Strategic marketing, if we break down the term, literally means using strategy to market your product or services.
In a more elaborative manner, strategic marketing means the use of certain techniques of business in a manner that your product/service comes across to your target customer as something which is unique and different from your competitors, it is the use of smart marketing to showcase the strengths of your product and create a conversion ultimately.
1. About Strategic Marketing: What is Strategic Marketing?
The idea of strategic marketing is to change how things process in your present organization’s marketing tactics such that the appeal to the consumers is very fresh and direct.
The use of creative ideas and a whole marketing mix is used to basically bring about a change in all the engagements happening across customers and the company.
It requires first understanding the fundamental framework of the company, then what are their goals and aspirations. Post that, you design a new methodology to gain the traction required.
2. Phases Involved in the Strategic Marketing Planning Process
Strategic marketing involves a step-by-step process to achieve your end goal, so it basically provides a direction for working for the company entirely and also how operations and processes have to be executed.
You first consider your demographics, customer base, working environment, and the competitive advantage that you have, and then form a specifically curated marketing plan.
Let’s discuss the four phases in which this is done.
2.1. Planning Phase
The primary analysis is across all sectors of the company and its marketing strategy; which involves the technological aspects, strengths, and weaknesses along with other factors required to prepare the final marketing plan.
2.1.1. Goal Setting
Once you have a complete analysis of the present day, you can now formulate a goal based on what are your long-term and short-term targets.
This will include accounting for all the resources that will be required to market your product/service in a manner that buying or availing of them becomes a non-negotiable scenario for your customers.
2.1.2. The Four P’s
Everything is now onboard. The next step is to focus on the four P’s which are price, place, product, and promotion.
Strategies of where, when, what, and how have to be discussed basically with option B always, in case anything backfires.
2.2. Implementation Phase
This is like an action phase, you bring on board all the resources required for achieving your end goal, make the final schedules and timelines, and start processing the same.
All tasks have to be allocated now, and small targets have to be finished quickly to achieve the final stage.
2.3. Evaluation Phase
This is when everything is running and in place, now you go and see what all needs to be fixed in the pipeline.
If there is any bottleneck, you fix that situation.
You make the last-minute edits, and spontaneous hits and trials at this stage to make sure the working of the entire marketing plan is smooth.
3. New Marketing Strategies for Higher Growth
Anything that is targeted has a better reach, and so is valid with anything that is limited to a particular company, place, or work.
Niche specialization has thus become a very important aspect of strategic marketing because now there will be no limitations of geography or marketing due to the huge presence and use of new communications technology.
All the marketing has to be everywhere. This implies that do not limit your marketing to online or offline, but make it available everywhere or basically anywhere the customer might look.
In this era of advancement in digitalization focus on 360-degree marketing. Emphasise increased visibility and cover all untouched areas.
If you are providing your customer with bread, try to provide him with butter and jam as well.
In a more technical manner try to provide bundles of both product and service so that he/she does not have to wander elsewhere to get their work done.
Provide the complete solution on the door, so that you provide them ease and they will choose you over other players in this manner.
Say you’re providing a service that is serving a set of customers X, but eventually, you realize that your service can also be used by a set of customers Y.
But now you’re skeptical about selling this to Y without diluting the brand image you built by selling to X.
In such a case you use sub-branding. Sub-branding involves the use of a parent brand and in relation to it, you make sub-brand labels and serve newer markets.
With every day a new milestone in this technological time, it is time for you to make suitable changes in your business models so that you remain relevant and make the best use of the present technology to achieve better and more efficient results.
Artificial intelligence is also making a lot of processes very easy. So, explore what changes can be brought about in your organization’s work and bring them along for better customer reach and better sales.
4. Final Thoughts – Strategic Marketing
Strategic marketing is the new way to ensure that your company’s goals in marketing are fully met, it is a means to make sure that you are thriving and flourishing continuously in your working environment.
All decisions in marketing are made in a way that your strategy to achieve the end goal is fulfilled completely and done in a planned and organized manner.
We have seen the world is getting ahead every day, with new innovations in the field of digital media and marketing so to keep a good marketing strategy we have to keep up with the times and make changes in our marketing plans so that we stay relevant and our mission and values are met.
