What is Marketing Strategy? Learn to Boost Your Business with Marketing Strategy
What is Strategy?
Merriam-Webster defines strategy as:
- a careful plan or method : a clever stratagem.
- the art of devising or employing plans or stratagems toward a goal.
- an adaptation or complex of adaptations (as of behavior, metabolism, or structure) that serves or appears to serve an important function in achieving evolutionary success.
In other words, strategy is your roadmap to success, guiding you on how to achieve your business's 'why '.
The question to answer is, "What does success mean in your business?"
Before you can develop a strategic plan, you need to have a clear understanding of your business's goals and objectives. This clarity will keep you focused and driven in your marketing strategy.
Goal Setting Before Strategy
The VMOST framework is a strategic planning tool that shows how goal-setting precedes strategy in the planning process.
Businesses and non-profits must first set organizational goals and objectives before:
Defining goals and objectives should start at a C-Suite or executive level to provide overall, organization-wide direction on what to accomplish long-term and short-term.
Do you know what the overall business goals are for your organization?
If not, take the time to ask the appropriate executives or do some goal-setting exercises to define your long- and short-term goals before you try to devise a strategy. We'll write a separate article on goal setting and objectives, but to understand strategy, think of goals as a broad, long-term, achievable outcome and objectives as short-term, measurable actions to achieve a goal. You can have multiple objectives to support a single goal, and each objective will guide how you need to develop your strategy.
Goals
Long-term and broad
Example:
Becoming the market leader in your industry
Objectives
Short-term and measurable
Example:
Increase market share by 10% over the next year.
- Double the number of subscribers/clients over the next six months.
- Retain an 85% customer base over the next year.
- Increase brand awareness to 100,000 impressions over the next year.
Strategy is not the same as Tactics
All men can see the tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.
The Art of War, Sun Tzu
Once your goals and objectives are clear, you can start figuring out the strategy. The most important thing to remember in this step is that strategy is different from tactics:
Strategy is your well-researched game plan.
Tactics are the individual steps to action your game plan.
You can also think of strategy as outlining the who, what, why, and tactics as the where, when, and how. Strategy is also a long-term function, while tactics are short-term. Tactics can be evaluated more or less in real-time and tweaked as needed. A strategy needs time for all the tactical elements to deploy and be analyzed to see if the collective efforts helped push the needle to reach the goals. If specific tactics don't work or give the desired results, you adjust the tactics under the same strategy. The strategy will still need to be evaluated, but that will usually be done at specific time frames or milestones.
Strategy
Researched game plan
- Long-term
- Who, what, and why
- Evaluated at milestones
Tactics
Individual action steps
- Short-term
- Where, when, and how
- Evaluated in real-time
Many organizations end up leading with tactics instead of strategy and, therefore, need clarification about strategy. When you lead with tactics, whether by accident or on purpose, you miss the big picture and can't justify why your actions are the right approach for the organization. Suppose you're reporting on your department's performance, campaign, or project and don't know the why (mission, vision, goals, and objectives); you can't properly form the strategic approach, and you won't know what metrics to report on. You end up picking out KPIs (key performance indicators) that essentially are fluff and meaningless metrics because they don't reflect the goals and objectives your efforts should be focused on.
It's essential to lead with strategy so that your efforts provide meaning and measurable results within your organization. This way, you can pinpoint what may or may not be working toward your mission, vision, goals, and objectives and adjust accordingly. You also will have a guide to know what metrics to focus on instead of trying to measure and analyze everything, freeing up precious time and resources.
What is Marketing?
It might seem silly to go over what is marketing. Everyone has seen ads. Most have social media and follow brands, celebrities, and influencers. Most have email, sign up for a newsletter, or subscribe to a business list. However, marketing is a discipline that often bleeds into others and causes many organizational confusion over roles and responsibilities. Many marketers will tell you their colleagues either think they can easily be marketers themselves or instruct the marketing team on what tactics to use. Or colleagues have yet to learn what marketers do and make requests to the marketing team outside the marketing scope. Marketing also gets a bad rep at times for misleading consumers or spinning things to make money over helping people. In reality, marketing is only as good or bad as the people executing it and the organizations they work for.
