A marketing strategy is a long-term plan for achieving a company’s goals by understanding customers’ needs while creating a distinct and sustainable competitive advantage. It encompasses everything from determining who your customers are to deciding what channels you use to reach those customers.
With a marketing strategy, you can define how your company positions itself in the marketplace, the products you produce, the strategic partners you make, and the type of advertising and promotion you undertake.
What Is Included In A Marketing Strategy?
In essence, a marketing strategy determines the general direction, but not the specific details for a variety of marketing-related activities. Ideally, your marketing strategy should help you define the following for your company:
Target Audience: Who you’re going after
Value Proposition: What your USP or competitive value is
Product Mix: What you’re offering
Brand Messaging: Where (and how) you stand in the market
Promotional Initiatives: What other benefits can you offer
Content Marketing: How you’ll use content to meet your goals
Why Is A Marketing Strategy Important?
A marketing strategy is essential to setting the direction not just for your marketing-related activities but also for your entire business. Your marketing strategy helps you stay in sync with your customer base, develop the right products for them, and determine how you communicate information about those products.
Without a defined strategy you won’t know who your customers are, you won’t develop the right products, and you’ll waste money promoting them.
In short, having a defined marketing strategy makes you more successful. According to a CoSchedule survey, companies that have a documented strategy are 313% more likely to be successful than those who don’t.
Types of Marketing Strategies
There are multiple types of marketing strategies, including:
- Content marketing
- Search engine optimisation (SEO)
- Paid media
- Digital Marketing
- Product Marketing
- E-mail marketing
- Social media marketing
- Partnerships
Whilst they all might have their separate teams, you ideally want to work with an integrated marketing approach. This offers a shared roadmap and tone of voice between the teams, leading to clear and consistent brand messaging across all marketing channels and marketing activities.
How To Create An Effective Marketing Strategy
1. Set Definable Business Goals
Your company’s vision and objectives are the driving factors behind your marketing strategy. These overall objectives help determine your marketing goals, which your marketing strategy is in service of.
Your marketing goals build on your company’s goals. You might set a goal to achieve a specific market share, dominate a particular channel, or reach a certain percentage of a certain type of consumer. Your goals should be reachable and measurable.
2. Identify and Research the Target Market
The goals you set help you define the target market to pursue. This requires you to get familiar with the customers in this market, which requires some degree of market research and analysis. You need to determine the following about the target market and its customers:
- Market size and growth potential
- Trends in your market
- Competitors
- Geographic and demographic characteristics
- Customer behavior
From here, you can develop your ideal customer profiles and buyer personas. And remember: you can’t be competitive without knowing what your competitors are up to. Competitor analysis is key to market penetration and moving up those search rankings.
Focus on the 7 Ps
As you develop your marketing strategy, you should focus on the traditional 7 Ps of marketing:
Product: How you satisfy customer needs
Price: How much customers are willing to pay for your product
Promotion: Which channels do you use to tell customers about your product
Place: Where you sell your product
People: Individuals who help sell your product to customers
Packaging: How you present your product to the customer
Process: How you deliver your product to customers
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