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Sara is the founder of an event planning business. While she has a robust set of business plans in place and skilled team members who share her vision, her business consistently struggles with low customer volume. Can you guess what Sara’s business lacks? A well-thought-out marketing strategy.
Let’s find out the meaning of a marketing strategy and why it’s so important for organizations to thrive in a competitive business environment. While we’re at it, we’ll also go through the various steps involved in a marketing strategy and look at a few marketing strategy examples.
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Marketing Strategy Meaning
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Importance Of Marketing Strategy
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Steps Of A Marketing Strategy
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Market Strategy Examples
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Zero In On The Right Strategy
Marketing Strategy Meaning
A marketing strategy is an organization’s plan of action to reach out to potential clients and turn them into customers. A marketing strategy acts as a roadmap for an organization to achieve its business objectives, such as increasing sales by attracting new customers, gaining a competitive advantage and boosting customer loyalty. By focusing on the big picture, a marketing strategy pivots on an organization’s value proposition that introduces the brand to its customers, differentiates it and communicates its vision to others.
Importance Of Marketing Strategy
The importance of a marketing strategy cannot be overstated. A marketing strategy is fundamental to ensuring consistent business growth. It lends direction to an organization and helps it tailor its products and/or services to its target customer segment. Let’s look at the importance of a marketing strategy in detail:
Brand Awareness
The primary importance of a marketing strategy is its ability to raise brand awareness. Brand awareness is a fundamental aspect of fostering trust and establishing meaningful connections with customers. When customers know and trust a brand, they’re more likely to choose it over a rival. A marketing strategy is key to building a compelling brand image. It can showcase an organization in a favorable light and change consumer perception about the organization, generating and boosting brand awareness.
A Competitive Edge
A marketing strategy can give an organization a significant edge over its competitors and strengthen its market position. An effective marketing strategy puts forth a consistent message and highlights an organization’s unique selling proposition (USP) to set it apart from its rivals. This also helps an organization establish its own identity in an ever-evolving business landscape.
Optimal Prices
When rival organizations offer similar products, product prices make all the difference, helping customers decide which brand to buy from. The extensive market research that develops an impactful marketing strategy helps organizations arrive at optimal prices for their products and/or services based on the current business scenario, competitors’ price points and customers’ purchase behavior.
Personalized Communications
A marketing strategy helps organizations identify a target customer segment, understand its needs and personalize their marketing efforts to meet their requirements. When organizations communicate their brand value to the right customers at the right time, consumers are more likely to pick their brand.
A marketing strategy is the single most important tool to boost an organization’s reputation and sales, inform customers about newly launched products and services and help management make informed decisions. A well-defined marketing strategy also ensures the internal departments of an organization are on the same page and working toward the same shared goals.
Steps Of A Marketing Strategy
Now that we know the meaning of a marketing strategy and understand its importance, let’s look at the steps involved in formulating an effective marketing strategy:
Establishing Marketing Goals And Budget
The first step to developing an impactful marketing strategy is establishing clear marketing goals. Once an organization has well-defined goals in place, it becomes easier for them to align their marketing strategy to the set marketing objectives. Such goals also help organizations evaluate the effectiveness of a marketing strategy in the long run. It’s important to ensure the established goals are SMART: specific (S), measurable (M), achievable (A), realistic (R) and timely (T). While establishing marketing goals, organizations must also determine a marketing budget for a specific time period. It’s essential to consider all expenses associated with marketing while deciding on a budget. Such expenses may include advertising, website maintenance and promotional costs.
Conducting Market Research
Thorough market research is what lays the groundwork for a successful marketing strategy. Conducting detailed market research offers organizations valuable insight into the current market scenario, potential competitors, gaps in the market that need to be addressed, customer pain points and market trends. Such insights help them make informed business decisions, mitigate potential risks and make the most of new opportunities in the business environment.
Identifying Target Audience
To create personalized marketing campaigns, an organization needs to first identify and understand its target customer segment. Identifying a business’ target audience is often considered the most crucial step in crafting a marketing strategy. To do that, organizations need to focus their efforts on creating buyer personas — fictional representations of ideal customers that help marketers better understand their wants and needs and build targeted marketing campaigns. Organizations analyze customer demographics, preferences and backgrounds to generate buyer personas, using website analytics, social media and customer surveys, reviews and interviews to gather information on potential customers and understand them.
Analyzing Competitors
To stay a step ahead of competitors, organizations must analyze their rivals while developing a marketing strategy. It’s essential to understand a competitor’s strengths and weaknesses and determine what’s working for them and what isn’t. Organizations also need to compare their own products and services, price points and brand image to that of their major rivals. This helps them identify and highlight their key differentiators in their marketing strategy — the factors that convey to a customer why they should choose their brand over the rest.
Determining Marketing Methods
The final step of a marketing strategy involves determining which marketing methods to use to maximize success. From content marketing in social media posts, blogs, podcasts, infographics and videos to sponsored events, paid promotions and customer loyalty programs, organizations have a vast repository of marketing methods to choose from. A large part of deciding which methods to use depends on the information gathered in the previous stages and the nature of the business. For instance, if an organization wants to cater to a younger demographic, it may utilize social media channels to communicate its vision to potential customers.
Even after a marketing strategy has been put in place, organizations need to continuously review and revise it to keep up with current market trends and cater to customers’ changing needs. An effective marketing strategy minimizes wasted time and resources and helps organizations tie their efforts to the big picture or the overall vision of the business.
Marketing Strategy Examples
The types of marketing strategies organizations use to drive business growth are many. Let’s look at a few top marketing strategy examples that have redefined success in the real world:
Myntra
Fashion e-commerce giant Myntra utilized the concept of customer loyalty programs to maximum advantage, launching its Myntra Insider program. Becoming a part of this program allows customers to earn loyalty points each time they shop on Myntra. Customers can redeem their accumulated points for a range of benefits such as early access to sales, free shipping and an exclusive video session with a stylist allotted to them. They can even explore a variety of offers from Myntra’s partner brands across the hospitality, dining and travel industries. Such rewards incentivize customers to spend more on Myntra and also act as excellent tools for word-of-mouth marketing.
GoPro
Technology organization GoPro’s marketing strategy centers on user-generated content. GoPro’s editing programs allow users to create videos with prominent start and end frames featuring GoPro’s logo. The organization shares these videos on social media, encouraging other users to come up with their own unique content to be featured on their online channels. This helps the brand raise brand exposure and opens the door to expanding its customer base.
As evident from the above marketing strategy examples, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to marketing. Organizations need to tailor a well-thought-out marketing strategy to their own unique business needs to maximize their return on investment (ROI).
Zero In On The Right Strategy
It can be challenging for organizations to get their marketing strategy right to drive growth in the long run. Harappa’s Select A Strategy program can help you redefine the meaning of a marketing strategy. It’ll equip you to ask the right questions, challenge assumptions, identify and weigh criteria to rate your options and think critically to choose the best strategy.
You’ll pick up Thrive Skills such as Intellectual Curiosity and Overcoming Bias that’ll help you actively engage in cognitively challenging tasks and mitigate the subtle effects of your implicit biases on behavior. With the First Principles Thinking framework, you’ll learn to break down a problem to its first basic principles—basic assumptions that can’t be simplified any further. Second-Order Thinking will prompt you to think through the various layers of a situation and consider broader implications.
Sign up today for Harappa’s Select A Strategy pathway and zero in on the right marketing strategy through sound inquiry and reasoning.