Marketing as a Tool
Marketing, in its essence, is a tool that can be used to connect an audience with a product or service they would find valuable. The American Marketing Association defines marketing as, "the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large." This definition underscores the role of marketing in promoting products or services, but more importantly, in creating and delivering value to the end consumer.
Marketing is composed of the marketing mix - price, products/services, promotion, and placement. These four elements are used to market a product or service to consumers successfully. However, to do this, marketers also need to know the market or industry of the business, the product/service, and the audience.
A good marketing team should be able to answer questions like:
- Who is the target market for each product or service the organization offers?
- Who are the competitors, and where do they stand in the marketplace?
- What is the value proposition of our product or service, and how does it compare to the competitors?
- What pricing strategy do we use, and is it appropriate for the audience and market? Are we priced competitively?
Marketers use the answers to these questions to build strategy and develop the tactical plan. Creating emails, posting to social media, attending or sponsoring events, pitching to media, building a landing page, creating a lead generation form, and more are all examples of marketing tactics that marketers execute.
Strategy is not the same as Tactics
Branding, design, public relations (PR), social media, customer service, communications, events, sales, and other functions are all areas that intersect with marketing but don't always fall under the marketing umbrella. A marketing team might include PR and social media in its tactical plans because they are marketing channels to promote a product or service, but they also are disciplines in their own right. Some examples of how marketing overlaps with these other functions are:
- Public relations involves internal and external stakeholder management and communications beyond promoting a product or service.
- Social media involves managing multiple social channels by responding to posts and private messages, monitoring conversations, and crossing over to communication, customer service, and marketing.
- Events are a marketing channel to promote products and services. To use that channel, a marketer may have to set up a booth at a conference, pull together a panel for a webinar, or even market the event itself. However, a marketer is not necessarily an expert in event logistics, event production, or developing event content like an event planner would be an expert.
- Marketers are not designers, even though they should have some design knowledge and skills to work with designers on projects. Branding spans marketing, design, and public relations due to the nature of a brand.
- Sales and marketing must work closely together to move the needle on sales and revenue goals. Marketers should have knowledge and skill in the customer journey, the sales funnel, and lead generation, but the sales team is the team building relationships with potential customers. Customer service also works closely with sales and marketing to address existing customer needs. Marketing helps to communicate new offers to existing customers.
It is essential to highlight that these areas overlap because they all work together towards the same organizational goals and objectives. Many organizations are sales-first, which seems like the right approach given that all businesses are looking at the bottom line - to make money. However, in many sales-first organizations, these other areas, especially marketing, get treated as supporting sales. Then, the sales function ends up driving the objectives for each of these areas. This can cause misuse of time and resources, siloed teams, and overall dysfunction within an organization.
Instead, each of these areas should serve a separate purpose in supporting the organization; therefore, they each have their own objectives, strategies, and tactics stemming from the organizational goals. Sales can't set marketing objectives and have marketing be effective, just like marketing can't set PR objectives and have PR be effective. They should all operate like spokes and gears, working together to achieve the same outcome.
What is Marketing Strategy?
Now that we've discussed strategy and marketing, it's time to put them together. Let's do some simple math:
If strategy = the game plan to achieve an organization's goals
And marketing = the tool to be used to connect an audience with a product or service they would find valuable
Then marketing + strategy = the overall game plan to achieve marketing goals and objectives centered around connecting audiences with the organization's products and services.
Elements of Marketing Strategy
Marketing strategy is where all of the marketing elements come together to understand who to target, what to promote, and why, based on what needs to be achieved. A great marketer takes all of the information in the marketing mix, the SWOT, the competitive and market analyses, and the audience analysis to map which audiences are interested in which products/services and how to message them in the market. They understand the audience's pain points, needs, psychographics, demographics, and behaviors to know how to communicate with them appropriately.
Let's use an example to illustrate how to develop a marketing strategy and use it to determine tactics:
Goal:
Your organization has a long-term goal of becoming the market leader in your industry
Objective:
Over the next year, the objective is to increase your market share by 10%.
That's a very broad goal with a timely and measurable objective that can be broken down into a game plan.
Marketing Function:
You lead the marketing team, and it's your job to develop the marketing strategy to help achieve this goal.
