Marketing Strategy: What One Contains and How to Write It

Updated September 2026 · Written and maintained by the Progression Agency strategy team

A marketing strategy is a small number of decisions about who you serve, what you promise them, and what you will not do. Almost everything sold under the name is a plan — a list of activities with a calendar attached — which is a useful document and a different one. The test is subtraction: if the document adds activity in every direction and removes nothing, no strategic decision has been made. This page sets out what a strategy contains, how to write one, and how to tell whether yours is real.

Omnichannel consulting

A word used loosely enough to be worth pinning down before buying it.

Omnichannel consulting means designing an experience that is continuous across the channels a customer actually uses — site, app, store, call center, email, marketplace — so that what happens in one is known in the next. It differs from multichannel, where a company is present in several places that do not know about each other, and the difference is entirely in the data and the process rather than in the number of channels.

An omnichannel consultant therefore spends most of the engagement on things that are not marketing: identity resolution across systems, inventory visibility, returns handling across channels, and the operational changes required so that a promise made online can be met in a store. Omnichannel agencies that arrive with a campaign plan and no operational scope are selling multichannel.

The question to ask before commissioning is which handoff is currently broken, because that is where the value is. Most omnichannel programs pay for themselves on one or two specific transitions — buy online and collect in store, or a service conversation that starts in chat and finishes on the phone — rather than on a general improvement.

Global marketing, and a metric worth calculating properly

One strategy topic and one measurement habit.

International marketing examples that are genuinely instructive are the ones where a company changed something substantial rather than translating. Global marketing examples divide along one axis: standardization, where the same product and message run everywhere for consistency and scale, and adaptation, where product, price, channel and message are localized. An example of global marketing at the standardized end is a luxury brand holding one identity worldwide because the scarcity depends on it; at the adapted end is a food company reformulating and renaming per market.

International marketing example collections rarely say what it cost. The honest framing is that adaptation buys relevance and costs margin and management attention, and the question for any company is which markets are large enough to deserve it.

A percent of goal calculator answers a small question that teams get wrong constantly: performance against target expressed as a share. Percent to goal is actual divided by target, times a hundred. How to calculate percentage over goal is the same calculation reported differently — either as a figure above a hundred percent, or as the excess divided by the target. Mixing the two conventions inside one report is why dashboards disagree with each other.

A percentage to goal calculator and a percentage of goal calculator are the same instrument. The one worth building into a report is one that also shows pace: where you should be by this point in the period, not only where you are against the whole. A campaign at sixty percent of goal is excellent in week three and a problem in week eleven, and a percent to goal calculator that ignores elapsed time hides that.

Repurposing, link building, and strategy vocabulary

Three practical topics that sit underneath most content and search programs.

What is repurposing content: taking one substantial piece of work and deriving several assets from it for different channels and formats. How to repurpose content well is a commissioning decision rather than a post-production one — deciding at the outset that a piece of research will also become a talk, a video, an email sequence and a set of social posts changes how it is researched, because you gather the material each format needs while you have access.

Content repurposing strategies that produce something worth publishing share one property: each derived asset is genuinely made for its format rather than cropped into it. A content repurposing strategy that simply excerpts produces material that reads as leftovers, which is the reason most repurposing programs quietly stop.

Strategies for link building that survive scrutiny are the ones where the link is a byproduct of something else being worth citing: original research with a number nobody else has, a genuinely useful free tool, a reference resource kept current, or coverage earned by doing something newsworthy. Strategic link building means choosing which of those you can sustain rather than pursuing all of them, because each is a different capability.

The tactics to avoid are the ones that would embarrass you if described accurately: paid placements without disclosure, reciprocal exchanges at scale, and networks that exist to sell links. These are named in search engine spam policies and are assessed at site level, which means the risk is not confined to the pages that carry the links.

New media strategies, as a phrase, has outlived the moment when new media meant anything specific. What buyers usually mean by it now is planning for channels the organization does not already run — creator partnerships, community platforms, streaming audio, connected TV — and the useful discipline is the same as anywhere: name the audience, name what changes for them, and decide in advance what evidence would show it worked.

