Contents
1. Set your goals and objectives
3. Identify your target audience
8. Build and maintain a content calendar
11. Put the right people in key roles
11 Important Elements to Consider When Building Your Marketing Strategy
You have decided to launch (or relaunch) your business, and the e-commerce platform or service-delivery model is set up. Now comes the harder part: building and implementing a marketing strategy that actually works.
Every business plan needs a strong marketing strategy. It is the foundation for everything you will do over the next year as you introduce your brand and promote your products. Without one, you are improvising in digital limbo.
The marketing-strategy playbook has shifted significantly in the last few years. Static content (blogs, images, text-only social posts) is being outpaced by video on nearly every engagement and conversion metric. The brands that win in 2026 build their marketing strategy around video as the core asset, with text and image content supporting it.
11 elements to consider when building a modern video-first marketing strategy. Each one ties back to a specific tactic you can execute starting this week.
1. Set your goals and objectives
Setting goals is not enough on its own. You need goals that position your brand for measurable success. Start with your business direction: what does the next 12 months look like? Increasing sales revenue, establishing brand identity, expanding your customer base, or all three.
If your business is already established, the focus may shift to expansion: new product lines, faster time to market, and improved customer experience across the funnel.
Follow the SMART framework when setting goals: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound. Vague goals like "grow brand awareness" do not give the team something to execute against. "Increase YouTube subscribers by 40% by end of Q3 through 2 product demo videos per week" does.
2. Conduct market research
Whether you run a small business or a large eCommerce store, knowing your market is a foundational input to your marketing strategy. This includes identifying your market size, the industry you operate in, and the kind of products you offer.
A company selling refrigerators starts its research by mapping the market: How many households are in their region? What is the market's buying power? Who are their competitors? How aggressive are competitor marketing activities?
Buying power informs pricing strategy. Pricing strategy informs which platforms make sense. Platform choices inform content production. Skip the research step and the rest of the strategy stacks on a weak foundation.
Consumer data sources include the US Bureau of Labor Statistics for US-based research, plus Statista, Nielsen, and Pew Research for broader consumer behaviour insights. Layer in customer interviews and support-ticket analysis from your own business for the qualitative side.
3. Identify your target audience
Define exactly who you are targeting. Build a customer persona that captures characteristics, demographics (age, marital status, gender, income, education), and behavioural patterns of your ideal customer. This information shapes everything downstream: product positioning, content tone, channel selection, and video format choices.
Identify their pain points. What problem are they trying to solve when they encounter your brand? Knowing the pain point lets you build content that addresses it directly instead of generic awareness content.
Analyse media consumption habits. Which platforms do they spend time on? What kind of content do they consume there? A B2B audience watching long-form YouTube product reviews needs different content than a B2C audience scrolling 15-second TikToks. Match the format to the actual habit.
4. Analyse your competitors
Competitor analysis is non-negotiable for an effective marketing strategy. You want to know what your competitors are doing, where they are succeeding, and which gaps you can bridge.
Audit their branding, product positioning, marketing activities, and social channels. If they run Google Ads driving substantial traffic, find the keywords they rank for and the audience segments they target. If they have a strong YouTube channel, study which video formats drive the most engagement on their playlists.
Competitor analysis surfaces both strengths to emulate and weaknesses to exploit. A competitor with a strong written content strategy but weak video presence is an opening: you can dominate the video angle while they catch up.
5. Determine your budget
Budget shapes strategy. Decide how much you can allocate to marketing efforts. Will you run ad campaigns on every platform you operate in? If so, how much per platform?
Platform minimums vary. Facebook lead generation typically requires at least $15 per day to produce useful data. Google Ads has its own minimums. LinkedIn requires a minimum daily spend that varies with ad format, objective, and audience selection.
The US Small Business Administration suggests allocating a percentage of revenue to marketing if your margins are at or above 10 to 12 percent. Most established businesses allocate 7 to 12 percent of revenue to marketing.
Video production used to be a major budget concern, but AI tools have collapsed the cost. The AI video editor turns raw recordings into publish-ready videos in one click, which eliminates most of the post-production budget line. AI avatar generation lets you produce presenter videos without a studio. The result: video marketing is no longer reserved for brands with $100K+ production budgets.
6. Choose the right platforms
You cannot maintain a presence on every platform. Choose carefully based on where your audience actually spends time.
