Which steps comprise strategic marketing
Strategic marketing is an effective tool that helps you create a coherent and clear action plan to achieve your desired business goals. It involves collecting, analysing, and using information to develop a company strategy. In this case, experts study the characteristics of their target audience, comparing their needs with business opportunities. Strategic marketing helps to understand how a company can improve its level of service to become more demanded by customers. This approach answers essential questions for the business: how competitive it is and what needs to be done to improve it.
Strategic marketing involves several vital steps:
- Planning. This step is the basis for all subsequent processes and requires special attention. Here it is essential to formulate the company’s mission, values and business objectives. The target audience should also be studied in detail to match their needs with what the business offers.
- Analysis. Experts conduct a detailed business audit in this phase, assessing financial, human and operational resources. In addition, a market analysis is carried out using comprehensive research on competitors, niches, and consumers. As a result, specialists should form a complete picture of how the sector is performing and how competitors are doing. The analysis will help understand the company’s strengths and characteristics that attract consumers.
- Creation of a strategy. In this case, you need to define the key areas of marketing: the target segment and brand positioning tools. The marketing strategy will be the basis for the company’s policy, pricing, and communication with consumers and competitors.
- Implementation. This stage results from all previous actions that made the product launch possible.
- Efficiency assessment. Tracking the result and making changes in due time is important during the strategy implementation. It is necessary to understand that the market is changing dynamically, and the strategy can’t be effective all the time. Therefore, it is important to analyse trends and adjust your activities regularly.
Strategic marketing is different from marketing strategy. The former is responsible for scaling up a business, considering its market position, competitors’ characteristics and the TA’s needs. A marketing strategy is an action plan to build a company’s image and increase its competitiveness.
Strategic marketing aims to develop consistent steps to help achieve business goals within a clearly defined time frame. The approach allows you to prioritise your company’s activities and outline development paths to help your business scale. In this case, matching the business’s values with the ideal customer’s portrait is essential. Otherwise, the ways to achieve the goals may differ from the target audience’s needs.
