Marketing Plans vs. Marketing Strategy

A marketing strategy explores fundamental questions about the business

A Marketing Strategy Holds Important Differences from Marketing Plans

Marketing Strategy

It’s been said the purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer, and the primary function to fulfill that purpose is marketing. Before marketing plans are put into action, they are preceded by a marketing strategy. A marketing strategy asks fundamental questions about both the business and its products. A marketing strategy explores unmet needs and desires of potential buyers and solving specific problems a buyer wants or needs fixed.

What is a Marketing Strategy?

A common misperception is that a marketing strategy is the same as a marketing plan or a go-to-market plan. It is not. Marketing strategy asks core questions about a business such as:

What is our mission? Why are we in business? What do we stand for?

A marketing strategy will ask foundational questions about customers, such as “Who is our primary customer? What jobs do our customers need done? How will our customers change?

A company’s brand is also part of its overall marketing strategy. In the past, companies could “build brands” by manufacturing a desired identity through persistent advertising. With the segmentation of customers, multitude of channels to communicate with people, and complexity of today’s market, a brand is more a reflection of an organization from any number of customer interactions rather than something that can be created.

A brand might best be defined of what people generally think of you and your company. Part of this are sustained emotional ties – if any – there are between a company and its customers.

A marketing strategy and its associated brand should be an honest reflection of one another and might include the a company’s mission, vision, purpose, value proposition, customers, key brand messaging, and other data that will help in creating new ideas regarding marketing and communication with customers.

Difference Between a Marketing Strategy and a Marketing Plan

The most significant difference between a marketing strategy and a marketing plan is that the latter is a document, steps or process that would contain specific details regarding the marketing activities that must be carried out by the marketing function in support of a specific product or service.

In a marketing plan, specific goals and objectives might include, for example, a projected advertising budget, the anticipated response to that campaign, such as number of clicks on a digital ad. It might also include a target conversion rate, an average sales price, a lead to customer rate percentage and an overall return on a marketing activity.

A marketing plan may also include the timetable on when these activities would be conducted.

Marketing strategies ostensibly are much broader and endure much longer compared to the marketing plan, since the former refers to the company’s core beliefs, value propositions and elements of its brand.

How to Build a Profitable Marketing Strategy

Securing new customers for a business is one of the most important aspects of running any company. To ensure companies can win, they  need to formulate the right kind of marketing strategy to match their business plan.

Learn about the job people need done

Any number of motivations can cause people to “hire” a product or service. Renown Harvard marketing professor Theodore Levitt famously said, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter inch hole.”

Understanding the jobs customers want products to do touches every part of product marketing, customer segmentation, messaging, sales strategy and sales processes.

Many times motivations can be hidden and even seem irrational. A marketing strategy presumes nothing, and will explore what knowledge needs to be gained from customers.

For example, we may assume customers want a product to do a practical, measurable job when it truth they were simply bored.  Understanding what satisfies needs, wants, aspirations is so complicated it can only be answered by customers themselves.

Learn about target customers

It is essential to find out if the target customers are interested in what the firm is offering. Exploring specific data about the preferences of people who are predisposed to potentially buy your product can include an understanding of:

  • Where they live
  • Their age
  • Gender
  • Interests
  • Education level
  • Fields of work
  • Income range
  • Relationship status
  • Language
  • Frequented websites
  • Buying concerns

More exploration should come into all kinds of data tied to weather, seasonality as well as  What time did people buy or consider buying products? What were they wearing? Were they alone? An understanding of demographic and psychographic data should be coupled with an understanding of associated experiences.

Research competitors; prepare to innovate

The purpose of researching is not to replicate whatever competitors are offering, but to try to think of ideas to make it better or different. Before you can sell within a successful sales process, you should establish a substantive value proposition for clients to establish sales traction. A value proposition is a statement that explains what benefits the product or service provides in a unique and compelling way.

The value proposition should describe:

  • The target client or purchaser
  • The job to be done by the customer
  • The solution you provide and how you solve the job to be done by the client
  • Why your solution is uniquely or distinctly better than alternatives available.

One point about value proposition: research suggests that you can measure the potential for customer acceptance of a new product or solution using a gain/pain ration. That is, can you significantly offer gains in convenience, price, ease of use or effectiveness from buying the product. Or, can alleviate pain to such an extent with minimal disruption that the product is worth purchasing?

