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The marketing process of your business can make or break your brand positioning and consumer loyalty. Your strategic planning process directs your total marketing activities, ensures you target the right consumers, and keeps you focused on your goals and objectives. It gives you a concrete tool to assess the state and success of your actions.
And if your business hasn’t taken the time to completely plan and map out its marketing process, the risk of missing out on a market niche and falling behind in your sector is extremely serious. Whether you’re promoting a new product, trying to improve your public relations, or aiming to achieve a larger market share, your marketing program requires a strategic edge.
What is a strategic marketing process?
A strategic marketing process is exactly what it sounds like: it’s a plan that outlines all of the factors associated with and influenced by your company’s marketing objectives.
Strategic marketing processes are the actionable methods you employ as part of your overall marketing strategy. Your marketing strategy outlines how you want to go to market, the channels you intend to use, and the aspects of your business that will be influenced by any marketing initiatives. The processes you design turn your plan into a systematic series of steps that will assist you in identifying and achieving your marketing and sales objectives.
Breaking it down: Steps to success
Because each business and its target audience’s needs are unique, marketers must remember that no two strategic marketing processes will look the same. There are, nevertheless, a few common lessons you can use to your unique marketing approach. Given the nature of your consumers or the products and services you provide, your concept may require a few more processes. However, there are a few significant aspects to every effective marketing process:
Step one: Plan your mission, goals and objectives
Before proceeding, your marketing executives and stakeholders must sit down and identify your company’s mission, as well as the goals and objectives that will fuel your strategic marketing.
Your goal statement should influence and be incorporated into every decision you make as a business, including marketing. If you still don’t have a mission statement, now is the time to write one. It should describe why your company exists, what it does, and how it helps and benefits its customers. Some mission statements are ambitious and encouraging, while others are more formal. Make sure your mission statement reflects your company’s goals and culture.
Next, create a list of goals and objectives that will serve as spokes in the wheel that is your marketing process. These should always be consistent with your desired customer life cycle. That is to say, your goals should be: Smart; Measurable; Attainable; Realistic; Time-bound.
Step two: Analyze industry positioning
With your mission statement, goals, and objectives in place, it’s important to look outward to see where your firm stands in relation to the industry as a whole, as well as how it’s seen by existing customers. It’s now time to do some market research. This step involves two critical strategies: a SWOT analysis and an assessment of market positioning. SWOT stands for:
- Strengths – are the things that your firm excels at in comparison to its competitors.
- Weaknesses – or issues that may prevent your company from achieving market success.
- Opportunities – are external factors such as trends that may generate the opportunity for new business or revenue streams.
- Threats – are external variables (economical, political, technological, etc.) that may obstruct your company’s progress.
Whereas SWOT focuses on internal and external market aspects, positioning tries to better define how the brand is regarded in relation to its competitors through the customer’s perspective. Brand positioning, as defined by Brafton’s Dominick Sorrentino, focuses on developing a compelling brand identity that leaves a lasting impact on customers in your target demographics.
Step three: Establish marketing tactics
Make an effort ahead of time to lay out your mission, goals, and objectives, as well as your market position and how clients see you. This will get you started on developing the actual methods and campaigns you’ll utilize to boost your brand marketing.
Considering your distribution channels is a must, especially in today’s social media marketing landscape. Certain forms of material, for example, are better suitable for an email marketing campaign, but others are more suited for your company blog. The right mix will be defined by your market segments. Your situational analysis and positioning inform your product and messaging, and your marketing team should also ensure that the appropriate distribution channel is chosen based on:
- Your brand image
- Target audience needs
- The specific marketing tactic being carried out as part of the current campaign.
Step four: Put your process to work
After you’ve completed all of the essential planning, it’s time to put your tactics and process into action. In this step, you and your content marketing team will be:
- Obtaining resources such as the appropriate financial backing and subject matter expertise, when needed.
- Developing schedules for each technique and campaign. Make these tasks as specific as possible to guarantee that they can be properly completed.
- Executing the process
Step five: Evaluate, modify, repeat
This is the stage at which many businesses make a crucial mistake. It is important to remember that your strategic marketing process will be an ongoing activity – you should always be looking for ways to improve and enhance the plan.
After you’ve implemented your marketing strategies and techniques, it’s important to revisit your established goals and objectives, as well as the metrics you developed in accordance with your SMART planning. These will be critical in determining the overall success of your activities in relation to your mission statement and goals.
Tips to guide your efforts: Final thoughts
Here are a few useful pointers to keep in mind while you and your team work through the aforementioned steps:
- Don’t cut corners when it comes to research. The significance of elements such as market statistics, business cycle data, and clearly defined consumer profiles cannot be overstated.
- Plan for the long future while keeping the short term in mind. Quick victories can be useful for capturing the attention of your target audience and motivating your internal staff. However, you should also include long-term goals and objectives that correspond to the major themes of your mission statement.
- Be simple and precise. Include all of the necessary information for team members to carry out the actions and approaches you develop as part of your strategic marketing strategy. Work to provide perfect clarity and no possibility for misunderstanding.
- Be practical and sensible. This is when considering your own team’s talents comes into play. If you lack the internal resources or experience to support your plans, it may be time to explore collaborating with an expert to ensure that your expectations meet your aims and eventual successes.
Your strategic marketing process provides the roadmap required to create valuable connections with customers and solidify your brand in the ideal niche in your marketplace. Don’t waste another second floundering with ill-defined and indecisive marketing activities; instead, go forth and conquer your industry.
