Strategic Marketing for Your Business

In the current ever-changing world, churning products and then sitting back waiting for clients to grab them off the shelves will not work. You should have a strategy for attracting the right customers through the creation of unique value and communicating what clients can expect from your brand. This calls for top-notch marketing.

Marketing entails the actions taken to attract people to your business. Through this, you get customers interested in what you are selling and recommend you to their peers to increase your client base. Nonetheless, you should have the right information on your potential clients for your marketing to be a success. The avenues for gaining this information should be on your strategic marketing plan. You can potentially get your professional strategic marketing plan for FREE by signing up for this giveaway.

The article below will delve into what strategic marketing entails and how it can benefit your business so you can appreciate the essence of getting this marketing plan now.

What Is Strategic Marketing?

The strategic marketing process involves studying and establishing objectives that maximize the success and efficacy of your overall marketing plan. The research allows your company to invest in intentional marketing instead of wasting your time and cash on efforts that do not pay off.

You can think of a marketing strategy as butter on toast. Though you can eat your toast just fine without the butter, the latter makes it better. The marketing strategy will be the basis of your long-term decisions and create a sustainable advantage for your firm in actualizing profitable business growth.

The main goal of strategic marketing is leveraging your company’s positive differential over your competitors through the perspectives of your target market. Though this might seem impossible to achieve, you can be among the few businesses that actualize success by signing up for this giveaway.

How Does Strategic Marketing Integrate with Your Marketing Plan?

As a marketing manager, there seem to be too many documents to pay attention to. Most managers who do not want to go the extra mile will only focus on a marketing plan, believing this is all they need. When you want to build a renowned brand, you cannot afford to only focus on a single document. You might be wondering how a marketing plan fits into strategic marketing.

A marketing strategy is ideally the top-level guide for your company’s direction. It informs the details in your marketing plan and a detailed blueprint of the execution of your marketing strategy. From the marketing plan, you have another document with specific activities delivered according to your strategy.

Most SMBs fail because they jump straight into specific marketing activities without conducting strategic marketing and compiling a marketing plan. This only leads to a lot of activities that ultimately do not contribute much to your profits or bottom line. This mistake might explain the failure of 22% of SMBs that were cited by Failory, which failed because of poor marketing. If you were thinking of skipping this marketing strategy giveaway, then you might only be setting up your company for failure.

Phases of Strategic Marketing

The diagram to the right summarizes the four key phases the marketing strategy giveaway follows. Below are tidbits on these phases.

1. Planning phase

In this crucial first step of strategic planning, you identify your business’s needs, objectives, goals, and purpose. This is the basis of all your marketing activities because, without this crucial information, it will be tough to understand what you aim to achieve from your marketing efforts. This means creating a solid marketing plan will be hard and succeeding in marketing will be almost impossible.

2. The analysis phase

This step involves looking into how your company holds up against your competitors and the industry in general. Here, most businesses will conduct competitor analysis and market research. Market research will help marketers understand how their industry looks, including their market share and prevailing trends, to gain an overall sense of their playing field. The information gleaned will validate your objectives and goals so that you know whether or not they are achievable. This protects you from putting too much effort into marketing products or services that will not profit you.

The competitor analysis gives you insight into your competitors’ actions, their industry position, and the possible market gaps you can leverage to outperform them. You can consider the testimonials from your competitor’s customers to understand what they are looking for that your competitor does not provide. This way, you can build the ideal product for these clients and take over the market.

The analysis phase involves a SWOT analysis of your company. This evaluates your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. The strengths and weaknesses are those in your company, while the opportunities and threats are the ones outside your company. You can control your strengths and weaknesses, but can only anticipate and prepare for threats and opportunities because you have no control over them. Here is a representation of the SWOT analysis in marketing.

In the analysis phase, take time to understand your ideal audience and create a buyer persona. This way, you have a thorough understanding of your customers’ needs, interests, desires, and locations. By the end of 2021, Statista estimated that there’d be 21.4 billion online shoppers, up from 1.8 billion in 2018. These numbers might be higher as the covid-19 pandemic pushed more business online.

Though the figures on online shoppers are mouthwatering for any SME, this does not mean that all your marketing efforts should be concentrated online. You will only know where to find most of your clients during the analysis phase so that you are sure which marketing channels will highly benefit your business. The analysis phase is always cash-intensive. Thankfully, with this marketing strategy giveaway, you can significantly lower its cost for your company.

