beyond.

You don’t need to arrive with all the answers. Figuring out which questions to ask is part of the work.

Ready to give your marketing a clearer direction? Let’s talk about the plan and how to put it into action.