Marketing Strategy Planning
Strong marketing strategy planning is critical to build a thriving business and optimize your sales. So how do you get started on your strategic marketing plan?
Taking a little time to write a marketing strategy that supports your business goals will help focus your product or service planning, accelerate your sales efforts, save money wasted on ineffective marketing, and decrease your time-to-market.
If you need help writing your marketing strategies and plan, download our Marketing eBook to learn how to apply our 7-step marketing process to fire up your business, or check out these nine easy steps to write a marketing strategy.
Marketing Strategy Planning Really Is As Easy As 1-2-3!
Effective marketing strategy planning does not need to be difficult or time-consuming. If you have a good idea of your target customer and what problem your product or service is solving, then you're already much of the way there. If not, you should start with developing a marketing research plan.
First, take a look at our definition of marketing strategy. Then, follow our simple marketing strategy process and these three easy steps to develop a marketing strategy that will help your business grow:
- Analyze Your Customers, Market, and Competition This step will help you paint a detailed picture of your target customer, understand your market environment, and assess your competition. This will help ensure a strong market orientation for your business. Take a look at this article to understand more about the benefits and drawbacks of market orientation. We make your market analysis easy by having you answer some simple questions, combined with a little web-based market research. Click here for our three simple steps to developing your competitive marketing strategy. This data is the critical input to your marketing strategy.
- Create a Marketing Strategy List Given the data from Step 1, you are now ready to draft a list of potential marketing strategies: think of these as the rules that will guide your marketing decisions. For example, if you find there’s a key influential figure or company or website in your market, that your target customers trust to help solve their pain point… one of your strategies might be to focus on building a strong relationship with that individual or company. Don’t worry about how you’re going to do that just yet – leave that for the final tactics step below. Think of all possible strategies for your draft list… then narrow it down to 3-5 key marketing strategies that best align with your business goals.
- Prioritize Your Marketing Tactics The final step in your marketing strategy planning is to go through the various possible marketing activities, and prioritize them as sub-bullets under each of the marketing strategies you identified above. If a marketing activity does not clearly influence your target customer base, differentiate you from your competition, and support one of your 3-5 key strategies, then you should think twice before doing it. Those activities that make the cut are the ones that should feed into your marketing plan and budget.
Following these three steps is an easy way to quickly write a marketing strategy and focus your strategic marketing plan on optimizing sales and business growth.
To get started, follow these nine steps to write your marketing strategy. Or if you need a little guidance getting started and staying on track with your marketing, then check out our marketing strategies ebook.