Stages of Marketing Strategy
Marketing strategy is a written business plan that identifies your company's marketing goals, and explains how you will achieve those goals within a given time period. Your marketing strategy will help you identify and communicate your target market segment; position your product or service in the marketplace; determine your marketing mix; and outline how you will allocate your resources.
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Identify Your Target Market
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The first stage of your marketing strategy involves narrowing your marketing focus and choosing a group or several groups of people you will promote your product or service to. Determine who your target market is by researching the current marketplace. Identify the target customers for your competition -- take note of important demographic information such as age, sex, ethnicity, household income and technology preferences. Conduct Internet research by typing in key words related to your industry. For example, if you are developing a marketing strategy for a dietary supplement, search with key words such as "target marketing" and "dietary supplement." If you have the budget, hire a market research company to help you complete this stage of your marketing strategy. Once you've identified the characteristics of your target market, create a "customer profile" that describes your target audience based on these characteristics.
Write Down Your Key Differentiators
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Once you know who your target customer is, the next stage is to determine how your product or service is better than your competitors'. Use the information from your target customer profile to describe how your services will solve the problems of these key customers. Write down a list of product features and benefits that differentiate your business. A feature is what your product does, while a benefit is what your product does for the end user. For example, a feature of a new car may be "heated seats," while the benefit of these heated seats is "experience comfort and warmth throughout the cold winter months."
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Determine Your Marketing Mix
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The "marketing mix" is a term used to describe the resources and tactics you will use to market your products and services. The marketing mix includes the "four P's," which are price, product, place and promotion. For this stage, identify how you will price your product; communicate the product life cycle; choose the channels in which you will distribute your product or service; and identify the ways you will promote your product. Outline how you will allocate each of these resources.
Develop an Implementation Plan
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The final stage of the marketing strategy is the implementation plan, in which you outline a plan for how you will allocate your resources. With your target customer and marketing mix in mind, develop a chart or timeline that shows which marketing tactics you will use and when you will use them. State how you will measure and test the effectiveness of your marketing strategies. Finally, start building your marketing materials, then take your strategy to market.
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References
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