Marketing Strategy Tutorial
If you do a good job at identifying your customers' needs, developing and innovating products based on those needs, and pricing and promoting products, you will help your company sell goods and services more easily. That's the essence of any marketing strategy. According to Jay Conrad Levinson, author of "Guerilla Marketing," you can create a marketing plan with just a few sentences. In fact, the simpler, the better. Your strategy, however, needs to take into account comprehensive research on your products, your customers and the buying and selling environment. Then you need to create compelling messages and blast them to the people you want to reach.
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Marketing Strategy 101
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You are marketing when you create activities aimed at satisfying the needs and wants of customers. The ultimate goal of marketing is to make the tougher act of selling products easier and less essential. Marketing strategy is founded on the 5 Ps: product, promotion, price, place, and positioning. Products are what you offer, either goods or services. Price is the amount you charge for product. Place refers to the distribution channels your products go through to reach your customers. Promotion is how you raise awareness of your products among the customers you want to reach. Positioning is about cultivating your product in the minds of your customers.
Plan
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Your marketing strategy is one part of an overall marketing plan. Other parts of a plan will help you determine what strategy to use. For example, your plan will express your understanding of who your customers are and the marketing environment in which you will operate. Your strategic plan for marketing should explain the purpose of the strategy, how much it costs, how you will achieve it, your competitive advantage, target markets and what media you will use to broadcast your strategy. The nuts and bolts of marketing strategy is how you'll deal with positioning.
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Know Your Customers
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Start your marketing strategy by collecting data about the people, government agencies or other businesses to whom you want to sell. You want to learn their demographics, earnings, spending power and buying habits. Use resources such as census data, Hoovers and Standard & Poor's to conduct research. You need to determine how big your audience is and determine how much of the market you can claim. You also want psychographic measures that explain your audience's values, attitudes and lifestyles. For example, if you are marketing a juice product, you may want to reach suburban mothers who may place special emphasis on their children's diet and can pay a little extra for the product your company creates. However, knowing their current economic conditions and fluctuations in income may help you tailor the most appropriate message to reach them at any given time.
Know Your Environment
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Many forces present opportunities and hindrances to your marketing strategy. For example, you need to know about the competition, laws and regulations, economic and social conditions, technological changes and cultural factors that influence spending patterns. You also need to be aware of issues such as suppliers, middlemen and transporters who can affect your ability to get a product to your customers, as well as environmental factors that affect the supply of materials for the products you are promoting.
Position Yourself
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Once you understand your customer and the environment in which you are operating, it's time to begin crafting messages to help your customers remember your name and think highly of you. You need to find your niche in the marketplace. For example, you need to answer questions such as, is your product the first one to market, does it improve on something your competitors neglected or is it unique in some other way. The answers determine what you should emphasize in your advertising and promotion. You can also use your marketing strategy to reposition your competitors in relation to yourself. For example, Tylenol repositioned aspirin makers by using a strategy that emphasized the side effects of aspirin and how acetaminophen doesn't involve those risks.
Craft Messages
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The messages you create in your marketing strategy should help your customers identify, understand and remember your company's positioning. Messages should be short. Think of how well you associate the words "Just do it" with Nike, for example. To create messages, list reasons a customer should choose your product over your competitors' offerings. Create keywords for your messaging from that exercise. However, instead of words like quality and dependability, appeal to your customer's hearts and core desires with buzzwords they are familiar with.
Promote
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You broadcast your strategy through a promotional mix, including advertising, personal selling, sales promotion and publicity. Advertising can promote your product through media, such as television, radio and newspapers, or through email, direct mail, trade shows, billboards and the good old Yellow Pages. Advertising is your way of communicating with your audience, so you need to be informed on how they like to be reached. For example, many companies are finding more success in using social networks than paid advertising through other media.
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