What makes a great marketing strategy?
Long gone are the days where marketing is an afterthought, a great marketing strategy positively connects the Brand to the Customer. Blog update June 2026.
What makes a great marketing strategy?
A great marketing strategy starts with understanding your unique value, the specific reason customers choose you, and turns it into a repeatable system for connecting with the people you serve. It is not a list of tactics or a single campaign. It is a clear, documented plan that links what makes you different to how you reach customers, then measures and refines it over time.
Key takeaways
A great marketing strategy begins with clarity on your unique value, not a pile of tactics.
Strategy connects what makes you different to how you reach and keep customers.
Tactics are experiments. Run them in short cycles and keep what works.
A documented strategy becomes a system that stabilises sales, rather than random acts of marketing.
AI can build a strategy fast, but used plainly it makes you sound average. Use it to amplify your unique value, not to replace your thinking.
A case for marketing
In the mid 2000s, Kmart Australia was struggling. The business turned over $4 billion annually, yet was ‘flirting with collapse’, making almost zero profit. Tellingly, 90% of sales were driven by discounting. To generate foot traffic and draw customers away from competitors, Kmart ran almost continuous sales with 50% mark-downs. Whilst discounts resulted in short-term spikes in sales, they did nothing to build brand equity or profitability. The broader retail environment was tough with intensifying competition from online shopping.
In short, the brand lacked a connection to their customers and a great marketing strategy. It had lost its way. Continuous sales, confusing shop layouts, long queues and mind-boggling varieties of stock all combined to paint a not-very-pretty picture for incoming Managing Director Guy Russo in 2008. Fast forward to 2014 – Kmart had become the most profitable department store in Australia.
We find Russo’s stunning turnaround of Kmart’s fortunes fascinating because most analysts had written Kmart off as a basket case. And yet he managed to do it, because he took the time to develop a marketing strategy that put the customer at the heart of the business. Before we continue, let’s define what we mean by marketing strategy.
It starts with understanding your unique value
Every great strategy rests on one piece of clarity: the specific value you provide that customers cannot easily get elsewhere. Not a slogan, and not everything you do, but the genuine reason people choose you. Without that clarity, marketing becomes guesswork, and you end up competing on price or noise.
This is exactly where Russo began. He saw that Kmart was trying to be two things at once, a discount store and a higher-end retailer, and serving neither well. His insight was to recognise what Kmart was at its core: a discount retailer. As he put it, in Eloise Keating's article for Smart Company, Kmart competing with mid-tier stores was like McDonald's selling T-bone steaks with knives and forks. Once he was clear on the unique value, everyday low prices on quality products, the strategy almost wrote itself. He cut prices by an average of 30 percent and removed discount sales, and earnings before tax grew 69 percent between 2011 and 2013.
Your unique value is the foundation everything else sits on. Get it clear, and the choices about who to reach, what to say, and where to invest become far easier.
A strategy is how you connect with your customers, new ones, existing and lapsed
A strategy is how you connect with your customers: new ones, existing ones, and lapsed ones. You need to know who they are, how to understand them better, where to reach them, and how to help them choose you. Your high-level marketing strategy describes that connection to the people you serve and why they should buy from you. From there you set objectives, ideally SMART ones, specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely, so you can tell whether the connection is working.
The rest of the strategy is about identifying the best ways to reach those objectives and the obstacles in the way. You make deliberate choices about how to deploy finite resources like budget, time, and technology, and how you will measure results. It is informed by your business strategy and your brand strategy, and often your digital strategy too.
Do not confuse an objective with a strategy. "Grow by improving customer retention 10 percent year on year" is an objective. It says nothing about how or why it will be achieved. The strategy is the reasoning and the choices that get you there.
This can sound like a lot of work. With the right tools it does not have to be, and it does not need to run to pages no one reads.
Start small, but start.
Strategy is not a swearword!
How you make it happen is your tactical action plan
A tactic is a specific action that needs to be taken to implement your strategy to reach your objectives. In building terms, if a blueprint is the strategy guiding what the end result should look like, then a hammer and nails are one of the tactics that bring it to life. Marketing tactics can relate to the product, price, place, promotion, people (customer) or processes. So, if the objective is to encourage customer retention, several tactics might be implemented such as retargeting customers a specific number of days after their most recent purchase, sending an email with a 20% off redemption code or introducing a loyalty points program.
Tactics as science experiments
Think of tactics as the marketer’s tool kit. If the objective is to encourage repeat purchases, several tactics might be in the toolkit, such as retargeting customers a specific number of days after their most recent purchase, sending an email with a 20% off redemption code or introducing a loyalty points program.
You want to consider yourself like a scientist that is conducting experiments. You create a hypothesis based on your experience and available data about what will work to reach your objective. You predict the results of the experiment and then you launch it.
We work in 90 day increments because often in the marketing world, things can take a little longer than you initially hope - you know, the one social post you posted won’t magically turn into 1,000 website visitors.
Track how your experiment is going using the available metrics. These metrics need to be meaningful and align back to your objective. If repeat purchases is your goal and you’re tracking social followers closely, you don’t have a pulse of what is happening in your experiment. A better metric would be click through rate of your retargeting campaign, email opens and click through rates, loyalty program sign ups.
At the end of the 90 day period 9 (or however long you set - hello 6 and 2 week product marketers) review the data and draw your conclusions. Record your learnings, if you can, so that it informs your next experiment.
From scattered tactics to a growth system
Here is the shift that separates businesses with stable sales from those riding the highs and lows. A one-off campaign, however clever, gives you a spike. A system gives you consistency. When your unique value, your strategy, your experiments, and your learnings connect into a repeatable cycle, marketing stops being a series of disconnected efforts and becomes an engine you can rely on.
