Marketing Strategy

Marketing strategy is a process that can allow an organization to concentrate its limited resources on the greatest opportunities to increase sales and achieve a sustainable competitive advantage.

Strategic planning involves an analysis of the company’s strategic initial situation prior to the formulation, evaluation and selection of market-oriented competitive position that contributes to the company’s goals and marketing objectives.

Strategic marketing, as a distinct field of study emerged in the 1970s and 80s, and built on strategic management, that focuses on strategies, that preceded it. Marketing strategy highlights the role of marketing as a link between the organization and its customers.

Marketing strategy leverages the combination of resources and capabilities within an organization to achieve a competitive advantage and thus enhances firm performance.

A clear marketing strategy should revolve around the company’s value proposition, which communicates to consumers what the company stands for, how it operates, and why it deserves their business.

This provides marketing teams with a template that should inform their initiatives across all of the company’s products and services. For example, Walmart (WMT) is widely known as a discount retailer with “everyday low prices,” whose business operations and marketing efforts are rooted in that idea.

Importance of Marketing Strategy

• Marketing strategy provides an organization an edge over it’s competitors.
• Strategy helps in developing goods and services with best profit making potential.
• Marketing strategy helps in discovering the areas affected by organizational growth and thereby helps in creating an organizational plan to cater to the customer needs.
• It helps in fixing the right price for organization’s goods and services based on information collected by market research.
• Strategy ensures effective departmental co-ordination.
• It helps an organization to make optimum utilization of its resources so as to provide a sales message to its target market.
• A marketing strategy helps to fix the advertising budget in advance, and it also develops a method which determines the scope of the plan, i.e., it determines the revenue generated by the advertising plan.

Process:

• Identify your goals: While sales are the ultimate goal for every company, you should have more short-term goals such as establishing authority, increasing customer engagement, or generating leads. These smaller goals offer measurable benchmarks for the progress of your marketing plan. Think of strategy as the high-level ideology and planning as how you accomplish your goals.
• Know your clients: Every product or service has an ideal customer, and you should know who they are and where they hang out. If you sell power tools, you’ll choose marketing channels where general contractors may see your messaging. Establish who your client is and how your product will improve their lives.
• Create your message: Now that you know your goals and who you’re pitching to, it’s time to create your messaging. This is your opportunity to show your potential clients how your product or service will benefit them and why you’re the only company that can provide it.
• Define your budget: How you disperse your messaging may depend on how much you can afford. Will you be purchasing advertising? Hoping for a viral moment on social media organically? Sending out press releases to the media to try to gain coverage? Your budget will dictate what you can afford to do.
• Determine your channels: Even the best message needs the appropriate venue. Some companies may find more value in creating blog posts for their website. Others may find success with paid ads on social media channels. Find the most appropriate venue for your content.
• Measure your success: To target your marketing, you need to know whether it is reaching its audience. Determine your metrics and how you’ll judge the success of your marketing efforts.

Advantage:

Promotes Your Business to a Target Audience

You can’t sell your products or services without appealing to the people most likely to buy those products and services. That group is known as your target audience, and a marketing strategy is the most effective way to reach that all-important group. If you have targeted this group correctly, you know their habits, behaviors, wants, and needs, and you also know where they like to hang out on social media. This information shapes the methods you will use to promote your business. For example, if you own a comic book store, online marketing can be more beneficial than traditional advertising to help you reach your audience on social media platforms.

Helps You Understand Your Customers

You have to do market research before you develop a marketing strategy, and that research can provide you with reams of data that you can use over and over to help refine your product development and to keep up with trends and shifts in your target audience’s behavior. With the evolution of digital information, even small businesses have access to hyper-detailed information about prospective customers. This is known in the digital world as “big data,” large data sets that give you a deep analysis into customer behavior based on factors such as online activity, buying activity, mobile activity, and interactions at stores and shops.

Helps Brand Your Business

Your marketing strategy isn’t just about boosting leads and converting them into buyers, it’s also about expressing the culture, values, and purpose of your business. The process of communicating that vision to your audience is the essence of branding. For example, Apple’s marketing strategy is all about simplicity, elegance, design, and function. Their products are sleek, simple, beautiful, and offer multiple functionalities. When people think of Apple, they think of a company whose products are always on the cutting-edge of technology, design, and physical attractiveness.

Disadvantages:

Costs of Marketing

Although the digital revolution has somewhat evened the playing field, the truth is that small business is still at a disadvantage, when it comes to grabbing their share of eyeballs through their marketing efforts. Big data has great value, but accessing that data is expensive, and you have to keep analyzing that data to stay abreast of buyer trends. Launching a marketing campaign on your website can also be expensive, especially if you’re using a pay-per-click strategy to attract more prospects. Television and radio advertising spots are also costly, and even local advertising space is at a premium, because there is so much competition for the local audience.

Time and Effort May Not Yield a Return

Big brands can afford to spend time and effort working on a marketing campaign that fails, because they have the resources to regroup and move on. As a small business owner, however, the return on investment on a marketing campaign may be low, and that means you have spent months crafting a strategy that did nothing to help your bottom line. Even the most well-planned marketing campaigns fail, and at the small business level, that can set you back for months.