Creative strategies examples worth studying are documented ones, where the constraint and the reasoning are both on the record. Award case studies and published effectiveness papers are the best available source, because they state what the business problem was before describing the idea. Consulting consumer goods work is one of the more transparent sectors for this, since the categories are competitive enough that the results are measurable and frequently published.

Strategy read through published examples

Case material is the fastest way to see strategy as a set of tradeoffs rather than a list of activities, provided the examples are read for structure rather than copied.

LVMH strategy is the most instructive published example of portfolio thinking in consumer goods. The company operates dozens of houses across wine and spirits, fashion and leather goods, perfumes and cosmetics, watches and jewelry, and selective retailing, and the reported logic is deliberate decentralization: each house keeps its own creative direction and its own brand equity while the group supplies capital, distribution, retail estate and back office. The strategic consequence is that a weak year at one house does not force a repositioning of another, and that scarcity can be maintained brand by brand rather than sacrificed to group volume. The group’s own annual reports, cited below, set out the segment structure directly.

Sephora marketing strategy is usually cited for the opposite reason: it is a retailer that built a loyalty program and an owned digital experience around trial and discovery in a category where the traditional purchase depended on a counter and a salesperson. Sephora s marketing strategy is worth studying for how sampling, loyalty tiering and user reviews were used to convert a high-consideration purchase into a repeatable one.

DTC strategy is what happens when a manufacturer removes the retailer and takes on the customer relationship and its whole cost. The margin gained is real and the acquisition cost is also real, which is why so many DTC brands grew revenue for several years without ever reaching contribution profitability. A DTC strategy holds up when repeat rate and average order value together clear the fully loaded cost of acquiring a customer, and not otherwise.

Coach marketing strategy, credit unions marketing strategy and travel marketing strategy are each shaped by a constraint the others do not have: brand repositioning after discounting in the first, member-owned governance and regulatory limits in the second, and extreme seasonality with a long booking window in the third. Reading marketing strategy case studies across unlike sectors is more useful than reading five from your own, because the transferable part is the reasoning, not the tactic.

Positioning, personas, and the words a strategy is written in

The vocabulary here is loose enough that two people can agree on a plan and mean different things, so it is worth pinning down.

Positive positioning is the practice of stating what you are and what you do well rather than defining yourself against a competitor’s weakness. Asking what is positive positioning usually surfaces a real problem: comparative claims age badly, invite rebuttal, and teach the market to think in the competitor’s terms. The stronger form names the buyer, the situation and the outcome without mentioning anyone else.

Persona generation has become partly automated, and that is where it goes wrong. A persona assembled from demographic data and plausible-sounding motivations reads convincingly and contains nothing you did not already assume. Personas earn their place when they are built from interviews and from behavioral data you actually hold, and when each one carries at least one fact that surprised the team.

Intuitive strategy is the honest name for what most small companies do: a founder with deep category knowledge makes fast decisions without writing them down. It is not inherently worse than a documented process, and it fails in one specific way, which is that it cannot be delegated. The point at which a company needs strategy written down is the point at which someone other than the founder has to make the same call.

Content repurposing strategy is the operational counterpart. One substantial piece of research becomes a long-form page, a set of social posts, a conference talk, an email sequence and a short video, and the discipline is deciding that at commissioning time rather than afterwards. Repurposing planned in advance changes how the original is researched; repurposing planned afterwards produces excerpts.

Campaign mechanics: budgets, types, and bidding

Several of the terms people search under strategy are really platform mechanics, and confusing the two produces plans that cannot be executed.

Campaign budget optimization is a Google Ads and Meta setting that distributes a single budget across ad groups or ad sets automatically, moving spend toward whatever is performing. It removes a manual lever and works well when the ad sets share a goal and a conversion definition; it works badly when one ad set is prospecting and another is retargeting, because the retargeting will always look cheaper and will absorb the budget.

Google campaign types is the practical map: Search, Performance Max, Display, Video, Demand Gen, Shopping and App, each with its own inventory and controls. Understanding how do Performance Max campaigns work matters because it is the type that spans all of them: one campaign supplies assets and a goal, and the system decides placement, audience and bid across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps. The tradeoff is control and reporting granularity, which is why it is a poor first campaign and a reasonable later one.