This is what stabilises sales. Instead of reacting to a quiet month with another hasty promotion, you have a documented strategy and a rhythm of testing, measuring, and refining that compounds. The work moves from frantic to deliberate, and the results become predictable enough to plan around.
Where AI fits, and where it can trip you up
AI can be useful here, and it also worth being honest about its limits. Used well, it will help you draft a marketing strategy in a fraction of the time. Used plainly, it will give you a strategy that sounds like everyone else's.
The reason is in how AI works. It predicts the most probable response, and the most probable is, by definition, the most average. Ask it for a marketing strategy with no real input, and it hands you a competent, generic plan built from the same patterns it gives everyone else. The whole purpose of a strategy is to make you distinct, so a generic one kind of defeats the purpose.
The better way to think about AI is as an amplifier. It multiplies whatever you give it. Feed it a clear, genuine sense of your unique value, the thing only you provide, and it amplifies your distinctiveness, helping you express and extend it faster than you could alone. Feed it nothing distinctive, and it amplifies the average. You don’t want to use AI to become more average, more quickly.
The same caution applies to systems. You could adopt someone else's ready-made system or template and move fast, and sometimes that is a sensible start. But borrowed systems keep the capability, and the power, with whoever built them. The lasting advantage comes from building your own capability to create an original strategy, enhanced by AI rather than handed over to it. Original with capability beats average at speed, every time it matters.
This is the difference between using AI and being used by it. The businesses that stand out will not be the ones that generated a strategy fastest. They will be the ones that built the capability to think clearly about their unique value, and used AI to amplify it.
Learn more about AI and marketing for small business
Great strategy puts the customer first
We call this human-centred marketing, and it is core to what we do. Businesses used to be able to build a product and then work out how to sell it. Technology and the internet have shifted the power firmly to the customer, and people are far more sceptical of advertising than they were. Businesses that design their offering around real customer insight, and communicate in a way that builds genuine connection, hold the advantage.
How did a discount department store competing on price manage that? Russo and his team took the time to deeply understand the Kmart customer. As highlighted in How Kmart beat the odds on everyday low prices, their research found that shopping at a discount store carried negative feelings, including the quiet shame of making ends meet. So the everyday-low-pricing strategy was launched with a campaign that celebrated the pride of finding a quality product at a bargain price, featuring real mothers guessing prices in store. Store visits rose 20 percent over two years and items sold rose 42 percent. By putting the customer at the centre, Kmart earned a new place in the hearts of Australian shoppers.
Why you should write down your marketing strategy
Your business may not be in the dire straits that Kmart found itself all those years ago. But if you can’t confidently say you’re making the most of every opportunity, or if your results seem to be flat-lining, it might be time to review/refine or create and document your marketing strategy.
Perhaps you’ve been putting it off because you’ve thought that developing a good marketing strategy is hard.
And whilst it does require focused thought and collaboration across the business, there are ways to do it easily to get you moving quickly.
When you’re focused on delivering results for the next quarter, it can feel counterintuitive to hit a pause button and question everything you’re doing. In the face of competitor intensity, it’s tempting to simply do more; run another promotion, produce another brochure, experiment with advertising on a new social media platform. In other words, it’s tempting to operate on a purely tactical basis. But working with 25eight for just one hour a week in as little as 8 weeks, can help you develop and execute an effective strategy.
Share your strategy so that everyone has a clear picture of how you will connect with your customers and reach your business objectives
Whilst it might be tempting to skip formally documenting your marketing strategy, documenting it has several benefits;
It forces clarity of thought as you interrogate which choices to make.
There’s less risk of distraction, misapplication and/or wastage of resources.
Your business is less likely to be reactive.
It creates a shared understanding within your business about how you intend to approach achieving your objectives.
It’s much easier to develop an action plan that can be measured, as you will have defined what ‘success’ looks like and know when you’re moving in the wrong direction.
And ultimately, this leads to a much greater likelihood of your business achieving its objectives quicker, and with less wastage.
Ideally, it should live somewhere where everyone can access it. In your cloud project management tools such that it can be referenced to help make decisions. And, it can be as simple as a one page document.
Where to start
The simplest first step is to get your strategy onto one page.
But, if you want to go further, getting clear on your unique value, turning it into a growth strategy, and building the system to deliver it consistently is the work at the heart of our Next-Level Growth Program. Rather than renting someone else's system, you build your own capability to create an original strategy, enhanced by AI rather than handed over to it. It is how we help businesses move from sporadic results to stable, repeatable sales, in about an hour a week over eight weeks.
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Clarity on your unique value, the specific reason customers choose you, turned into a documented system that connects what makes you different to how you reach and keep customers, measured and refined over time. It is a plan and a rhythm, not a single campaign.
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The strategy is the reasoning and the choices about how to reach your objectives. Tactics are the specific actions that carry it out, such as a retargeting campaign or a loyalty program. The strategy is the blueprint; the tactics are the tools.
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Because it is the foundation every other choice rests on. When you are clear on the value only you provide, decisions about who to reach, what to say, and where to invest become far easier. Without it, marketing drifts into competing on price or noise.
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y turning scattered, one-off tactics into a repeatable system. A documented strategy with a rhythm of testing, measuring, and refining compounds over time, which makes results more consistent and predictable than reacting to quiet months with hasty promotions.
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AI can draft one quickly, but used without your input it produces a generic strategy that sounds like everyone else's, which defeats the purpose of standing out. Use it to amplify a clear sense of your unique value rather than to replace your thinking. The lasting advantage comes from building your own capability to create an original strategy, enhanced by AI, instead of renting someone else's system.
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Yes. Documenting it forces clarity, reduces wasted resources, creates shared understanding across your team, and makes results measurable. It can be as simple as a single page kept where everyone can access it.