MARKETING STRATEGY

 Marketing strategies means an organization's strategy that combines all of its marketing goals into one comprehensive plan. A good marketing strategy should be drawn from market research and focus on the right product mix in order to achieve the maximum profit potential and sustain the business.  It tells you what to say, how to say it and who to say it to in order to make more sales. Because timing is critical, it will tell you when to say it, too. However, a smart Marketer must not forget the principles of Marketing Strategy for this Digital Age these principles are;

Clarify Business Objectives

There is so much going on in the marketing arena today, everybody is struggling to keep up. At the same time, every marketing professional feels pressure to be progressive and actively integrate emerging media into their marketing program. There is a tendency for marketers to try to create a one size fits all approach for a portfolio of brands or, alternatively, to want to create complicated models to formulate marketing objectives. However, most businesses can be adequately captured by evaluating just three metric these are awareness, sales and advocacy.

Use Innovation Teams to Identify, Evaluate and Activate Emerging Opportunities

Marketing executives are busy people. They need to actively monitor the marketplace, identify business opportunities, collaborate with product people and run promotional campaigns. It is unreasonable to expect them to keep up with the vast array of emerging technology and tactics, especially since most of it won’t pan out. Hence it is essential to have a team dedicated to identifying emerging opportunities, meeting with start-ups and running test-and-learn programs to evaluate their true potential. Of course, most of these will fail, but the few winners will more than make up for the losers.

Decouple Strategy and Innovation

In many organizations, strategy and innovation are often grouped together because they are both perceived as things that smart people do. Consequently, when firms approach innovation, they tend to put their best people on it, those who have shown a knack for getting results

However, strategy is different from fundamentally innovation. As noted above, a good strategy is one that achieves specific objectives. Innovation, however, focuses on creating something completely new and new things, unfortunately, tend to not work as well as standard solutions. The truth is that innovation is a messy business. So failure must be an option, which is why technologically focused venture capital firms expect the vast majority of their investments to fail.

 Build Open Assets in the Marketplace

The primary focus of marketing promotion used to be to create compelling advertising campaigns that would get the consumer’s attention and drive awareness. Once potential customers were aware of the product, direct sales and retail promotions could then close the deal.

Successful brands are becoming platforms and need to do more than just drive consumers to a purchase, they have to inspire them to participate. Focus groups are giving way to accelerators and creation to co-creation. In the digital age, brands are no longer mere corporate assets to be leveraged, but communities of belief and purpose. Effective promotional campaigns are less likely to lead to a sale and more likely to result in an Internet search, where consumers’ behavior can be tracked and then retargeted by competitors. Simply building awareness and walking away is more likely to enrich your competition than yourself
    Minzi Catherine
   BAPRM 42616