3. The development phase

After getting a picture of your sector and competitors, you develop a marketing plan. This is what most marketers are familiar with because it entails establishing tactics guided by the strategic marketing process. In the development phase, you define your marketing mix, detailing how you will meet your objectives from the planning phase based on what you have discovered in the analysis phase. The following are the four Ps in the marketing mix to focus on.

• Product, which is what you are selling.

• Price meaning the price point at which you will sell a product to clients. The price is based on market references and research to ensure you get the highest profits without overpricing products and pushing customers to your competitors.

• Place, which is where you intend to sell your product. This is often online, in stores, or door-to-door.

• Promotion detailing how you will advertise your product and the strategies you will take to get people buying it.

Here is an image of the marketing mix.

A simple example to understand the development phase of strategic marketing would be to assume that the goal you have established in phase one is the creation of accounting software. The analysis in phase two has shown you that the current software in the market is not scalable and is overpriced. In the development phase, you will create, price, promote and market scalable and affordable accounting software to the right audiences.

4. Implementation phase

In the final step of the marketing strategy, you act on the efforts you have put in place based on your market research and planning. You can then launch the product and start selling. Though most marketers think it is the end of their marketing strategy However, you need to review the processes and make the necessary changes. The market nowadays is constantly evolving. You might readdress specific aspects that crop up time and again as new trends emerge and consumer interests change.

Are There Differences Between Marketing Strategy And Strategic Marketing?

Most people use the terms marketing strategy and strategic marketing interchangeably. However, they mean different things. In strategic marketing, an organization differentiates itself from competitors so that it can provide better value and service to customers. It is related to management because it involves determining budgets, allocating budgets, and improving product qualities.

A marketing strategy is your company’s plan to target markets and convert them to paying customers for your products and services. The plan implements a predefined strategy and does not involve higher levels of management, since it involves marketing strategies for specific services or products. A marketing strategy is restricted to the promotion, pricing, and planning of one product. The common types of marketing strategies include content marketing, paid adverts, conversational marketing, and social media marketing.

Benefits of a Marketing Strategy for Your Business

Though you can now get a marketing strategy giveaway, you might be wondering if your business really needs one and thus opt not to sign up for the giveaway. A marketing strategy is very important for your company’s growth. In fact, CoSchedule reported that businesses with a documented marketed strategy were 538% more likely to succeed compared to those without one.

Here are some benefits of getting a marketing strategy.

• You will know who your clients are. With this knowledge, you can take into account their needs and desires so that your service or product meets them. A marketing strategy will define your ideal market so that you know who needs your company’s offerings.

• You will understand what your business is and how it benefits others. Though you might have started a company with a picture of what you aim to achieve in mind, a marketing strategy will fine-tune this picture and help you understand your mission so that you can outperform your competitors.

• It helps you consistently communicate your value. Your marketing strategy will enable marketing agencies, employees, contractors, and other stakeholders to understand your value. This will give you consistency in the marketplace since relevant people know what they are working toward instead of groping in the dark.

• You will get a guide for your budget and marketing plan. The marketing strategy informs your marketing plan and how much money you will spend actualizing your objectives. This eases the plan and enables the achievement of the highest marketing benefits at the lowest possible costs.

• You will have an idea of what marketing success will look like. You cannot manage anything in business that cannot be measured. The goals in your marketing strategy inform the metrics on what will be used to calculate your marketing success. Therefore, you know what actions were helpful to your bottom line and what needs tweaking.

• You will know how your business stacks up against the competition. With a marketing strategy, you can know where you stand in relation to your competitors and what your competitors are doing. This gives you an advantage since you can leverage your strengths and opportunities while minimizing or correcting threats and weaknesses.

• You will exude professionalism. Running a business is not about watchful waiting and hoping for the best. A marketing strategy proves to your stakeholders and potential investors that you are a professional running a business the right way.

From the information above, you now understand what a marketing strategy entails and its benefits for your company. If you have been running a business without one, it is time to get a professionally done marketing strategy in this giveaway. Though there are templates online for creating marketing strategies, it is productive to work with a digital agency or marketing expert. This way, you will be guided through the complex process and benefit from an impartial look at your business so that you know how best to maximize revenue.