How do you create a marketing strategy?

I often get asked how do you create a marketing strategy and so I just wanted to break it down really simply for you guys who are asking about it. So when you think about creating marketing strategy, the first thing you actually need to do is to conduct something called a marketing audit. Now a marketing audit is essentially getting under the hood of your business and understanding what marketing is successfully helping you achieve your goals versus probably what's a huge amount of waste of time. And the way that we do this is we look at it on a channel by channel basis. So you would break down every single channel, so content, paid media, the website, event programs. You need to have access to that data, you need to be able to condense it into a way of viewing it against your business goals. So do you know if content is driving any revenue for your business? Do you know if it's converting any demos for your business? Do you know if the events that you're spending thousands of pounds attending are actually driving any opportunities for your sales team? So the first step is often actually just getting that reporting in place. Many businesses surprisingly still don't have that in place. If you have that information, then you'll be able to then create an effective marketing strategy because you will be able to identify what your growth levers are. So you will be able to see, well, events are driving loads of opportunities for our sales team, so let's invest more in events. Or we're spending a lot of time on content but we're actually not getting very many conversions, what can we do to change this? It's kind of just digging under the surface and utilising all that data to make sensible decisions within your marketing strategy. Your marketing strategy isn't a whole load of tactics, it's how do we help achieve the business goals, but we need the data in order to do that. So a lot of people are probably struggling because they don't necessarily have that information available to them right now.