Strategic Marketing encompasses all the best practices to implement one’s business’s mission and vision, using specific processes to maximize the plan’s outreach. Marketing is the key to a successful business. Be it a big shot business of an in-home brand that you wish to market, a strategy is the heart of any marketing idea. Landing your brand into the market after correctly identifying the target audience and their taste can bring-in the much-needed results.
An ideal strategic marketing plan makes the process of attracting relevant customers easy and attainable. Only a few brands and companies successfully create customer loyalty and carve out a niche for their brand in the market through correct strategies.
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What is Strategic Marketing?
Defining the process of Strategic Marketing is subjective. It includes a plan that integrates the selected market with all the common goals and a limited market at the macro level.
This is what differentiates marketing from Strategic marketing. While the former is like a piece of cheese, the latter use that cheese to make mouth-watering pizza. The former, marketing, in general, is great in its being, like cheese. But it shall be nothing when we see its use in the bigger picture, as an overall plan trying to make the best use of every ingredient used.
Arriving at an ideal textbook definition, Strategic Marketing is a set of techniques used by the organization to set itself apart from its competitors in that niche. It works according to the consumer’s perspective, aiming to provide better value services to them.
It aims at answering three broad questions to tackle the highest competitors in the market:
- Where to compete?
- When to compete?
- How to compete?
History of Strategic Marketing Management
The processes under Strategic Marketing have evolved systematically in the last thirty years. They used tactics that are far more evolved and competent than their raw form that existed in part.
Now, strategic marketing management has found the new best practices in all the following areas:
1. Budgeting
The idea of strategic marketing was restricted to budgeting in earlier times. It involved planning only in terms of organizing finances. It aimed at devising techniques only about budgetary and control mechanisms required in a business and did not focus on other aspects of management.
It used all the different variants of the budget to conduct an ideal marketing audit.
2. Long-range planning
After the budgeting techniques’ evolution, the focus shifted to long-term planning within an organization.
Strategic Marketing expanded to include forecasting within the organization. It made the use of trends to arrive at systematic predictions about the organization’s sales, profits, and overall costs.
3. Strategizing and planning
During the ’80s, after long-term planning had attained the highest evolution levels, strategic marketing focused on strategizing. Strategic planning is now focused on the bigger picture.
It included paying attention to the details concerning the overall direction and control over the planning process. Although forecasting was still important, the larger focus shifted to the business and planning side of things.
4. Strategic Marketing Management
Now is the era of organizational planning that finds itself evolved to the stage of Strategic Marketing Management.
All the variants that have evolved along the process are combined and fused into a single strategy that serves the purpose of matching the organization’s fabric with the taste and preferences of the consumer base. It helps manage the goals of the organization better.
Phases in Strategic Marketing
Strategic Marketing rolls itself out in the form of three broad phases. These are as follows:
1. Planning Phase
This is the most crucial first phase in the process of strategic marketing. It involves analyzing all the nuances of the organization’s functioning, strengths and weaknesses, technological and cultural advancement, and the brand’s external competitors. The following are the key aspects of the planning process:
1. SWOT analysis
Analyzing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to the company by carrying out operations like competitor analysis, trend analysis in the history of the company’s sales, and assessing the potential consumer base from the market.
2. Marketing Program
After the consumer base is identified, the focus shifts to developing the product in a user-friendly way. This involved carving out strategies to work on the 4 Ps concerning the market, the product itself, price, place, and the people. It aims to set out a budget to arrive at an ideal mix of marketing aspects.
3. Goal Setting
Goal setting is an important part of the planning process. Resource allocation and setting a target to be achieved in a given time frame are next in line to be planned by the organization’s finest heads.
The key here is setting measurable and attainable goals to meet the company’s product strategy provisions.
2. Implementation Phase
Now is the time to put the devised plan into action. If the planning process is carried out excellently, but the implementation is loose, the results shall not be desired and in favor of the organizational standards. If everything is favorable, the plan can be implemented with a sales and a budget forecast with the help of the following pointers:
- Gather all the required resources to market the product.
- Divide a marketing hierarchy to oversee the successful implementation of the action plan at every step.
- Develop a schedule to ensure the timely completion of the tasks at hand.
