What is Marketing Strategy?

A Marketing Strategy is your overall game plan for finding customers and making sales, comprised of high-level elements like branding, value proposition, and customer demographics.

Recommended reading: Marketing basics, what’s your business game plan?

What Is It?

A Marketing Strategy is your overall game plan for finding customers and making sales, comprised of high-level elements like branding, value proposition, and customer demographics. It sits above your Marketing Plan in importance and keeps all your marketing activity focused in the same direction for maximum impact and cost efficiency.

It helps to think of your marketing strategy as having three sections.

1. Who, Why & What
2. Your Objective
3. How & Where

Part 1 – Who, Why & What

The first part of your Marketing Strategy solidifies the; who, why, and what elements of your business. Outlining what you are offering, who your target market is, what your company stands for, your brand guidelines, what niche you serve or problem you solve, and who your main competitors are. These details will continue to evolve as you learn more about your customers and develop your brand. But they are the more consistent aspects of your business. 

Part 2 – The Objective

Next is your business objective. As an overall marketing strategy, this should target the area with the most potential for business growth. Some top-level objectives you might consider include sales, purchase value, customer acquisition, customer retention, repeat business, profitability, subscribers, followers, new markets etc.  

Part 3 – How & Where

The final part of your marketing strategy focuses on how & where outlining the best mediums to communicate with potential customers and the mechanisms you will use to motivate consumers at different stages of their buying process to take action. These elements add flexibility to your marketing strategy, and you will want to change them to align with your current objective.

• mediums – website, social media, email, sponsorships, trade shows, advertising etc.
• mechanisms – value, education, engagement, advice, loyalty, social proof, promotions, pricing, free trial, newsletter, competition, discounts etc.

That’s all there is to your top-level marketing strategy. Although, if you want to increase your chances of success, mapping multiple strategies for core areas of your business make it easier to manage what you’re doing where and why. 

 Increase your chances of success with multiple strategies

Multiple Strategies

Marketing is a massive and complex part of every business. So naturally, when something is so big, it helps to break it down into smaller manageable chunks. Therefore, to get even better results, we recommend having multiple marketing strategies targeting your marketing fundamentals.  

• Brand Strategy
• Growth Strategy
• Customer Acquisition Strategy
• Customer Retention Strategy
• Website Strategy
• Pricing Strategy
• Social Media Strategy
• Advertising Strategy

Multiple strategies help keep your daily marketing efforts focused. They make it easier to plan and budget for too. Even if you don’t proactively try to improve each area, just having your strategies in place can be enough to keep you on track and prevent accidental self-sabotage. 

Constantly Evolving

As you learn more about your customers and your business evolves, you’ll want to refine and update your Marketing Strategy to better fit your business and your goals as you grow. 

Once you’ve established a Marketing Strategy and it works in theory, it’s time to implement it. That’s where your Marketing Plan comes in.

Your Marketing Plan is more boots on the ground. When & Where you will implement your marketing activities? Which communication channels you will use when and how frequently. What you say and how you say it will vary as much as the matter. But as long as you stay true to your Marketing Strategy objective, you will be on the right path to meeting your business goals.

It’s All Connected

Your marketing budget should reflect the financial benefits of achieving your marketing goal vs the cost of implementation. 

Setting an appropriate budget is just good business. You wouldn’t expect to make a 1 million profit from a 100-dollar investment. And you’d be equally crazy to invest 1 million to generate 100 dollar profit. 

If you’ve ever struggled to set a marketing budget for a campaign or project, you probably skimmed over your Marketing Strategy a little too quickly. If you can’t estimate the value on what you stand to gain, you can’t make an educated and calculated investment.

It’s never too late to review your marketing strategies. They aren’t supposed to be set in stone, so if you don’t have one or haven’t thought about it in some time and would like a helping hand to get back on track, why not book a strategy consultation with Hue Marketing?

Stephen Jones

Hue Marketing Founder
Seasoned marketing strategist and information junkie, with over 25 years of hands-on marketing experience. Phuket based since 2003.

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