Every successful marketing strategy begins with data and insight. Without a thorough understanding of your market landscape, who you’re targeting and what matters to them, it’s impossible to create meaningful communications that resonate.  

This module guides you through the initial stages of developing successful marketing strategy from defining objectives and setting a benchmark to conducting in-depth market mapping to understand your organisation's current position.  

You’ll receive all of the templates to complete this part of the process, including charts for market mapping, competitor research templates and all the tools you need to create personas for your own organisation. 

Module structure

  • Agreeing business objectives
  • Defining marketing and communications objectives
  • Benchmarking your current position
  • Market mapping
  • Competitor analysis
  • Gathering product/service insights
  • Introduction to buyer personas
  • Building personas for your own organisation

Defining your objectives

The first three lessons take you through getting clarity on your businesses overarching objectives, defining clear marketing communications goals and understanding your organisation's current position. 

This section underpins the entirety of your strategy development and gives you a benchmark to evidence your success against as you move into delivery stages. 

Competitor research

The second phase of this module focuses on three lessons that allow you to effectively conduct in-depth competitor research and map your current position in the market.

You'll learn how to analyse your competitors' products and services and current marketing activity so you can define your competitive advantage and stand out in a crowded marketplace. 

Understanding your audience

This section is key for building the foundations of your strategy. In the final two lessons of module 1, you'll learn how to leverage the power of marketing personas to make your marketing all the more effective.

In this section, you'll learn how to understand your audience through collecting quantitative and qualitative data, run focus groups with your team and validate your findings through desk research.