Jeff I. Richards once said, “Creative without strategy is called art. Creative with strategy is called advertising.” The main difference between marketing and strategic marketing is how you take something already great on its own to make it even better. Here are things you need to know about strategic marketing and how to weaponize it to boost your business.
Why You Need Strategic Marketing?
Businesses need to adapt at rapid speeds to new information and changing economic conditions in today’s world. Market conditions are constantly shifting as new trends and technologies emerge. Your strategic planning can effectively mitigate some of your most significant challenges when generating traffic into leads to increase profits.
What Strategic Marketing Entails
A strategic marketing plan needs to integrate selected targeting tactics to drive leads and sales. Your strategy needs to prioritize target industries, audiences, and regions to ensure that your advertising efforts reach the right people. You need to compile goals and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to gather the most critical metrics to determine success. You will also need to choose the right platform and tools to execute your brand’s values across all your designs and web content. Finally, your targeted campaigns should focus on engagement, awareness, nurturing, and conversion to propel sales.
Identify Your Target Market
Whether you are a top software company or a local auto shop, your marketing activities only become strategic if you know your audience well. Any product or service you advertise should fulfill a need to solve a problem for your target market. For instance, if you are selling used cars, you need to identify who will buy these types of vehicles, how they will benefit from them, and why they should choose your brand.
Analyze Your Competitors
Unless you are selling tourism packages to the moon, your business does not exist in a bubble. You will have other brands to compete with and will need to fine-tune a unique approach to stand apart from the crowd to get a customer’s attention. Strategic marketing helps conduct valuable competitor analysis to stay on top of what they are doing, so you can do it better.
The insights you need to gather are where your competition is spending their advertising budget, where they are positioned in the market compared to your brand, and what types of clients they are attracting. This information is critical to help you plan the future of your business to avoid getting lost and unheard in all that competitive noise.
Brand Positioning and Tactics
This is a crucial element that separates strategic marketing from your basic tactics to help achieve your overall business goals more successfully. Your marketing budget needs to get the right word out to your target audience by engaging them on the best channels as you efficiently move down the sales funnel.
Whether you invest in a blog, social media advertising, radio, or print, you should outline specific tactics to avoid wasting the marketing budget. This should include going over the most effective use of your budget, branding materials you need, which digital platforms get you closest to your target customers, how to leverage existing clients to attract new ones, and how your tactics can be interlinked to improve performance.
For example, if you are selling sneakers for Gen Z, you will want to be on TikTok and YouTube instead of LinkedIn. This can save time and money instead of signing up and investing in every platform. Once you have mastered these tactics, you will see all your hard work pay off by witnessing the impact on your bottom line compared to traditional marketing that lacked strategic direction.
