To understand this concept first, we have to understand what a marketing strategy is.
A strategy is a group of actions that your company makes to get a competitive advantage in its sector.
We could say that the definition of strategic marketing is a process that consists of detecting the needs of your consumers and making an external and internal analysis of your company.
One of the objectives of strategic marketing is collecting your competitor's information and detecting where there could be opportunities and threats to which your company could prevent or take action faster.
Another way to look at it is that a strategic marketing plan will inform the set of actions that will set the course to achieve your company's marketing objectives.
What is its function?
To better understand strategic marketing, let us examine its main characteristics :
Competitor Analysis
You should make a benchmark that will allow you to know which are the best and worst practices in your sector, so you have a clear path when planning.
You should investigate:
How many people work for your competition
What products they sell
What their prices are
How they distribute their products
What marketing strategies they use?
Your company's analysis
This analysis is also the starting point for any business's strategic marketing plan
Analyze your company's departments to see if you can better their performance.
Analyze the tangible and intangible resources that you have
Analyze your company's value chain
Analyze your business's marketing mix strategy (product, price, promotion, and distribution)
External analysis of your company:
Studying the external factors that could affect your company would form part of your strategic marketing analysis. A well-known tool for doing this is the PESTlE analysis, which consists of analyzing the following factors:
Political
Economical
Social
Technological
Legal
Environmental
Another essential part of your strategy is understanding your Market Segmentation, which consists of determining what group of consumers you should target. For this, it is vital to have a clear idea of your ideal customers or buyer personas (link to another past blog) and know their characteristics and their shopping behavior. With this, you will be able to define how you want your customers to find your brand and make your offer better than your competitors'.
Underline the market segment which the company will target
A Marketing segment consists of evaluating the level of demand and offer in the market for your company to detect possible opportunities. It's also essential to assess the capacities and resources that your company has to satisfy the needs of the different client segments
Now is when you will see the real importance of strategic marketing
Create a competitive advantage that's sustainable through time
If you remember the definition that we shared at the beginning of the article, one of the objectives is finding a competitive advantage.
Understanding how to gain a competitive advantage is basically what the strategic process is about, analyzing all the aspects concerning your business to detect the exploitable factors which help you to get ahead of the competition.
Determine your strategy
Finally, we will have to establish all the analysis that we've done in the previous steps in the form of a strategy. This step is where we have to elaborate on a strategic marketing plan that lets us achieve our companies' objectives.
Differences between strategic marketing and operative marketing.
Operative marketing mainly takes care of the execution and control of the marketing plan for the strategy previously described.
While the first one is in charge of the analysis phase and definition of the strategy, operative marketing is in charge of its execution.
The first one is long-term, and the second one is short-term.
Besides, one of the main functions of operative marketing is to design the politics of the marketing mix ( price, product, promotion, and distribution). Operative marketing is also in charge of executing the marketing strategy. Its function is also to verify if the strategy is working or if there needs to be some changes.
In other words, the role of strategic marketing is to fix the long-term objectives defined after analyzing the company, while operative marketing's role is of defining a set of actions for the short term execution of the previously described strategy.
How to elaborate a strategic marketing plan:
First, let's define the essential elements of a marketing plan:
Executive summary
Company's current situation analysis
A. External Analysis
B. Internal Analysis
C. FODA Analysis
Marketing strategies
A. Mission
B. Objectives
C. Corporate strategies
d. Marketing mix strategies
Execution of the marketing plan
A. Defining the timing of actions
B. Defining everyone's responsibilities
C. Defining the budget
Economic and financial aspects
Control of the marketing plan
A. Defining the units of control (income, expenses, satisfaction)
B. Determining a contingency plan
In summary the main stages of elaborating a strategic marketing plan is Internal and external analysis, Market segmentation and positioning Determining the strategy and operative marketing which is the execution of your established plan.
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