A conquesting campaign bids on or targets a competitor’s brand terms and audiences. It is legal in the United States for keyword targeting, contested when the competitor’s mark appears in the ad text itself, and expensive because the competitor’s own brand campaign will have a quality advantage on their own name. It is most defensible where switching is genuinely common.

B2B services and the agency landscape

A large part of strategy demand is really a search for someone to run it.

A B2B growth agency sells across the funnel rather than by channel, which suits companies whose problem is that nothing connects. A B2B demand generation service is the narrower version, concentrating on creating and capturing demand rather than on brand or product marketing. A B2B PPC agency narrows it again to paid media, and a B2B content agency to the asset production that everything else depends on. The distinction matters at contract time because these four will each describe the same client problem in their own terms.

A B2B fractional CMO is a part-time senior hire rather than an agency, typically one or two days a week, brought in when a company needs judgment and structure but cannot yet fund a full-time executive. The arrangement works when there is a team to lead and fails when the fractional CMO is expected to also be the team. Firms selling access to B2B marketing experts on the same basis should be asked who specifically, and for how many hours.

B2B influencer marketing platforms are a smaller and more recent category than their consumer equivalents, and the influence they broker is different: analysts, practitioners with large professional followings, and community moderators rather than entertainers. The measure is pipeline influenced rather than reach. B2B PPC agency work and email marketing B2B programs usually sit alongside it, because the audience is small enough that the same names appear in every channel.

Comparing the tools a strategy runs on

Tool selection is not strategy, but the wrong tool constrains one.

Vertical strategy consulting is priced and scoped differently from marketing services. Insurance strategy consulting deals with regulated products, agent and broker distribution, and state-by-state variation, so the work is often distribution design rather than communication. Life sciences supply chain strategy sits further still from marketing, and is included here only because the phrase is searched alongside the others: it concerns cold chain, serialization and single-source risk, which is operations rather than demand.

Campaigns worth studying, and what to take from them

Public campaign examples are useful as evidence of what an audience tolerated, not as templates.

Health communication campaign examples are the best-documented category available, because public health bodies publish their evaluations. Health communication campaigns examples from tobacco cessation and vaccination programs are studied precisely because the outcome measure is unambiguous and the results, including the failures, are in the literature. Social campaign examples from commercial brands are rarely evaluated that honestly.

A celebrity campaign buys borrowed attention and borrowed risk in the same transaction, which is why the contract matters more than the creative. Event engagement strategy is the opposite trade: lower reach, far higher intensity, and a measurable list of people who attended. For B2B especially, one is usually a better use of the same money than the other.

Retrospectives are worth reading with the date attached. Round-ups of 2024 campaigns and forecasts about marketing strategy in 2025 both date quickly, and the parts that survive are the structural observations rather than the predictions. SaaS copywriting is a case in point: the advice a SaaS copywriter gave in 2019 about feature-led pages has been overtaken by search results that summarize rather than link, which changes what a page has to do before it is read.

What is a marketing strategy?

A small set of decisions about who you serve, what you promise them, how they will encounter you, and what you are choosing not to do. It is short, it is stable, and it constrains what happens next.

The word is used for almost anything, which is why so many companies have a document called a strategy and no strategy. The distinguishing feature is that a strategy forecloses options. If reading it does not tell you what you have decided against, it is a summary of intentions.

Strategy is a choice; a plan is a schedule

Both are necessary and they answer different questions. Strategy answers what we are trying to do and for whom; the plan answers what will happen in March. A plan written without the strategy underneath produces activity that cannot be evaluated, because there is no standard against which to judge whether it was the right activity.

Why subtraction is the test

Adding is easy and costs nothing to write down. A document listing twelve priority channels has not prioritized anything, and the giveaway is that no internal group loses. Real strategic choices disadvantage somebody’s preferred activity, which is why they are difficult to get agreed and why unanimous immediate approval is a warning sign.

How is a marketing strategy different from a marketing plan?

Strategy is the decision; the plan is how that decision gets executed. Strategy changes rarely; the plan changes quarterly; campaigns change monthly.

