When creating a formal, written marketing plan, your marketing strategy will become the meat & potatoes from which you will generate new business without wasting precious capital.  Marketing strategy is the process that allows your organization to use its limited resources on the greatest opportunities to increase sales and achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. While marketing strategy should be centered on the key concept that customer satisfaction is the main goal.

Key to Your General Corporate Strategy

Marketing strategy is a method of focusing your company’s energies and resources on a course of action which will lead to sales growth and dominance of a targeted market niche. A marketing strategy combines product development, promotion, distribution, pricing, relationship management and other elements; identifies the firm’s marketing goals, and explains how they will be achieved, ideally within a given timeframe.

Marketing strategy determines your target market segments, positioning, marketing mix, and allocation of resources whether it be capital or human. It is most effective when it is an integral component of overall company strategy, defining how your organization will successfully engage customers, prospects, and competitors in your particular market.

Corporate business plan strategies, corporate missions, and corporate goals.  As your customer constitutes the source of your firms’ revenue, marketing strategy is closely linked with the entire sales process.

Below is some basic theory to chew on.

• Target Audience
• Proposition/Key Element
• Implementation
• Tactics and actions

A marketing strategy should serve as the foundation of a marketing plan. A marketing plan contains a set of specific actions required to successfully implement a marketing strategy and helps to paint a picture for which your target audience is, and how to communicate a message that they want to hear.

Here’s an example of a marketing strategy: “Use a low cost product to attract prospects. Once our company, via our low cost product, has established a relationship with prospect, our organization will begin to sell additional, higher-margin products and services that enhance the prospect’s interaction with the low-cost product or service.”  Walmart would be a great example of this strategy.  Once they get you in the door with “advertised loss leaders”, they then introduce to the consumer higher margin products.

A strategy consists of a well thought out series of tactics, i.e. advertising, public relations, and referrals to make a marketing plan effective and actually generate results. Marketing strategies serve as the fundamental foundation of marketing plans designed to fill market needs and reach marketing objectives. Plans and objectives are generally tested for measurable results in order to achieve overall goals.

A marketing strategy integrates an company’s marketing goals, policies, and action plans (tactics) into a comprehensive whole. Similarly, the various strands of the strategy, which might include advertising, channel marketing, internet marketing, promotion and public relations can be orchestrated.  Many companies flow a strategy throughout an organization, by creating strategy tactics (advertising, public relations, referrals) that then become strategy goals for the next level. Each level is expected to take that strategy goal and develop a set of tactics to achieve that goal. This is why it is very important to create each strategy goal measurable, utilizing a given set of metrics.

Types of Strategies

Marketing strategies may differ depending on the unique situation of the individual business. However there are a number of ways of categorizing some generic strategies. A brief description of the most common categorizing schemes is presented below:

Strategies based on market dominance – In this scheme, firms are classified based on their market share or dominance of an industry. Typically there are three types of market dominance strategies:

• Leader
• Challenger
• Follower
• Product differentiation
• Market segmentation

Innovation strategies – This deals with the firm’s rate of the new product development and business model innovation.  It asks whether the company is on the cutting edge of technology and business innovation.

There are three types of Innovation Strategies:

• Pioneers
• Close followers
• Late followers

Growth strategies – In this scheme we ask the question, “How should the firm grow?”.  There are a number of different ways of answering that question, but the most common gives four answers:

• Horizontal integration
• Vertical integration
• Diversification
• Intensification

Believe it or not, when it comes to Marketing Strategies we have not even scratched the surface but what we have mentioned are some basics that are most commonly used.  Most of our information was compiled from severals sources including Wikipedia from which you can find a plethora of “college textbook” marketing concepts.

While it is good to read and understand these fundamental concepts, at Heavy Guerrilla we feel that a more practical, easy-to-understand approach actually produces better results.