What is Strategic Marketing?

No matter the size of your business, strategic marketing can be difficult. However, it doesn’t have to be. To succeed in business marketing, knowing how you can plan your strategy is helpful.

While there’s a lot to learn about it, there are four primary phases that most successful marketing strategies go through to create and execute an effective campaign.

This article will focus on each of these phases and steps so that you have a solid understanding of what effective strategic marketing looks like when you plan your own. Enjoy!

What Does Strategic Marketing Mean Exactly?

Strategic marketing is a process that helps companies decide what products or services to offer and how to offer them. It’s a plan that helps companies develop strategies to achieve their goals.

Strategic marketers use research and data analysis to understand the changing needs of customers and the market. They can also observe competitor behavior to make strategic decisions about how to best position their company relative to competitors.

Therefore, strategic marketers focus on:

🤳 Identifying & solving problems in the marketplace.

💡 Developing products that solve those problems.

🚀 Effectively promoting those products.

🙌 Communicating with consumers, employees, shareholders & other interested parties.

For example, when McDonald’s opened its doors, the company initially sold hamburgers and French fries. Over time, it added more products such as salads, chicken sandwiches, and ice cream cones.

By looking at what competitors were offering and what consumers wanted, McDonald’s was able to strategically decide which foods would be most profitable for the company over time.

Strategic marketing may sound like a fancy term for “marketing,” but there are some important differences between the two concepts:

1️⃣ Strategic marketing focuses on long-term goals, while traditional marketing focuses on short-term sales results.

2️⃣ Traditional marketing focuses on creating awareness of products or services. But strategic marketing requires an understanding of buyer behavior — in other words, what motivates people to buy something?

The Role of Marketing Strategies in Modern Businesses

Marketing is an essential part of modern business. It helps build a brand, promote products and services, and attract customers. Therefore, marketing strategies are a plan of action that helps achieve business goals.

It includes a set of guidelines for using marketing concepts, techniques, and tools to achieve those specific goals. It answers the question of how the company’s resources –time, money, human resources, and technology– should be used to achieve goals that support the company’s overall mission.

Marketing strategies help companies in many ways 👇

#1: Maximize Return on Investment (ROI)

Marketing strategies help companies maximize their ROI by improving sales productivity, reducing costs, increasing profits, gaining market share, and enhancing brand image. These also can also be used to develop new ideas for products or services that provide greater value to consumers and increase sales volume over time.

#2: Evaluate Opportunities

Marketers evaluate opportunities within their industry by examining trends in customer behavior, competitor activity, and macroeconomic factors such as inflation rates and interest rates that affect consumer purchasing power.

This analysis allows marketers to determine which products or services are likely to be successful in a particular market segment at a particular time.

Marketing strategies also help businesses align all the company’s departments and make sure everyone is working towards the same goals!

And last but not least, they will help increase efficiency by providing a clear framework for implementing new ideas, methods, and procedures.

What Should Be Included in Your Strategic Marketing Plan?

A strategic marketing plan is a vision for the future that should include not only your current products and services but also what you plan to offer in the future. It’s a road map that guides decisions about how your company will compete in the marketplace.

It will help you determine what markets you want to serve, which products and services you’ll offer, where you’ll put your resources, who your target customers are, how you’ll communicate with them — and much more.

Therefore, it should include at least these 4 stages 👇

#1: Planning

The planning phase is one of the most important parts of any marketing strategy. It includes defining your target market, your goals, and the ways in which you plan to reach your target audience. It also includes setting your budget, determining your resources, and what you will do to achieve those goals.

What do you want to achieve? Who are your customers? What products or services will you offer them? How will you provide these products or services? How much time, money and energy do you have available for this project?

#2: Analysis

Once the plan is created, it must be analyzed to ensure that it is realistic and feasible. This step involves studying the market and competitors’ activities to determine opportunities for growth.

It also helps determine if there are any barriers to success or if changes need to be made before implementation begins.

Who are your competitors? What are their strengths and weaknesses compared to yours? Can you compete effectively with them in this market? Do consumers have any preconceived notions about what they expect from a product or service like yours that might influence their purchasing decisions?

#3: Development

Now that you know where you are standing, it’s time to develop your strategic marketing plan.

At this stage, you will define specific actions to accomplish the goals you set in previous phases. You need to address:

• Product: What are you selling? Define the features of your product and plan your campaign for launching a minimum viable product.
• Audience: Who is your customer? Which pain points are you targeting? Create buyer personas.
• Price: Which pricing schema are you using? (single pricing, tiered membership)
• Channels: Where will you sell and promote your product?

In this phase, the focus is on creating your own unique brand identity through marketing channels such as social media, advertising, and public relations.

#4: Implementation

🚀 Finally, once plans have been developed, they must be put into action through implementation activities such as advertising campaigns and product launches.

This post was originally published in Unita.co on August 8, 2022.