A marketing strategy is a process or model to allow a company or

organization to focus limited resources on the best opportunities to

increase sales and thereby achieve a sustainable competitive advantage.

Confused about the difference between that and your marketing

plan, marketing mix, business goals, etc?

Bottom line: think of the definition of marketing strategy as the high-level

rules that direct your marketing activities. For example, if theres a single
influencer who touches all your customers and has a significant impact on
the way those customers try to solve their problem... one of your strategies
may be to focus on building a strong relationship with that influential
individual or company.

Your marketing strategy is the way you make sure youre getting the
maximum impact from your limited marketing budget and time.

The picture on the left is the simplest way to think about it, starting at the
bottom:

Start with your business goals: these are the highest-level objectives
of the business, or mission statement.

Next comes the marketing strategy: the high-level rules that will
govern what marketing efforts you focus on.

After youve defined your marketing strategy, you will define

the marketing mix: plans for Product, Pricing, Place (Distribution),
and Promotion.
 Then the final step is writing a marketing plan, which will describe
the specific, detailed marketing activities that you plan on engaging in
to achieve the marketing strategies and business goals.

Your first step in developing a marketing strategy that drives significant

business results is to make sure you fully understand your market by doing
some research: market size and growth, competitors, complementors, and
customers.

Marketing strategies are ultimately designed to increase market share for a company and
its brands, using a range of marketing tactics to accomplish specific goals for new
customer acquisition and increased customer loyalty. In a number of situations, a small
business owner or manager can be required to describe a marketing strategy to an
internal or external stakeholder, such as a loan officer, an investor or marketing
employees. Knowing how to effectively communicate the details of a marketing strategy
is the key to bringing people on board with your initiative.
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WHAT IS A MARKETING STRATEGY

A marketing strategy is a coherent and

agreed upon process formed with the aim of increased revenue and market share.
Broadly speaking, marketing strategies refer to the set of actions designed to meet
your business goals.

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Marketing strategies should contain three important elements:

Who your target customers are
How to reach your target customers
How to retain your customers
 Your marketing strategy is effectively your companys roadmap to success.

There are also a number of other items to consider as you form your strategy.
Your unique selling point (USP): Your USP is vital as it will help to
differentiate you from your competitors and highlight to customers where the value of
your product lies. How you articulate and define your USP will be one of the most
important tasks in your marketing strategy.
Pricing: Pricing is a critical element of your marketing strategy. Deciding on a
suitable price for your product will have an effect on your positioning, promotion, and
even the features you offer. Before you decide on a price, you must consider the
price of rival product offerings, your target customers willingness to pay, your own
companys objectives, and how you plan to position your product e.g. if you plan to
promote your product as the best in its class then a low price might harm your
product.
Positioning: Positioning is related to pricing but is an important consideration
in its own right. You must consider whether to make a play for a segment of an
established market, going head to head with established rivals in the process or
whether you want to try and carve out a niche market for a new product.
Offers: Offers are the type of deals you put together to win new customers.
An example might be the free trial offer many b2b software companies offer today.
Products with limited features available at a lower price is another popular offer.
Perform a cost benefit analysis on which offers suit your companys product best
before roll out.
Content: As buyers grow more independent and self directed, companies
have turned to content to power their marketing strategies. Look to create high
quality content that can bring potential customers to your website.
Promotion: How you promote your product is another key consideration.
Does it make sense for your product to go down the route of paid advertising, or
should you handle the promotion in-house with a series of blog posts and social
media activities?
PR: Good PR can bring enormous benefits to your company. For early stage
companies PR can be especially valuable helping to put their product on the map.
Referral Strategy: One of the best ways to win new business can be a
referral by an existing customer. Look at ways you can stimulate referrals. You
should take the time to draw a list of existing clients who may be willing to, or have
already referred clients to your company. From here, you should look to develop a
referral follow up and conversion strategy. Dont leave this important area to chance.
Conversion Strategy: What tactics do you use to convert website visitors
into leads. Regularly test the various calls to action (CTAs) on your website to see
how they are performing. Continue to tweak the visuals and language until you land
on a winning formula.
Financial Projections: Put together a plan to forecasts the contribution of
marketing to overall pipeline. What are the financial aims of your marketing strategy?
Document your targets and reassess at the end of each quarter.
WHY IS A MARKETING STRATEGY IMPORTANT?
Your b2b marketing strategy sets out a clear vision for your companys future. A
cohesive and clearly laid out strategy helps to clarify your businesss goals, aims,
and activities. Strategic marketing can also help to prioritize each of your tasks as
they arrive.

Marketing strategies can help you to maximize the resources at your disposal. For
example, an early stage company might focus on a predominantly digital or online
marketing strategy to make the most out of their limited resources, while a firmly
established and larger rival might incorporate more expensive trade show and
conference speaking engagements into their strategy.

Todays b2b landscape can be a noisy place making it difficult to get your message
across. Content is being produced at a rapid rate as companies switch their focus to
inbound marketing. Your content marketing plan makes up an increasingly large part
of your companys strategy. You should look to create an editorial calendar for your
blog and regularly publish unique and high quality pieces of content. Remember, the
competition is fierce so you cant compromise on quality when it comes to content
marketing.

