What is Marketing Strategy — and Why Do We Need It?

A marketing strategy is a coherent, high-level yet all-encompassing plan that addresses your business environment, competition, the market needs, how you acquire and maintain customers, and continually deliver value to them. In the most concrete terms, a marketing strategy is a set of plans and processes that drive sales of your product or service. It’s the roadmap that leads to customers and lasting revenues.

People often confuse a marketing strategy and a marketing plan. In fact, it’s common to find a marketing strategy and a marketing plan blended together. However, the line between the two is anything but blurry. A marketing strategy covers the big picture of what a business offers — the essence of the business and how it’s presented to customers and potential customers. The plan focuses on how the business will get across the key message — the creative, the vehicles, the timing, and so forth, i.e. it’s the mechanics with which we realize our strategy.

It’s also important to note that the marketing strategy should unfold well before the inception of a product or service. A mistake that all too many early stage businesses make is to go through the laborious process of developing a product, or taking it to the so-called ‘proof of concept’ stage, and only then start testing their product and its reception in the marketplace. 

The infamous idea from the dot-com bubble in the late nineties, ‘Build it and they will come,” is unfortunately still very much in play today. So is the concept of ‘stealth mode’, i.e. hiding your business concept from everyone, before finally launching it. This is a surefire way of achieving a terrible product-market fit. 

What Marketing Strategy Isn’t

Marketing does not equal advertising. That’s right: marketing doesn’t just entail maintaining a presence in certain media channels. In fact, your marketing strategy can be centered on minimizing advertising expenditures. People all too often conflate marketing strategy with advertising tactics. (For example, retargeting is a marketing tactic and not a strategy).

Marketing has also been defined as an attempt to influence behavior, but this is a somewhat Machiavellian interpretation. Successful marketing strategists understand behavior; they discover needs, wants and preferences and satisfy them with useful and relevant solutions and value. Responding to those needs does not just entail telling a story to a prospective customer; it entails conceiving a relevant solution, conveying the solution and delivering it to the customer. All of these are elements of marketing.

Finally, many marketers will define marketing as the science of creating a competitive advantage. While creating a competitive advantage is a typical challenge in a mature and crowded marketplace, it does not apply quite as strictly to the current digital economy — and even less so to truly novel start-ups. How so? Simply because there are many other equally important challenges, as we’ll soon find out.

Why Do We Need Strategy?

What happens without one? Chaos. The marketing function becomes a mad scurry for hacks, scattered tactics and ‘optimizing’ things that ultimately do not matter to the business.

An explicit strategy is an absolute necessity in today’s rapidly changing digital business environment. You need a sense of direction that unifies everyone in the organization. At the most fundamental level, businesses need customers. Customers generate revenue, and let’s face it: revenue solves virtually all business problems. A marketing strategy outlines how we are going to generate revenues by acquiring new customers or release more revenue from our existing customer base. 

Therefore, the final output of any successful marketing strategy is revenue. This takes place by defining the top line strategy, objectives, processes and goals and executing towards them.

Strategy and Action

Marketing strategy, as with the field of strategy itself, addresses the transformation of analysis into action. A marketing strategy is worthless unless it can be proven to be effective. This is why every marketing strategist should understand the fundamentals versed in marketing tactics, and be able to evaluate the execution of their proposed strategy every step of the way.

The Marketing Strategy Process

As we stated earlier, a marketing strategy is not a marketing plan; it’s more of a process; and an evolutionary one. The macro economy will change, market conditions will change, the competitive environment will change, and your business must change with it. ‘Perfecting’ a strategy makes very little sense, because as everything around you is constantly shifting, your strategy will have to evolve as well.

That’s not to say that you’ll be reassessing your strategy on a daily basis, but it does mean that you’ll be validating your core assumptions as new data emerges. If the basic facts change, you change. Strategy formulation is an ever-evolving, scientific process, whereby you:

  1. Start with a hypothesis
  2. Move towards action and implementation
  3. Validate the findings against your initial assumptions

Some common questions you will answer throughout this process are:

  1. Do consumers respond to my messages the way we thought, and are they purchasing our product within the timeframes we had laid out?
  2. Can we generate the awareness at the scale we had envisioned?
  3. Can we reach our target audiences at the price point we forecast?
  4. Do certain demographics behave as we assumed?

Notice that most of the factors involved with these questions can be quantified in some way, and this is particularly true in the digital space. Successful marketers are data driven, methodical and goal-oriented wherever possible, and they approach marketing as a “hard science.”

Author: Lars

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