What is a marketing program?

A marketing program or strategy is a comprehensive plan outlining a business’s approach to reaching and engaging its target audience. It involves a set of activities designed to achieve specific marketing goals, including:

A successful marketing program aligns with a company’s overall business goals and delivers measurable results.

How to create your marketing program

Follow these steps to develop an effective marketing program for your brand or ecommerce business:

1. Identify your business objectives

Define your business goals to establish a clear direction for your marketing efforts. Analyze your business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (also known as a SWOT analysis) to gain insight into its current status.

After defining your business goals, share them with your marketing team to make sure everyone understands what you’re trying to achieve. With everyone in the loop, you and your team can brainstorm new marketing ideas and strategies.

2. Make a buyer persona

Create a semi-fictional profile of your ideal customer you’ll base on:

  • Demographic profile: Age, income, location
  • Psychographic profile: Belief systems, interests, etc.
  • Challenges and pain points
  • Goals and motivations
  • Preferred marketing channels

By creating your ideal customer, you’ll be able to understand your customers better, refine your marketing efforts, optimize your marketing budget, and build stronger relationships so that your approach resonates with your audience and drives better results.

3.  Research your competitors

Increase the effectiveness of your marketing efforts by looking at what your competitors are doing. You can either use competitor research to determine where your marketing plan falls short or what you don’t want to do so you’re differentiating your brand.

Competitive research is essential for creating benchmarks that will allow you to measure how well your brand is performing.

4. Develop measurable marketing goals

Set up key performance indicators (KPIs) to break down your marketing strategy into clear, actionable targets that are easy to verify and track. To make them as clear as possible, make sure each KPI is:

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Achievable
  • Relevant
  • Time-bound

5. Expand on the details of your marketing plan

Develop a detailed roadmap that outlines all your marketing tasks with clear timelines and budget allocations. Prioritize tasks based on their impact on your business’ objectives.

If your marketing team is large and has several pillars (email marketing, social media marketing, etc.), have regular check-ins throughout the planning process so you’re developing a cohesive plan that ladders up to your overarching strategy. 

Regularly review and adjust your marketing plan to adapt to changing market conditions.

Marketing programs vs. marketing campaigns

Marketing programs and marketing campaigns aren’t the same thing. You can define each in this way:

  • Marketing program: A broader, holistic approach that often includes multiple marketing campaigns and strategies to achieve higher business objectives and goals.
  • Marketing campaign: A specific, targeted initiative used to promote a product or service. Campaigns are bound by duration and a specific, measurable objective, such as generating more conversions or boosting brand awareness.

A marketing program includes several types of activities, including:

  1. Product alignment: Strategies related to positioning, features, and benefits of a product or service
  2. Organic growth: Strategies that generate revenue without paying for ads
  3. Content marketing: Activities focused on generating and distributing valuable information that informs, attracts, and engages the audience
  4. Community building: Activities centered around building and nurturing communities that share the same interests, beliefs, or goals
  5. Data gathering: Strategies that involve systematic collection, measurement, and analysis of data to understand customer behavior and market trends
  6. Performance analysis: Evaluation of business and marketing KPIs and strategies used to improve their efficiency

Take your marketing program to the next level with Klaviyo

A leading marketing automation platform like Klaviyo simplifies the implementation of your marketing program. Klaviyo helps you send targeted SMS and emails that get results. With over 350 pre-built integrations and flexible APIs, you can easily retrieve data from your entire tech stack and get a complete audience overview.

Klaviyo offers features essential for every marketing program, including:

  • Campaigns: Easily run and manage targeted email and SMS marketing campaigns driven by your customers’ data.
  • Automated flows: Create and automate deeply personalized email and SMS flows based on customer interactions and behavior.
  • Segmentation: Group your subscribers into highly precise segments with Klaviyo’s segment builder that updates in real time so your messages stay relevant.
  • Reporting: Analyze your data with Klaviyo’s extensive reporting capabilities and dashboards, visualizing all your KPIs in one place.

Ready to make your marketing program more efficient? Sign up for Klaviyo today and transform your marketing strategy with data-driven decisions. 

Additional resources