MARKETING STRATEGY BEST PRACTICES

As you develop your marketing strategy there are a number of best practices to
follow.

Search Engine Optimization(SEO): The modern buyer completes up to 57% of the

buying process before the sales rep is engaged. Buyers spend their time educating
themselves online taking advantage of the plethora of free information online via blog
posts, whitepapers, and case studies. Before the buyer engages your rep he will
know all about your product as well as your competitors. To get the buyers attention
you will need an effective SEO strategy. This strategy might mean creating content
that focuses on keyword terms around your product offering or consistently creating
high quality content to improve the authority of your site.

Put a stop to the Where did I leave that file routine: Even the most well thought
out marketing strategy can suffer if inefficiencies run rife in your organization. One of
the most common issues in business today is the time spent searching for and
recreating lost files. Research has shown that knowledge workers spend 6.5 to 8.8
hours per week searching for information. Look towards sales enablement solutions
that provide your marketing team with instant access to content regardless of where
it is stored.

Map your content to each stage in the buying process: Content lies at the heart
of your sales and marketing strategy. As you set about creating content to power
your inbound marketing machine, look to eliminate gaps in your content strategy.
Blog posts, for example, will generally focus on top of the funnel. High quality, bottom
of the funnel content that can help your sales team close deals is also an integral
part of your strategy.
Consumers do not buy what you sell. They buy what
has value to them.
We are exposed to hundreds, if not thousands, of marketing messages every
day. Why would we be receptive to all of them? That would be mental chaos.
So, in response, we tune out all but the most relevant ones. Our brain is actually
very good at tuning out stuff that it does not want or need. We do this
automatically. This prevents us from going insane.

You probably remember the experience of learning a new wordas a child or

even as an adultand all of a sudden you see and hear that word everywhere.
This is an example of how our brains smooth over the parts of our environment
that are not relevant to us. That word was always there, of course, but it was
effectively invisible to our mind until learning its meaning gave it relevance. As a
result, pop! like magic that word is now there where seemingly it never was
before. A marketing message operates exactly the same way.
What does marketing strategy have to do with this materialization out of
nothing?

Marketing strategy is sorting out who your audience actually is, and then finding
out what has meaning for them. What do they care about, and how does this
relate to your offer? What message can you deliver that is both true and meets
your consumer squarely at the level of their needs? Marketing strategy is the
process of uncovering messages that can be heard. Marketing strategy allows
you to answer the crucial question your offer must address: Why should I
care? To paraphrase Peter Drucker: Consumers do not buy what you sell. They
buy what has value to them.

Why does marketing strategy matter?

Shortest answer: Because it saves you money.

Marketing strategy allows you to use pathways and

footholds that apply your limited marketing budget more
effectively.
In marketing, there is strategy and there are tactics. A lot of marketing, in
practice, is preoccupied with what I call tactical experimentation. This is the act
of throwing all kinds of things out at the world or at broad demographic targets
to see what works. As you do this you are spending money, potentially lots of it.
The idea in this method is to do this until you find some marketing actions that
work, and when you find them you can then do more of those.

This process often results in the classic Wanamaker dilemmaHalf the money
I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I dont know which half. He was
speaking of advertising, but the principle applies.

Marketing strategy allows you to use pathways and footholds that apply your
limited marketing budget more effectively (everyones marketing budget is
limited). Marketing strategy facilitates your ability to apply marketing money to
the correct half of the Wanamaker equationthe half you are not wasting on
audiences who do not value your message.

To illustrate this principal with one of our own rather straightforward examples,
when we looked at the South Bronx as a marketplace for the Bronx Museum, the
situation we saw was reflected by the first competitive advantage diagram
below; here, there is nothing in their offer, as understood by the consumer, that
is of any perceived value. The strategy, therefore, could not be to simply support
the institutional desire to communicate about all the great art that was on exhibit
(see Drucker above).

We had to find factors that could legitimately be moved into the competitive
advantage, things that were perceived as valuable to the desired audience, that
were not perceived to be offered by the competition. In this case, there was no
required product change, just an adjustment of the marketing message
communicated through the website and advertising. By effectively marketing on
the basis of the factors that reflected what was of value to the target consumer
we cost-effectively supported the achievement of their desired objective to
increase attendance from local audiences in the South Bronx. This is marketing
strategy applied, and it helped them double attendance*. (You can read more
about this campaign in The Marketing of the Bronx Museum.)

So, for the sake of your own institution or product, please spend the time and
energy to really get inside the head of your consumer. Find the intersection
between your offer and their needs. Answer Druckers Questions #2 and
#3: Who is your customer? What do they value? Isolate those specific factors
that actually drive behavior for them. Realize they are not buying what you are
selling, they are only buying what is of value to them. And, by all means, use
THAT in your marketing communications.

A strategy is a long-term plan to achieve certain objectives. A marketing[link] strategy is

therefore a marketing plan designed to achieve marketing objectives. For example,
marketing objective may relate to becoming the market leader by delighting customers. The
strategic plan therefore is the detailed planning involving marketing research, and then
developing a marketing mix to delight customers. Every organisation needs to have clear
marketing objectives, and the major route to achieving organisational goals will depend on
strategy. It is important, therefore, to be clear about the difference between strategy and
tactics.