Most organizational confusion about marketing sits at the boundary between rows one and three. When a plan is revised because results were disappointing, people frequently describe it as a change of strategy, which erodes the thing that was supposed to be stable.

How often should a strategy actually change?

Rarely, and for reasons outside marketing: a genuine change in the market, in the product, or in what customers value. Changing it because a quarter underperformed is almost always a mistake, and it is the mechanism by which companies end up with no consistent position at all.

How do you write a marketing strategy?

Interview customers, compare what your leaders believe, reconcile that against the numbers, choose a segment you can win, write the promise in one sentence, and name what you are stopping.

Start with customers, not with a framework

Fifteen to twenty conversations with customers, lapsed customers and people who chose somebody else will tell you more than any framework applied to internal assumptions. The most common finding is that customers value something different from what the company believes it is selling, and that gap is the strategy.

The separate-answers exercise

Ask each leader independently to write down, in one sentence, who the company’s core customer is. Compare the answers in the room. When they differ — and they usually do — every downstream disagreement about channels, messaging and budget turns out to be this disagreement wearing different clothes.

Choose winnable over large

The largest addressable segment is rarely the one to choose, because it is large for everyone and is contested by better-resourced competitors. The segment where you already win, or where competitors are weakest, produces more revenue at lower cost even though it looks smaller in a board pack.

What should the promise actually say?

One sentence, specific enough that a competitor could not honestly claim it, and true enough that your delivery supports it.

Two tests are enough. First, could your closest competitor put their name on this sentence without lying? If so, it is not a position. Second, would a customer who read it recognize their own experience of you? If not, it is an aspiration, and the gap between it and reality will do more damage than a modest but accurate claim.

Category language is where positions go to die

‘Innovative, customer-focused solutions delivered by a team that cares’ describes a very large number of companies. Vague language survives internal review precisely because it is unobjectionable, which is the same reason it does no work in the market.

A narrow true claim beats a broad plausible one

Being definitively the best option for a specific situation is worth more than being an acceptable option for everyone, and it is achievable by companies that could never win the broad claim. Narrowness feels like a sacrifice and functions as leverage.

What does ‘what we will not do’ look like in practice?

Named segments you will decline, channels you will not run, revenue you will turn down, and activities that stop this quarter.

• Customer segments you will not pursue, even when they inquire
• Channels you will not run, regardless of what competitors are doing there
• Types of work or product you will decline, and what you will refer out instead
• Geographies or verticals outside scope for the strategy period
• Activities currently running that will stop, with a date
• Metrics you will stop reporting because they drive the wrong behavior
• Feature or service requests you will not build to win individual deals
• Price points below which you will not compete

The fifth item is where most strategies fail to land. Naming future exclusions is easy; stopping something already running requires someone to lose an activity they own, and a strategy that does not survive that conversation was never binding.

What are the warning signs of a strategy that is not one?

No customer was interviewed, nothing is being stopped, it could describe any competitor, everyone agreed instantly, and there is no way to find out it was wrong.

The ‘could be anyone’ test

Replace your company name with a competitor’s throughout the document. If it still reads as true and sensible, you have written a description of your category rather than a strategy for your company. This takes two minutes and catches a large proportion of the problem.

Strategies should be falsifiable

A strategy is a bet about what will work, and a bet you cannot lose is not a bet. Writing down what would prove it wrong — and when you will check — is the difference between a decision and a statement of confidence.

How do you choose channels once the strategy exists?

By where the chosen customer already is, what the promise needs to demonstrate, and what your team can sustain. Usually two or three channels, done properly.

The third criterion eliminates more channels than the others combined. A channel requiring weekly output that the team can sustain for six weeks is not a channel choice, it is a project with a predictable end, and the abandoned account left behind does small ongoing damage.

Two channels done properly beats six done thinly

Every channel has a threshold below which effort produces nothing. Spreading a fixed budget across six channels frequently leaves all six below their threshold, which produces the characteristic result of a busy marketing function with nothing to show.

How should a strategy be measured?

Against the outcome it was chosen to produce, on a horizon that matches how long it takes to work, with the leading indicators agreed in advance.

