Marketing helps you attract people to your business, but it’s important to know who you want to attract and how you’re going to attract them. Without this information, it will be difficult to run successful marketing campaigns.

The best way to gather all this information together is to adopt a strategic marketing approach, which will ensure that your marketing campaigns are targeting the right people and using the correct mediums to do so.

Steps within the Strategic Marketing process

Strategic marketing directly influences many areas of your overall marketing strategy, so it’s important to approach these following steps carefully.

Step 1: Planning

Planning is the most important step within the strategic marketing process, as it acts as your base. You’ll want to identify your business purpose and the goals and objectives which you want to achieve.

If you don’t have a well-thought-out plan, it will be difficult to progress to the next step as you won’t fully understand what the purpose behind your marketing efforts are.

Step 2: Analysis

The analysis step is taking the time to conduct market research and to analyze what your competitors are doing to market their product or service within the industry.

Market research

Doing market research will give you an understanding of what your industry looks like, what the current trends are and provide you with an overview of what the ‘playing field’ is like. As an example, if you launch a new product that you think will do well but there’s no actual consumer or industry demand, all your efforts will be worthless.

Competitor analysis

A competitor analysis will provide you with all the ins and outs of how your competition works, what their position in the industry is like, and provide you with any possible gaps in the market that you can take advantage of to out-perform them.

Study your target audience and create specific buyer personas. Work towards understanding who your ideal customers are, what their needs and desires are, and know where to find them.

Step 3: Development

Now that you’ve got a clear idea of how you should present yourself in the market, the next step is to develop your marketing plan which will help guide you to achieve your set goals and objectives.

A good place to start is with your marketing mix which consists of four Ps:

Product: This is what your business is selling. This involves researching, developing, and creating a product launch timeline.

Price: This the price at which you will sell your product or service to customers. Pricing should be formulated off the back of market research and different pricing strategies.

Place: This is where you will sell your product or service. (Online or in-store.)

Promotion: This is how you will advertise your product or service to current and prospective customers. Is it via social media, is it via digital billboards, etc.

Step 4: Implementation

And finally, it’s time to implement your strategic marketing plan! This is the exciting part where you’ll be able to see all your strategic planning pay off.

After implementing, it’s important to take the time to review your processes and make any necessary changes. The markets are constantly evolving especially in the digital space, so it’s important to monitor your progress on a regular basis to adapt to new trends or changes in customer interests.

Are you ready to take on a more strategic approach to your marketing?

If this is your first time taking on a more strategic marketing approach, feel free to message me on WhatsApp or via email with any questions you might have. I’m always happy to assist where possible. 👋