What is Marketing Strategy?
Marketing strategy helps organizations to focus their attention to complete resource utilization to increase sales and win over their competitors. Every company applies some kind of marketing strategies to maintain existing customers, attract potential customers and also to maintain and enhance their reputation in the market.
Plan your marketing strategy
When designing a marketing plan, first a marketing strategy is taken into consideration. The marketing plan consists of steps to be taken so as to attain success in the implementation of the marketing strategy chosen. Big projects involve selection of different strategies at different levels. Usually a strategy consists of well-sketched tactics. They are meant to meet the needs and finally reach marketing objectives. Each of the strategies has pre-calculated results because when a particular strategy is chosen at a particular level, it’s outcome becomes the goal of that particular level. If there is an absence of a well thought strategy in a marketing plan, it means it is supposedly lacking a good foundation. A reasonable marketing strategy should not only facilitate marketing goals, but also the action sequence of a campaign supporting the business drivers.
At regular time intervals you should analyze you marketing decisions. This is done with the help of strategic models and often the 3C’s model (Kenchi Ohmae) is considered for this purpose. To calculate the company’s strategic position, Ansoff matrix is used. The 3C’s model determines the factors, which leads to the success of a marketing campaign. There are three key parties involved in this model: the corporation, the customer and the competitors. The involvement of all the three key parties leads to positive results and this involvement is known as the 3C’s or strategic triangle.
The role of the corporation is to increase the strength of the company in the success critical areas, when compared to that of the competitor. The customer and his interest form the basis of any strategy. The competitor also plays a vital part. The competitor-based strategies are based on the functioning of business competitors like design and engineering, sales and servicing, and purchasing.
When making a marketing plan depending on some particular strategies known as mix strategies are used. The 4P’s model is used to calculate whether the plan is sticking to the strategies or not. The four P’s stand for product, price, place and promotion. Products are goods produced by the company for the purpose of selling them and earning profit. Price is the money paid for a product by the customer. The price is based on many factors like competition, market share, customer perception and product identity. The place where the product is sold can be either be a physical store or a store on the Internet. It is also known as distribution channel. To make the customer knowledgeable about a product, the marketer does promotion. It involves advertising, public relation and point of sale.
Types of marketing strategy
There are different types of marketing strategies based on some criteria.
Market dominance
Challenger, Leader and Follower are types of market dominance strategies. Market dominance strategies are used to dominate the market.
Porter generic strategies
Cost leadership, Market segmentation and Product differentiation are types of porter generic strategies. Porter generic strategies are built on strategic strength or competing abilities and strategic scope or market penetration.
Innovation strategies
Close followers (main stream), late follower (laggers) and Pioneers (early adopters) are types of innovation strategies. Innovation strategies are meant to trigger the rate of product development and model innovation. It helps the company to incorporate the latest technologies.
Growth strategies
Intensification, Diversification, Vertical integration and Horizontal integration are types of growth strategies. Growth strategies facilitate the growth of the organization.
Marketing warfare strategies
Marketing warfare strategies are conjunction of marketing strategies and military strategies.
A marketing strategy or a mix of them is chosen only after thorough market research. A marketer should always be ready to face any kind of situations.If the company strategy is changed in the middle, he/she should be able to perform another market research and choose and tune to marketing efforts to the proper strategy, within a short period of time. Doing this easily comes within time and experience.
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