The first row’s leading indicator is the most useful and the least used. If the strategy chose a segment, the proportion of inbound inquiries coming from that segment should move well before revenue does, and it is measurable within a couple of quarters.

Do not judge a strategy on a channel’s quarter

Channel performance moves for reasons unrelated to strategic choice: auction dynamics, algorithm changes, seasonality, competitor spend. Revising a strategy because a channel had a bad quarter confuses the levels, and it is how companies arrive at their fourth strategy in three years.

What about digital marketing strategy specifically?

It is a subset, not a separate thing. A digital marketing strategy that does not inherit from the company’s strategy is a channel plan with an ambitious title.

The useful digital-specific decisions are about where owned, earned and paid effort goes, and how they support each other: what search visibility is being built toward, what paid media is buying that organic cannot, and what the website is actually supposed to do. Those are real decisions and they sit below the strategic ones rather than replacing them.

The website is usually the unexamined assumption

Almost every digital plan assumes the site converts adequately, and in a large proportion of cases it does not. Establishing whether the destination works before increasing the traffic to it is the cheapest sequencing decision available, and it belongs in the plan explicitly.

Who should write the strategy?

The person accountable for the outcome, with input from customers, sales and whoever will execute it. It can be facilitated externally and it cannot be outsourced.

An external party can run the interviews, structure the analysis, challenge the assumptions and write the document. What it cannot do is make the choice, because the choice commits resources and forecloses options that only the accountable person can foreclose. Strategies delivered rather than decided are the ones that sit unimplemented.

Sales should be in the room

The people having the actual conversations know which objections recur, which competitors come up and which claims fail under scrutiny. Excluding them produces a promise marketing believes and sales quietly stops using, which is a slow and invisible failure mode.

What are examples of real strategic choices?

Serving one segment exclusively, competing on a dimension the category ignores, choosing distribution over direct, or deliberately pricing above the market and delivering accordingly.

• Choosing to serve one vertical exclusively, and declining work outside it
• Competing on speed or certainty in a category that competes on price
• Choosing a single channel to dominate rather than a presence in all of them
• Deliberately pricing above the market and building delivery that supports it
• Selling through partners instead of direct, accepting lower margin for reach
• Refusing a large revenue category because it distorts the product roadmap
• Building for the buyer’s technical team rather than their procurement function
• Choosing to be the option for a specific hard situation rather than the general case

Every item on that list costs something visible. That is what makes them strategic choices rather than intentions, and it is the property most documents called strategies are missing.

Where do marketing strategy examples usually mislead?

By showing the outcome without the constraint. Famous strategies are memorable because they worked, and the published version omits the alternatives that were rejected and the resources that made the choice viable.

Marketing strategy examples are useful for illustrating what a decision looks like and dangerous as templates, because the same choice made by a company with different resources, different distribution and a different starting position produces a different result. What transfers is the shape of the reasoning, not the conclusion.

The third column is the one omitted from most published examples. Every pattern here works when its precondition holds and fails predictably when it does not, which makes the precondition the transferable part.

Read examples for the rejected option

The informative part of any strategic case study is what the company declined to do and why. That is almost never in the published account, which is why the most useful version of this exercise is asking somebody who was there rather than reading the write-up.

What is PMM, and where product marketing sits next to strategy

The abbreviation comes up constantly in job titles and org charts without being defined.

What is a PMM: a product marketing manager. The PMM definition in practice is the person who owns positioning, messaging and launch for a product — the bridge between what was built and how it is sold. What is PMM as a function differs from general marketing in that it faces inward as much as outward: a large share of the job is equipping sales rather than reaching buyers directly. In a small company the role is usually absorbed by whoever writes the strategy, which is why the two are so often confused.

B2B against B2C, funnel stages and case studies

Three foundational distinctions that decide most of a strategy document.

The differences between B2C and B2B marketing — also typed difference between B2C and B2B marketing, differences between B2B and B2C marketing, difference between B2B B2C marketing, or difference between B2B marketing and B2C marketing — come down to three things rather than tone: the number of people involved in the decision, the length of the consideration period, and whether the buyer is spending their own money. A B2B purchase with six stakeholders and a nine-month cycle cannot be marketed with consumer tactics, and the reverse is equally true.