- Paying attention to every detail in the plan and allowing space for creativity at the same time.
3. Evaluation/Control phase
This phase is the aftermath of planning and implementation. It is all about keeping track of the implementation and checking if the goals that were set earlier are achieved.
All the sorts of deviations are to be thoroughly traced by the brand leaders in this phase, positive and negative. Allocating more resources to the positive ones and getting the team back on track in case of negative deviances is the manager’s duty.
Paying more attention to strategy over tactics, measurable goals over the vague ones and an actionable plan over a redundant, dream plan is the key to a successful planning and implementation process.
Components of a Strategic Marketing Plan
1. Mission, Vision, and Values
It is essential for any business to completely comprehend what its motivation, mission, or vision is.
A business should know where it eventually wants to reach and how it needs to move ahead. For ensuring all this, a strategic marketing plan should incorporate the mission, vision, values, purpose, etc., of a business.
2. Objectives
A strategic marketing plan should also pay heed to the weekly, monthly, and annual objectives and business objectives.
Your strategic marketing plan should incorporate those metrics that can help you measure your ad and marketing campaign’s effectiveness.
3. Adeptly defining your product or service
It is crucial for effective strategic marketing to clearly define a product or service, so a highly result-driven marketing campaign can be designed.
For better segmentation, effective customer experience, and optimized market reach, you should dexterously define your product or service.
4. Target Audience
If you do not want to waste your time, energy, financial plan, and assets, your strategic market plan should always pay heed to target audiences.
It is necessary to comprehend your intended interest groups and what matters to them. Without undertaking this component of the cycle, you depend on pot-karma and timing.
5. Competitive Positioning
When you have total lucidity on your contribution and your target audience, you would then consider how you need to be positioned in your target market.
In any case, if it’s not too much trouble, you should find out who the opposition is and how you need to be positioned against them in the psyche of the client. Being aware of competitive positioning will always make a strategic marketing campaign conversion driven.
In addition to these five strategic marketing components, you also need to pay attention to the main routes to the market, key processes, and messages to make your marketing and advertising campaigns more effective and result-driven.
After going through all the components of marketing campaigns, let us now understand why a strategic marketing campaign is important-
Importance of Strategic Marketing
The importance of Strategic Marketing is unmatched today. The idea behind it is the adaption of the brand to the market as progression takes place dynamically.
The company’s goals and vision always remain the same, but the path to its achievement might have to be tweaked with the changing scenarios.
In an ideal business world, the benefits of strategic marketing are observable. These can be elaborated as under:
1. A better understanding of the market
The research carried out while analyzing the market and the competitors provide meaningful insights to the organization. While the entirety of the market is scanned, including domestic and the international market, it helps devise strategies that globally cater to a wider user base.
This adds a lot of value to the product reach of an upcoming brand.
2. Helps identify the strategic direction
Strategic marketing management ensures that the decisions made regarding the marketing of the product at hand are in line with the company’s goals, vision, and standards.
It is essential to stick to the devised plan if the organization wishes to seek the best results out of its strategic marketing.
3. Can have a big pay off
Strategic marketing can bring in impressive numbers and profit provided that the devised strategy is implemented correctly. With the budget at hand, the organization can widen the consumer base and, at the same time, enhance the quality of longevity of their business.
Obstacles of Strategic Marketing
Following are the key issues that usually prompt during the process of planning and implementing Strategic marketing techniques:
- Poor or incorrect assumptions about the market or change in the consumer demographics, leading to fallacies in the devices plan
- Coordination issues in the marketing department giving way to chaos and mismanagement in giving orders.
- Lack of feedback taking leading to the absence of room for correction of the faulty practices.
Final Thoughts about Strategic Marketing!
All in all, what becomes essential is that a set of Strategy Marketing techniques adopted by the organization is full-proof.
The higher the accuracy in the market assumptions, the better are the opportunities for the brand to make a successful stance in the market. With dedicated research, utmost commitment, and dedication, strategic marketing can open the doors to a large client base and provide all the relevant information that the organization is looking for.
Strategic Marketing techniques have to be part and parcel of the organization’s core values.
How effective do you consider the strategic marketing campaign? Feel free to share your views with us in the comment section below.
