How to Actually Write a Marketing Strategy
After years of overcomplicating it, I've worked out that good marketing strategy simply comes down to aligning your budget to your customer purchase journeys.
"So, Tom, what's the strategy?"
Christ, the S-word. Anyone else feel like it’s the heaviest word in the world? Just me? The idea of going away and writing up a strategy always felt so paralysing. Like if I didn’t get it perfect, the whole company might fall apart. And it almost always just sits in a deck no one will ever look at again.
When we launched Yonder, there was no strategy. I’d seen great marketing at Wise and Monzo, but those were scale-ups and I had no idea how to actually pull together a plan when nothing existed to build from. Yonder was pre-everything.
But you’ll be pleased to know that after years of overcomplicating it, I've worked out that good marketing strategy (at least the acquisition side of things) comes down to one simple thing: aligning your budget and resources to your customer purchase journeys.
So skip the slides, hun. Let me save you some time.
How to write a marketing strategy
Step 1: Really, really understand your customer purchase journeys
I'm fascinated by purchase journeys. Most people think they’re linear: see an ad → buy a thing. But in ten years of marketing I’ve never seen it that simple. They're usually all over the place: see an ad here → do nothing → hear about something from a friend → ask ChatGPT → ask Reddit → watch ten videos then eventually buy one shirt over another.
You can do this by interviewing five existing customers (preferably fresh to your product) or five people who are in the market for products like yours if you don’t have any yet.
Go in with zero assumptions and spend the first 5–10 minutes getting to know them as people before diving into the good stuff. Then spend 15 minutes understanding their purchase journeys. Make sure to avoid leading questions. Do it properly or you’ll be wasting your time.
Understand how they actually discover, consider, and choose products like yours. What triggers them to start looking? What do they compare you to? Who do they talk to?
When we did this at Yonder, we learned that it took a huge amount of touch-points for someone to consider signing up. People don’t impulse buy financial services. They researched, they read, they asked friends. We noted all of it down. The moments people talked to mates. The content they searched for. The tools they used to compare us. The questions they had but didn't ask.
You'll end up with a bunch of websites, publications, influencers, platforms, and other places where your customers go. If you can’t find the most obvious ones to work on first (usually I find they’re screaming at me), you could score each touchpoint on reach, intent or maybe just on how likely you are to be able to win in that area.
An obvious example here for us was SEO, but knowing we couldn’t win there, we looked elsewhere. If you can't realistically compete in a channel, don't waste your money trying.
Step 2: Work out who's ready to buy now vs later
Once you've mapped your typical customer journey, you need to figure out what percentage of your target market is actively looking to buy now versus might buy in the next 12 months.
Look for industry reports on purchase frequency, survey a few customers about when they last switched providers, or just make an educated guess based on how often people typically buy your type of product. There are loads of publicly available data out there so even ChatGPT could give you a rough idea. If you sell something people buy monthly, maybe 30% are in market. If it's something they buy every few years, probably closer to 5-10%. Don't overthink it - a rough estimate is fine.
Only about 10% of people who might get a rewards credit card are actually in market at any given time. The other 90% aren't actively looking but could be customers in the future. You need a plan for both.
This split determines your two types of marketing, which are most commonly referred to as brand and direct response. Or the long and short. I prefer to call it:
Growth Now → how you capture the people actively considering or buying in your market (this is your direct response work)
Growth Later → how you build awareness with people not yet ready to buy but may do so in the next 12 months (this is your brand work)
If you’re only spending on growth now (or only for growth later, both are bad), you’re wasting your limited resources. A good strategy invests across the whole funnel.
Step 3: Write up the top 3-4 highest-impact things to drive growth now and growth later.
Create a plan for reaching both audiences that you can actually execute with the budget and time you have available. For people in market, write up the top things you want to do to be discoverable when they're searching. For people not in market, focus on building awareness so they remember you later.
Match this to what you can realistically do. If it's just you and a freelancer or small team, maybe that's a couple growth now activities (like optimising for key search terms) and one growth later activity (like consistent social content).
Importantly, you should allocate your growth later budget and resources first, then do the growth now stuff. Not the other way around. Performance marketing and other activation-led channels are addictive. When it gets expensive (and it will), it'll eat your entire budget if you let it. Ring-fence a minimum monthly spend on brand building before you touch performance budgets. Even if it's a small amount.
Step 4: Write it down and get going
Write it all down then share it and get going.
Just stick it all in a doc titled something like "What we’re doing next". Don’t use the S-word. Then share it with your team, revisit it regularly to remind people of what’s most important, used it to defend decisions and trade-offs.
You don't need a deck. Please don’t make a deck. If you can explain what you're doing, why you're doing it, and how you'll know if it's working, you're doing strategy. Look at you go.
Just to make this less abstract, here's an actual one (stripped back slightly) for what I did about our AI search visibility earlier in the year.
Objective: Increase our visibility on tools like ChatGPT
Insight: More customers are checking ChatGPT for product recommendations, and Yonder isn’t showing up at all. We’re invisible at a key moment in the journey. If we’re not there when they’re looking, we don’t exist.
Actions:
Create content on our site optimised for GPT-indexed queries
Fix metadata and schema markup to improve visibility in AI tools
Find a measurement tool that tracks generative search performance
Keep chipping away at our earned media hitlist
How we’ll measure it: Share of visibility in related prompts
That’s it. Not a slide in sight. There was obviously some data and other insights to support what I was saying. You can actually read it here:
When you have a few of these written down, that’s your plan for the next few months.
Once again for the people in the back: strategy is just matching your customer journey to your budget and resources.
It’s actually that easy
That's what good early-stage strategy looks like. It's not perfect. But it’ll help lift the weight off your shoulders and set you off in a direction quickly.
While this is specifically written around acquisition, you can apply the same framework again to the activities. If social media content is part of your plan, map out all the channels your customers may use then follow the same process.
If you're an early-stage marketer, don't feel paralysed by needing a "strategy." Map the journey. Understand who's in market versus not. Match your spend to your resources. Be honest about what you can execute.
That’s your strategy. Good luck!
While I’ve got you…
About me
My name is Tom. I’ve launched and grown products at some of the UK’s most loved consumer brands and I’m part of the founding team and VP Marketing at Yonder, a modern day rewards card. Since starting at Yonder, I’ve written about all my marketing learnings along the way.
If you're a senior marketer at a startup, this Substack is for you. I write about what actually works in startup marketing (and what definitely doesn't) for marketers on the verge of breakdown.
You can find me on LinkedIn congratulating my mates on their new jobs, trolling Forbes articles about billionaires, and occasionally sharing something useful when absolutely forced to. Say hello.
I do some 1:1 consulting from time to time where my speciality is helping you understand why your brilliant product isn't selling itself. Contact me on LinkedIn if you're into that sort of thing.
Take my short reader survey so I can learn more about who reads this so I can write more useful stuff. I know you ask your customers to take surveys, so one won’t hurt you. Thanks in advance.
Thanks - I really like your approach. Especially your thinking on how understanding how customers discover and buy is fundamental to effective marketing. I also think that marketing now requires more sales skills - so I like to think of the brand vs direct response (buy now/buy later) overlay in terms of reach & attract (on other platforms), engage & nurture (on other and owned platforms), and convert (owned platforms).
Tja la for writing that up! I don’t know much about marketing but a lot sounds familiar to the product development work if done in the last years so I hope I’ll be able to put it in practice when the time comes