Owning your website matters most. The website gives you full control over presentation, product details, and the customer journey. Prospects research deeply on your website before they convert anywhere else. Make it strong before you scale to social channels.
Social platform selection comes next. Three questions to filter:
- Are your prospects actually on this platform regularly?
- Does the platform fit your product format? (Instagram for apparel and visual products, LinkedIn for B2B and professional services, YouTube for tutorials and long-form value, TikTok for short-form viral hooks.)
- Do you have the resources and content production capacity to maintain quality on this platform?
For video distribution at scale, the long-to-short AI lets you produce one master video and automatically generate vertical-format clips for YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and TikTok. One production, multiple platform-native assets.
7. Plan your content strategy
At the core of every marketing strategy is content. Start with messaging: how do you want your brand to be perceived? What promise are you making to customers?
Most platforms reward strong content with discovery, whether your goal is website traffic, social engagement, or email list growth. Lead with educational content, not sales pitches. Educate first, sell second.
Map content to specific customer questions. Each piece should answer a real question, solve a real problem, or guide the customer through a specific decision in their buying journey. Generic "brand awareness" content rarely converts; specific "here's how to solve X" content does.
For deeper strategy on video-led content marketing, see our full guide on video content marketing tips.
8. Build and maintain a content calendar
Planning content is one thing. Producing it consistently is another. Build your content calendar in advance, ideally with 4 to 12 weeks of content mapped before you launch any new platform.
Stock a content bank with assets ready for the next several weeks. For a new brand, start with awareness-stage content for prospects who do not yet know your brand or what you offer.
Once the brand is established (typically 6 to 12 months in), vary the content mix to capture different buyer-journey stages. Create content for prospects already considering your product, plus content for those who need more convincing before they decide.
Producing content in advance saves time and reduces panic publishing. It also ensures you cover important dates and seasonal moments (Christmas, New Year, Valentine's Day, industry events) without scrambling. The script-to-video tool turns written content briefs into ready-to-publish videos, which compresses the production cycle from weeks to hours.
9. Define your KPIs upfront
A marketing strategy is incomplete without defined KPIs. What metrics will tell you whether the strategy is working?
Common video marketing KPIs: video view-through rate, click-through rate from video to landing page, lead conversion rate from video viewers, cost per acquired customer, watch time, and audience retention curves. Pick 3 to 5 that align directly with your business goals and track them consistently.
The results of your marketing effort should tie back to the goals from element 1. If revenue is the goal, conversion and customer acquisition cost are the KPIs to watch. If brand awareness is the goal, reach and audience retention matter more.
Define the KPIs before launching the strategy. Defining them after the fact creates motivated reasoning where any metric that looks good becomes the metric that "matters".
10. Run a SWOT analysis
Build a marketing strategy that is both effective and efficient by running a SWOT analysis early. SWOT maps your strategy's Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. The analysis also applies to your competitive position, target audience, current messaging, and product offers.
Ideally, run a SWOT analysis before finalising brand positioning and the broader marketing strategy. The output is concrete insight into where your brand has natural advantages and where the competition will outflank you if you stay generic.
11. Put the right people in key roles
Most businesses underestimate this element. The best-laid marketing strategy goes nowhere with the wrong people executing it. You need someone steering the ship, plus the right specialists in the execution roles.
A strong marketing manager is an innovative thinker open to new approaches, with strong people skills to bring out the best in the team. For modern video-first marketing strategies, the marketing manager should also be comfortable with video production workflows and AI-assisted content tools, since these now sit at the centre of execution.
Layer in supporting roles based on need: social media manager, content marketer, marketing coordinator, video producer. The right team structure depends on your budget and the specific platforms you have chosen.
Wrapping up
A marketing strategy is the foundation for every brand and business, whether you run an e-commerce store, a service business, or an enterprise SaaS company. It is what turns objectives into a sequenced execution plan you can actually run against.
If you are ready to put video at the core of your marketing strategy, Vmaker covers the full pipeline. Record with the screen recorder, edit with the AI video editor, generate subtitles in 35+ languages, dub into 100+ languages, and turn long-form recordings into short clips for social distribution. Free plan, unlimited recordings, no watermark.
For the deeper strategic framework, download the free Video Marketing Strategy ebook.
