Strategic Marketing Plans

3 key Steps for Creating a Strategic Marketing Plan

Strategic marketing provides an overarching framework that shapes what our organisation stands for and how we respond to our marketplace and customer expectations.

It ensures our responses are coordinated, present consistent messages, chime with our stakeholders and make sense to our target audiences. The problem for many of us is that strategic marketing is not intuitive and is time consuming – typically three months of brainstorming and negotiating across the upper echelons of the organisation.

So how can we ensure we develop a marketing strategy that is effective over multiple years, supported across departments and relevant to marketing tactics. Here are my top tips.

1.    Look back and learn

Begin by looking back and reviewing marketing activities to date, looking at the external and internal business environments and isolating the factors that have been critical to your organisation’s performance.

Initially you will collect a huge amount of data, then drill down, using a SWOT analysis, to identify key issues and challenges, your distinctive capabilities and no more than six key factors for success.

2.    Match objectives to stakeholders

Using the insights from the first step, the second step involves brainstorming all your audiences/ stakeholders, then segmenting and prioritising them according to your corporate mission and business objectives.

Most organisations don’t have the resources to reach out effectively to all our audiences; segmenting and prioritising allows us to agree about who we target.

Marketing objectives then fall out of this, stating which products and services you will be providing to which markets. They clarify how to take your audiences on the journey from where they are to where you want them to be.

3.    Balanced marketing mix

This third step fleshes out how to provide your products and services to target markets. Most useful is a portfolio matrix that maps the 4 P’s of the marketing mix – product, place, price, promotion – onto your marketing objectives.

Once you have this matrix each marketing team is able to develop and execute its own annual tactical action plans knowing they are all part of the same holistic strategy.

Learn tools, models and techniques for each of these three key steps in our advanced level course Developing & Implementing Strategic Marketing Plans. Over five days you will work through each of the steps in detail, creating the outline of your own strategic marketing plan relevant to your organisation.

To know more about this course, please visit: https://aztechtraining.com/course/developing-and-implementing-strategic-marketing-plans or contact +971 4 427 5400.

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