Breakdown the buyer's journey within the sales funnel

The sales funnel starts with awareness, then interest, desire, and ends with action. For each step of the journey, companies have to determine which channels can achieve each of its goals. To make people aware, firms can use blogs, ads, web banners, and articles. Next is to educate potential customers about the need for the product. Popular B2B channels may include content marketing including eBooks, analyst papers, blogs, events, independent articles, and webinars.

Clients may acknowledge needs and that the solution is worth the time and money. Companies may inform or influence via podcasts, seminars, trials, demos, and customer references. Selection of your product for consideration may be aided by topic sheets, customer reviews, competitive intelligence, and presentations.

Select marketing channels, specify goals

Companies now have many promotional, influencer, social media and traditional advertising options.  Understanding buying centers, personas and roles, particularly in B2B is critical. Without going into specific marketing and promotional channels, its helpful to think about three categories of channels:

  • Owned – the company has total control over the website or blog
  • Earned – content is exposed through outside sources
  • Paid – any channel that requires some payment to show advertisements (Facebook ads, Google Adwords, TV or Radio commercials, print advertising)

In specifying your marketing metrics and goals, remember that these objectives must be specific, quantifiable, actionable, relevant, and time-bound.

Integration with Sales

A considerable problem for many companies is that marketing and sales operate in their own silos, each function having its own organization, processes, incentives, cultures, and, in many cases, objectives.

This is further complicated by a web of organizational complexity, with multiple business or sales units structured around products, customer segments, geographies, or channels.

It’s difficult for B2B organizations to change long-standing practices and ways of working. But the price of not changing is rising fast.

Companies that do not cooperate closely across their organizations may suffer because of poorly executed customer buying journeys, misaligned objectives, misallocated resources, and poor team ­morale.

They can also find themselves ­unable to learn from performance. ­Customer alienation, loss of market share, and slowed or no growth will follow.

This makes marketing and sales alignment more important than ever. Achieving this alignment, though, can be complex, and success often requires overcoming significant cultural barriers and the complete transformation of the marketing and sales model.

Key Elements of Any Marketing Strategy

Marketing is an imperfect art. Even when a company reaches authentic answers about its mission and value and potential customers are carefully segmented into different groups, a company must constantly test, monitor, analyze, and evaluate how effective the strategy and messages are in bringing in new customers.

After creating a marketing strategy, creators then move on to building a marketing plan. These efforts must continually be reviewed so that they can make the necessary changes promptly.

Marketing Plan Elements

What might a marketing plan include? Here are the things to consider:

  • Select the right marketing metrics depending on the business objectives
  • Create buyer personas to choose the channels that the company’s target customers often use
  • Check average views on posts to determine how much content or how often social media channels need to be updated
  • Accurately calculate how much the firm needs to prepare for earned and paid media
  • Build a workflow and process, and a team with skilled members who have specific responsibilities and tasks
  • Made use of content performance metrics for optimization of content strategy
  • Use psychographics in creating detailed buyer personas instead of only demographics
  • Create different content for each step of the marketing funnel

Other considerations my include:

  • Conversion Strategy
  • Joint Ventures and Partnerships
  • Customer Referral Strategy
  • Strategy for Increasing Transaction Prices
  • Retention Strategy
  • Financial Projections

Effective Tactics to Implement Your Marketing Strategy

  1. Try partnering up with other marketers. It is essential to build relationships with others so that guest posting and product partnerships are possible. Influencers are also an excellent choice to collaborate with since they might have a more significant presence in various social media channels.
  2. Update old content instead of creating new content. Trying to stand out in the group along with your competitors by creating new content may sometimes not be as impactful as updating an old post.
  3. Offer live, and offline SMS chat to customers. When potential customers visit the company website, they can easily connect with a representative to ask any questions or voice out their concerns regarding the products or services. Doing this boosts customer experience.
  4. Include well-searched keywords in articles. It is highly essential to appear as early on the search pages as possible since people barely visit the following pages. Companies can also try to reach out to top-ranked sites to get their content onto their website.
  5. Create webinars that can engage viewers.
  6. Post videos on video-sharing sites, such as Youtube.
  7. Write ebooks and blogs that are written professionally and full of exciting content.
  8. Make use of non-traditional social media sites, like Quora and Reddit. These are some examples of sites where people can freely talk about the brand.
  9. Focus on improving user experience on the website. They can do this by reducing page load speed and providing high-quality content.
  10. Include CTAs within the content to convert some of the traffic.

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