To develop a marketing strategy, you'll need to get your bearings. Look at your marketing mix and ask how you can help achieve a 10% increase in market share.
Some of the things you'll want to look at include:
- Who is in your sales pipeline?
- What does the customer journey look like?
- How many clients do you have and need to retain?
- Who is your target audience?
- What segments do you need to focus on?
- What messaging needs to be developed for the segments?
- Which products & services to focus marketing efforts on?
- Who are your competitors?
- What is the status of the industry/market?
- How are we positioned in the marketplace?
All of this information will help define your strategy:
- We are targeting x audience(s) using specific messaging for each audience segmented by where they fit into the pipeline/customer journey (customers get treated differently than a prospect would).
- These audiences match up with the specific products or services we offer, and we will meet them in channels they already frequent, such as segment A uses LinkedIn and attends industry networking events, and segment B prefers email and Instagram.
From the marketing strategy, you can now build out the tactical plan broken down by the objectives you're trying to reach.
To increase market share by 10%, you need to double the amount of clients by:
- Creating a landing page to drive people to a form that feeds into the pipeline
- Developing an email campaign with a ten-email arc over 6 months to existing customers to retain them
- Creating a separate email campaign to potential customers, moving them through the pipeline
- Selecting which events to attend and what to sponsor or partner on and all of the activations and assets needed for those events, sponsorships, and partnerships
- Developing the content plan, including social posts across the channels where your audience is, creating any long-form content (blog posts, reports, white papers, ebooks, and other types of long-form content.) that can be used as short-term content to drive people to the website or landing page
- Creating ad campaigns, including paid search, 3rd party digital ads on sites where your audience visits, and social ads
Marketing Strategy is like Legos
There is no one-size-fits-all marketing strategy. It's like playing with Legos, where you have a variety of pieces you can put together in various ways to create a final product. If you asked ten different people to build a house using Legos, they would all come up with something different. Some might be basic, some very elaborate, some small, some large. If you ask those same ten people to build a house but provide more direction on the type of house you want them to build, you'll get more consistent outcomes for the houses.
Marketing strategy functions similarly, bringing me back to how marketing is only as good or bad as the marketer/team and the organization. Suppose you have an organization that provides goals and objectives (backed up by a mission and vision) to provide direction. That will narrow down how the marketing team develops marketing strategy and tactics. Furthermore, suppose you have a marketing team that follows basic marketing principles like defining the audience, the marketing mix, and a SWOT analysis. In that case, the direction gets narrowed even more because the marketing principles set additional parameters. You start to get a clear picture of what pieces you need to accomplish your goal. But if you don't have defined goals and objectives and have a marketing team focused on tactics first, the results will be all over the place.
Final Thoughts
Marketing strategy is crucial to the success of any organization. A bad marketing strategy, or lack thereof, can negatively impact an organization, from wasting time and resources to alienating customers and even teams within an organization, not to mention not meeting the organizational goals, especially revenue goals. Identifying the cause of the bad marketing strategy is vital to correct the problem(s) and get your team or organization closer to achieving its goals and objectives. Is it a lack of defined goals and objectives? Is there a skill or knowledge gap in your marketing team? Is your company leading with sales or tactics? These are just some of the questions to ask to identify and address where the disconnect is.
And sometimes, even with a well-researched and thought-out marketing strategy, goals and objectives may not be met. The beauty of a well-researched and thought-out marketing strategy is that it allows you to look at the tactics from the plan that came from the strategy, analyze why the goals and objectives may not have been met, and adjust accordingly. Sometimes, you have to make pivots based on what's happening in the market or the world, like what we all experienced during the pandemic, but you have a roadmap to work from already and aren't starting at square one. It allows for quicker fixes and helps to focus your resources and efforts.
The bottom line is that investing in developing a marketing strategy is worth it.
Recap
Long-term & broad
Example:
Becoming the marketing leader in your industry
10 Question to Ask About Your Marketing Strategy
If you have trouble answering any of these questions, or don't think your answers are inline with a strong marketing strategy, it might be time to get help from an expert marketing strategist.
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Learn how we can help you or your marketing team translate your business goals into marketing strategy and tactical plans.
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