Marketing Strategy 3 Steps to Success

Craft a successful marketing strategy by adapting to customer demands for business success and profitable relationships.

Developing a marketing strategy is a crucial step for companies because it allows them to adapt to changes in customer demands.

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A successful business marketing strategy must focus on products and services to promote them and to develop potentially profitable relationships with customers. To establish an effective marketing strategy with well-oriented objectives, it will be necessary to be based on real data resulting from a precise and complete analysis of the market.

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What is meant by marketing strategy

Going step by step, let's start from the definition of marketing. By marketing we mean all the techniques that allow us to better identify the needs, expectations and behaviors of a target in order to be able to offer them a product or service that perfectly meets their needs.

Marketing is, therefore, the set of techniques and actions that allow a company to market its products and services more easily by knowing its target audience perfectly.

The marketing strategy integrates the different objectives that you want to achieve, in terms of turnover, number of customers, visibility (of your brand or of one or more products and services), range of products, services, price range, loyalty. It is, therefore, a coordinated business approach, implemented in the medium or long term, and aimed at achieving commercial objectives, such as increasing sales

Marketing strategy and marketing plan, what's the difference

The marketing plan is the way in which you proceed to achieve the objectives deriving from the marketing strategy while the latter answers the question what, the marketing plan answers the question how.

In other words, the marketing campaign plan is the means by which you will execute your marketing strategy. This is an action plan that describes in detail how the promotional activity will be implemented.

The following must be included in the marketing plan:

the objectives of the promotional campaign,
a content plan,
timing for the delivery of the campaign,
list of marketing activities,
reporting of implementation costs.

How to develop a successful marketing strategy

A successful marketing strategy consists of three phases.

Phase 1 strategic analysis

The effectiveness of a marketing strategy is essentially based on the study and understanding of the target market. Furthermore, before embarking on the development of your commercial strategy, it is essential to proceed with the method known as marketing mix. This method allows you to highlight and analyze the following 4 main factors.

The product: to establish a coherent marketing strategy, it is important to know and be able to highlight the different advantages and characteristics of the products and services offered.
The price : the selling price of the company's products and services must be appropriate to the quality and target customers. Price is one of the essential components of the corporate financial strategy.
Distribution : the distribution strategy is fundamental. It allows you to define the company's marketing positioning by determining the most relevant sales channels (physical store or e-shop, sales through distributors or other intermediaries).
Communication : Communication strategy is used to attract customers' attention to the company's products and services. It is therefore necessary to take into account the desires and needs of the target customers to successfully convince them to purchase.

In this strategic phase, it is also essential to understand how to direct all marketing and communication efforts in the right direction.

To do this, you can follow the process of segmentation, targeting and positioning:

Identify the target audience. This process not only involves interviewing current customers, but also market research and the creation of buyer personas.

Address a segment of your target audience. It's better to speak to a small group of highly qualified buyers than to send the message to everyone.

Position your brand relative to other brands. What do you do better than your competitors It is essential to keep track of this information when creating a marketing strategy.

Phase 2 Determining marketing objectives

To set a strategic marketing policy it is crucial to establish objectives that allow you to have a precise vision of the result to be achieved. The objectives can be quantified in particular with regard to sales volume and market shares.

It is important to set measurable, sufficiently ambitious and achievable objectives.

In this regard we talk about SMART objectives, an acronym that represents the five fundamental qualities that an objective must possess:

Specific : The objective must be clearly defined in detail.
Measurable : achievement of the objective must be an observable and objective fact.
Achievable : A goal is achievable when it is realistic .
Relevant : A goal is relevant when it is important.
Time - Based : There is a deadline to achieve the goal.

Phase 3 setting up the marketing strategy

When implementing the marketing strategy, it is essential to involve all employees by gathering the opinions of the different business lines to strengthen the approach.

On the other hand, during the implementation of the marketing strategy, it is essential to regularly analyze the results obtained, to verify the effectiveness of the actions implemented.

In case of difficulty in achieving the objectives or in case of unforeseen events, the marketing strategy must be adapted. It is thanks to a real follow-up, accompanied by the correction and adjustment of any difficulties that the marketing strategy becomes truly successful!

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