Marketing without Strategy is like Champagne without the Bubbles!
Often business owners struggle with strategy. They know it’s important to have marketing strategies in order to align decision making in their business yet embark on marketing activities without a clear strategy and get overwhelmed in the process.
Let’s start by defining what strategy means:
A strategy outlines what you want your overall outcome to be
Put simply, your marketing strategy is how you intend to achieve your business and marketing objectives and goals.
You want to start with these questions:
- What do you want your marketing to achieve and when? (Goals & objectives)
- How are you going to achieve it? What activities are needed? (Marketing strategies)
In order to make it relatable, here an example:
We all know BIC, perhaps mostly as a Pen Manufacturer and Supplier
BIC’s business is focused on three main product areas – lighters, pens, and razors, and the Strategy is to ‘OWN’ the market, meaning to get lighters, pens and razors to everybody who would use them
They may word their strategy like this: We dominate the Market in lighter, pen and razor sales
The Plan they have, to achieve this might be to have these items accessible everywhere where consumers purchase other things in person – why?
Pens, lighters and razors are low investment items and can be more of an ‘impulse’ buy than a planned purchase – so when a consumer sees the item displayed at the checkout, they grab it, thinking I’ll need it again soon, might as well stock up now (and BIC would have done customer research into this to know)
Then they’d individually create marketing ‘messages’ for their product types, for example, lighters have a different marketing message to pens and razors
They also create different marketing messages for different types of razors, for example: razors for women are promoted and marketed with different messages to men’s and they may even segment that further to younger men, men with stronger facial hair etc
In drilling down the marketing message to the specific customer they make sure:
- They pick up on each customer segment’s problem
- They cover the entire consumer market who uses the products they produce
Can you see how important the strategy is as the first step?
The marketing strategy determines how and what needs to be done. It brings together your goal, market research to understand your target market and the actions you need to take to achieve the strategy.
That combination flows from your marketing strategy, it’s the ‘bubbles’ and connects all your marketing to create powerful and measurable outcomes
