Effective marketing: how strategy works

Does paid search advertising increase consumer demand? Which social networks should a company use to strengthen its market position? Businesses can choose from many channels to reach audiences, but few approaches work equally well in every situation. Acquiring new customers requires investment. Research into markets, competitors and customer preferences helps make that investment more effective. That is how a marketing strategy takes shape.

My name is Ekaterina Rusakova. I am CPO Performance and oversee the promotion of Serenity, a marketing agency. I lead the development of the agency’s strategy practice.

At Serenity, strategy matters to account managers who work with clients and to service-line leads. Our specialists research their markets, interview clients and target audiences, identify customer needs and determine effective ways to address them. The leads then connect these workstreams and keep the focus on what matters most for promotion.

As the strategy lead, I want to keep strengthening this practice. Our results depend in large part on colleagues being open with one another, sharing their views and listening to different perspectives. I interviewed the specialists who plan and run campaigns to learn what strategy means to them.

Our team’s experience helps show whether strategy works in practice, what it can achieve and who can benefit from it.

Every business needs to explain the value its product offers to an audience. A marketing strategy helps identify who will benefit from and need your services.

Serenity account manager Lera compares two projects from her experience:

1) Social media promotion for indoor humidification equipment

The project had a specific audience: not everyone buys this product, and its average order value was high (RUB 1–1.5 million). The team tried promoting it without a strategy, using giveaways with mega-influencers.

The outcome fell short of expectations. The campaign did not lose money, but it generated little profit. Lera believes that a strategic approach could have delivered better results.

Lera offers another example:

2) Promoting a private dental clinic

Before starting, the team researched the audience and found that women should be the primary focus. The insight was that women often bring their children, partners and other family members to the clinic.

The campaign focused on women and introduced family discounts, which worked very well. Enquiries increased as whole families came in, including grandparents, brothers and sisters.

Experienced account manager Nadezhda highlights the value of market research. A strategy helps you understand where your product stands in its niche:

— what its strengths are;
— what could be improved;
— who the competitors are;
— what you can learn from them;
— which combination of actions can support growth.

Nadya shared a case about promoting Minisklad, a self-storage company. Led by a strategist, her team researched the market and sales opportunities, developed a strategy, selected channels, uncovered useful insights and defined key messages.

Strategy also helps with competitor analysis. It can reveal what needs to improve, which is useful during the research phase.

Anastasia, the project managers’ team lead, says strategy helps uncover audience needs, interests and motivations and decide how to address them.

Here is another story from our team. A business making personalised robes wanted to attract customers through Instagram, with two posts every day—any posts, as long as they kept coming. The audience response was minimal.

The team gradually reduced the cadence to one post a day and then two a week. Their research also suggested that Instagram could become a community for new mothers.

They began sharing educational stories for young children, practical tips and games. Saves, comments and engagement increased, and orders started coming in.

This happened because the team went beyond simply following the client’s initial instructions. They researched the audience to understand who potential customers were, what they needed and wanted to see on Instagram, then built a strategy around those findings.

A strategy also speeds up preparation. Promotion often spends too much time on assumptions and hypotheses. A strategy provides a suitable starting point and helps select channels that can make promotion more effective and support the goals you have set.

Ilya, the account managers’ team lead, agrees: strategy can make the path forward clearer and help improve results.

Serenity account managers also say that strategy reduces business owners’ anxiety because they can see the steps ahead. This makes it easier to stay focused and work effectively.

We also worked on an interesting real-estate project. The realtor’s Instagram account was new. After researching the audience and its needs, the team suggested creating content about real estate in Turkey: moving beyond apartment photos to explore the benefits of living there, compare options, discuss property prices and cover settling into a new country.

The team repositioned the account and ran advertising in CIS countries, where it received a strong response. Followers grew from one to 7,000 because people were interested: many wanted to move but did not know how.

The team found an original angle that worked so well that the realtor now has around 60,000 followers. Strategy opened up a new way to grow the Instagram account.

We also have a counterexample: a clinic in Moscow. The project had a major positioning problem. The owners focused on promotional offers and lead generation, without a long-term strategic view.

With a strategy, they could have understood competitors and market prices, established a position and found ways to engage the target audience over the long term.

Choosing suitable promotion methods and developing clear positioning can produce better results than working by guesswork. Account manager Dine told me how a client’s assumptions can fail without proper research.

One company invested in promoting its business on LinkedIn and achieved good results. Soon after, its management launched a very different project and decided to promote it on the same platform.

The client assumed that because one business had succeeded on LinkedIn, the new one would too. But the audience was different, and leads for the new project came from another channel. The team spent a lot of time and effort trying to gain traction, with no results.

There was no strategy. If the client had commissioned a broader promotion plan at the start, research could have surfaced this mismatch. That would have saved money and, above all, time.

Yulia, the paid search lead, says strategy helps you take a broader view of the brand, its positioning and the role the product plays for the market, society and the customer. It can lead to a deeper understanding of the business’s mission.

Yulia found strategy most useful when she could take part in every stage—from shaping the strategy and meeting the client to research, messaging and launching campaigns with those messages and settings.

Taking part at every stage, rather than simply reviewing the final strategy, can be especially valuable:

— test hypotheses, see what works and make adjustments;
— track the impact of early steps and decide what to do next.

A strategy also helps plan the resources needed to move forward and set priorities. It can help you picture the future brand: why the company exists, what it offers, what its goals are and how to achieve them.

Another benefit is that strategy makes the project and its detailed plan easier to visualise.

“Katya, does everyone really need a strategy?” you may ask. Broadly speaking, yes. You need to understand your audience and where the business should go.

Our specialists’ experience supports this: strategy focuses attention on audience needs and helps identify effective ways to address them.

There are exceptions. A neighbourhood café, a one-off service or a well-understood niche may not need a full strategy.

At Serenity, we take this into account:

— If you want to test a product idea, we can build an MVP instead of a full strategy.
— If you have a specific task, such as paid search, we can handle it and do only the research it requires.

We also consider your resources. For example, if you have one marketer, the strategy can scale gradually.

Not sure whether your promotion needs a strategy? Send an enquiry and a Serenity specialist will discuss your situation with you and help find the right approach.

Explore the agency’s services atservice page.