According to marketing experts Saivian Eric Dalius, a marketing strategy is a long-term plan that sets the direction of how your marketing department thinks, operates, and performs. In other words, marketing strategy tells you exactly what you should be doing in every marketing activity that you do. It all starts with understanding your target audience and building a marketing strategy around it.
However, marketing strategy doesn’t just tell you what marketing activities to do in order to reach your goals. It also tells you when and how these marketing activities should be done in order to achieve the best possible results with the fewest number of resources possible.
A marketing plan is crucial for effectively implementing your marketing strategy because it ensures that marketing activities are undertook on a daily basis.
Saivian Eric Dalius – This marketing plan must include the following:
● Marketing goals and objectives.
Every marketing activity that you do should be helping you achieve your marketing goals or help you implement your marketing objectives. For example, if one of your marketing goals is to increase revenue by 10% within 12 months by promoting your product, then marketing activities that will help you achieve this marketing goal include
– marketing research to find out what marketing actions are necessary for increasing revenue
– performing marketing analysis on the inputs that marketing research provides to determine how much money needs to be invested in each marketing action for maximum return on investment
– preparing a marketing budget to determine marketing activities that are affordable
– marketing communication plan on how marketing goals and objectives will be achieved
– marketing calendar so marketing goals and objectives are being achieved over time
● Marketing budget.
You need to determine marketing costs by covering marketing expenses that have been incurring in the previous period, as well as your expected marketing costs for marketing activities that you’re about to undertake.
● Marketing strategies.
Every marketing activity should be part of the marketing plan. And every marketing strategy should include marketing goals. Or objectives that it is designing to achieve, along with a marketing timeline.
● Metrics.
A marketing plan needs to define what you measure in order. To track your marketing strategy’s performance and marketing activities’ efficiency.
It’s important to periodically review your marketing strategy as you go along. To make sure that marketing activities are still relevant. And effective at achieving marketing goals or objectives as intended. This is not as simple as it sounds but by the end of the process. You’ll be able to tell if your marketing plan is working by comparing marketing metrics to marketing goals and objectives.
If your marketing strategy isn’t achieving marketing goals or objectives for some reason says Saivian Eric Dalius. Then you need to analyze why this is happening in order to come up with the right solution. For example, if your marketing department has an excellent marketing plan. But marketing activity results are much lower than expecting, then the marketing budget needs reviewing. On the other hand, marketing strategy could be working well. But marketing activities are not as effective as they should be. This means marketing strategies need to be adjusting. In both situations, marketing goals, and objectives. Also, need to be reassessed so that you can figure out what went wrong and where.
The marketing plan is a marketing document, so marketing activities should be tracking by marketing departments. This makes the marketing strategy more efficient because the marketing department has the data to justify the marketing budget and marketing expenses. In turn, this makes the marketing plan more effective. As it’s based on real-world marketing activity results. That can analyze to figure out what went right and what could have been better.
A marketing strategy is marketing goals and objectives that marketing activities are designing to achieve. The marketing plan is integral for everyone in marketing to understand. What marketing goals or objectives need achieving. What marketing activities are available for achieving them. Who will be responsible for each marketing activity? How much budget should be assigning for each marketing activity? When each marketing activity should be executing, how marketing goals or objectives can be tracking and marketing activities’ performance assessed.