5 Key Ways to Create an Effective Marketing Strategy

CMOs now operate in an era of less, where persistent constraints and heightened scrutiny demand a fundamental shift in approach. Success means moving past “doing more with less” to a model where marketing proves its value — connecting each initiative to enterprise goals, bridging long-term vision to short-term action and treating strategy as an ongoing discipline. In this environment, resilience comes from clear priorities, greater productivity and visible impact across the business.

Understanding and meeting the CEO’s expectations for your role and responsibilities are foundational to making marketing’s value visible and measurable. Before you begin strategy development, reinforce agreement on clear areas of marketing accountability with your CEO, executive peers and other key stakeholders — ensuring that every marketing activity is purposefully connected to enterprise goals.

Avoid guesswork and inflated expectations by establishing what marketing will be held accountable for with your CEO. Typically, these include: 

• Commercialization. Marketing is accountable for developing and executing advertising and brand campaigns, demand generation and sales conversions.

• Strategy. Marketing is accountable for innovation initiatives, product design, customer insights, and designing growth strategies and go-to-market strategy.

• Enterprise profit and loss (P&L). Marketing is accountable for both the commercialization and strategy roles.

A compelling marketing strategy bridges the gap between your long-term vision and the short-term activities that drive daily execution. Avoid creating strategic plans that are simply to-do lists. Instead, ensure every tactic is purposefully aligned with enterprise objectives, so stakeholders can see how marketing’s day-to-day work advances both immediate business needs and the broader organizational vision.

CMOs face a complex environment following waves of disruption over the past several years, and for many enterprises, the days of double-digit budgets are a thing of the past. But despite the turbulence, marketing budgets have leveled off between 2024 and 2025, with the mean average budget remaining steady at 7.7% of company revenue.

Flat growth is both good news and bad news for CMOs. Although the postpandemic budget decline has halted, marketing spending has stabilized at a rate that many CMOs feel is insufficient to deliver on their strategic ambitions. Even industries with strong initial budgets in 2025 may face shifting allocations as external factors evolve. To thrive, CMOs must make the connection between marketing investments and enterprise outcomes explicit — ensuring that every spending decision supports both the long-term vision and the short-term activities that drive business value.

For marketing, that means assessing your spend in key areas such as agencies, media, martech, operations, digital commerce, campaigns, marketing analytics and projects — exploring how each supports (or hinders) the customer journey and influences business revenue. Consider what programs actively create marketing value versus those that merely support it.

These essential steps should be part of your marketing spend playbook:

Step 1: Benchmark your budgets to identify how your current budget and spending stack up against peers and competitors.

Step 2: Build your understanding of the changing behaviors of your customers and consumers. Build your voice-of-the-customer (VoC) capabilities to track how economic uncertainty is impacting your customers.

Step 3: Shore up your scenario-planning capabilities to build agile, adaptive marketing strategies.

Strategic KPIs are the essential bridge between the long-term vision for marketing and the short-term actions that drive daily execution. With aligned operational metrics, CMOs can show how marketing contributes to business goals, justify investments and ensure that every activity is both purposeful and measurable.

A key area of focus is marketing operations (MarOps), which receives about 9% of the CMO’s budget for programs and operational areas. Over a third of CMOs plan to increase that spending — and as they do, scrutiny over what demonstrates success will intensify. 

But gaps often occur in measuring the effectiveness of MarOps efforts. To continue to increase budget and remain relevant, MarOps must be able to:

• Measure and demonstrate progress against performance goals

• Leverage that progress data to inform forward-looking optimization decisions

Most marketing organizations have yet to universally adopt marketing work management systems, but lack of data or imperfect data should not delay establishing productivity baselines. The time to start measuring is now. 

Focus on these four operational KPIs: 

• Capacity. To forecast and plan for upcoming work, start by creating an inventory of capabilities you want to plan for. Capabilities are not roles, but specific skills or skill groupings. For example, capacity for “copywriting” may include not just copywriters, but anyone who does copywriting, like a social manager. Then calculate a baseline measure for capacity by multiplying the number of people with the capability by the amount of time these resources are available to work on the project (measured as a percentage of total time available). Eventually, you’ll want to add other metrics to the baseline, such as focused work time versus time spent on administrative tasks, or employee engagement versus burnout rates.

Ninety-four percent of CMOs say that translating enterprise strategic directives into actionable plans for marketing is a challenge. CMOs often respond to short-term, execution-oriented needs by restructuring or hiring. But these measures fail to make a significant impact, and often lead to further changes down the line. 

To break the cycle of reactive restructuring and talent planning, build adaptive marketing capabilities. When business context and goals shift, building adaptive capabilities enables you to get ahead of strategic drivers of change with more agile execution. 

Adaptive capabilities have a market focus. They enable the organization to anticipate and quickly adjust to opportunities and threats, whether external or internal. Rather than pursuing continuous, incremental improvement in the hope of keeping up, adaptive capabilities focus on seizing opportunities that will help you surpass the competition. 

CMOs with adaptive capabilities are able to sense and respond to how customers and competitors are changing. Rather than sticking to known advantages, they look at what customers need regardless of marketing’s current ability to execute. They are confident that the required skills can be learned and the capabilities developed.

• Insights and analytics that synthesize data from disparate sources inside and beyond the organization, such as market intelligence, trendspotting and voice of the customer (VoC)

• Go-to-market strategy that makes sense of the opportunities and threats facing the business in collaboration with cross-functional stakeholders

• Innovation that identifies programs, projects and products that can create new value for the customer and business

• Growth hacking that formulates hypotheses and develops tests to validate assumptions and refine understanding

• Operational agility that mobilizes resources (people, process, data and technology) for novel capabilities needed for value delivery and market shaping

These capabilities do not all need to be resourced within marketing. Instead, focus on driving the capability-building process, not only within the function, but also with cross-functional collaborators. Adaptive capabilities overcome silos that impede a coherent customer view and slow decision making in order to inform strategy with deep market insights.

Marketing channels, both online and offline, play a vital role in spreading the word about a brand and reaching potential customers. Marketing leaders realize the importance of a clear and cohesive cross-channel experience, but too often they struggle to break their marketing channel strategies out of organizational silos.

Our research shows that across industries, customers reported using an average of four unique channels throughout their interaction with a brand, such as a company’s website, email, SMS and social media, during their customer buying journey. To build an effective channel portfolio, successful brands first gather insights to identify target customer groups and establish key leadership priorities. These insights include:

• Top marketing goals and how they can be supported across channels

• Personas or segments that define the brand’s target customer

• Brand research on customer sentiments and economic opportunities or threats

• Existing customer journey map(s)

• Ideal customer actions across the journey that would help meet the brand’s objectives