B2B web development and a B2B web development company face a specific version of that: the site is not a storefront but a qualification and reassurance tool, read by people building an internal case. That shifts the requirement toward documentation, proof and specificity rather than toward conversion mechanics.

Funnel stages

Marketing funnel stages are a model rather than a description of behavior, and their value is in forcing you to notice that awareness content and decision content are different jobs. Judging awareness content by decision metrics is the most common way useful work gets cut.

Case studies

Marketing strategy case studies are worth reading for the reasoning and worth distrusting for the outcome, because published cases are survivors and almost never state what else was happening at the time. Read them for the decision structure, not for the result.

Top of funnel, sampling and launch strategy

Three more strategy questions that arrive with a budget attached.

What does top of the funnel mean: the stage where somebody has a problem and is not yet comparing solutions. Top of funnel marketing, top of funnel advertising and top of funnel ads all describe spend aimed there, and the reason it gets cut first is that it converts worst on last-click attribution while feeding everything downstream. Judge top of funnel on assisted conversions and branded search volume, not on direct response.

Sampling campaigns are the physical-world equivalent and work on the same logic: the cost is high per person reached and the conversion is far better than any impression, because trial removes the main objection. They suit categories where the product is genuinely better than its description, which is exactly where advertising struggles.

Pharma product launch strategy operates under constraints most launches do not have: what may be claimed is defined externally, approval chains are long, and the audience splits between prescriber and patient with different permissible messages for each. Fashion campaigns sit at the opposite pole — almost no claim restriction, and a calendar set by seasons and drops rather than by quarters.

Target markets, funnel stages, DTC and strategy consulting by sector

Four questions that arrive whenever a strategy engagement is being scoped.

Target market strategy examples and a target market strategy example are asked for because the abstract version is hard to act on. The concrete version is three sentences: who specifically, what they are currently doing instead, and why they would change. A target market defined by demographics alone is not actionable; one defined by a situation is.

The awareness stage

What is the awareness stage of the marketing funnel: the point at which somebody has a problem and does not yet know the solutions exist. Content aimed there answers the problem rather than describing the product, which is why it converts poorly on first touch and matters enormously to everything downstream. Judging awareness content on immediate conversions is the most common way it gets cut just before it starts working.

DTC and seasonal campaigns

DTC strategy differs from retail strategy in one structural way: you own the customer relationship and the data, and you also own the acquisition cost with nobody to share it. A season campaign in that context is not a calendar exercise — it is the period where acquisition economics are briefly favorable, and planning it late is what makes it expensive.

Strategy consulting by sector

Insurance strategy consulting, pharmaceutical strategy consulting and omnichannel strategy consulting are distinct practices rather than one capability with different clients, because each is shaped by its own regulation and its own distribution. In marketing terms the common thread is that the constraint is rarely creative — it is what you are permitted to claim and who is permitted to say it.

Legal marketing

Personal injury marketing firms, personal injury marketing companies and marketing personal injury law firm searches sit in one of the most expensive paid categories in the country. The strategic answer for a smaller firm is almost never to compete on the head terms, but to own specific injury types, specific locations and the questions claimants actually ask before they are ready to call.

How does strategy survive contact with the quarter?

By separating the review of the strategy from the review of performance, and by holding the strategic review to a date agreed in advance rather than to whichever quarter goes badly.

The mechanism that erodes strategies is entirely predictable: a disappointing quarter produces pressure to change something, the most available thing to change is the strategy, and changing it resets every downstream program before any of them had time to work. Booking the strategic review in advance removes the decision from the moment of pressure.

Separate the two conversations explicitly

A monthly or quarterly performance review asks whether the plan is being executed well. A strategic review asks whether the plan is the right one. Holding both in the same meeting means the second question gets answered under the emotional conditions created by the first.

What it costs: Marketing Strategy

Marketing retainers are priced by the channels and the hours behind them, not by the size of the client. For Marketing Strategy, the planning ranges below are the ones we quote against; they come from our published marketing agency pricing guide, and the final number follows a written scope.

Ranges are US planning figures, not quotes. Every engagement is priced after a written scope, and the planning range tells you which tier the conversation starts in.

Frequently asked questions