Strategic Marketing Guide 101: What It Is & How to Develop It

Strategic marketing is a long-term approach to planning and executing marketing campaigns that align with a company’s overall business goals and objectives. It involves taking a data-driven, customer-centric approach to marketing, building strong customer relationships, and creating tailored messaging and campaigns that resonate with their needs and preferences.
Learn how tactical planning can break down big goals into smaller, more manageable components. Examples include content plans and team building. A strong strategy is crucial for successful marketing campaigns, with key elements including target audience identification and competitor analysis. Southwest Airlines’ successful strategy shows the importance of understanding the difference between planning and strategy in business. To improve marketing efforts, consider education or community marketing, contests, entertainment strategies that align with your brand tone, tapping into customer references, or joining referral networking organizations to generate leads.
What Is Tactical Planning and Why Is It Important?
- The video is about tactical planning.
- Tactical planning breaks down strategic plans into short-term plans.
- With clear steps, achieving goals can be easier and more encouraging.
- Tactical planning helps break down big goals into smaller and more manageable components.
- Examples of tactical planning include content plan, team building, and content production and distribution.
- Breaking down big goals into individual components are tactical planning step.
- Each tactical goal can be broken down further into projects and actionable that need to be worked on by the team.
- Team building involves hiring individuals and training them for their new responsibilities.
- The video briefly summarizes what tactical planning is and how to use it effectively for personal or business goals.
How to Develop a Tactical Marketing Plan: Template
- A marketer needs both strategic and tactical plans to succeed.
- Strategic marketing focuses on the big picture, while tactical marketing puts action behind the plan.
- A tactical marketing plan is a set of campaigns and initiatives that help achieve strategic goals.
- The plan should be structured with larger objectives, such as increasing brand awareness or boosting customer retention.
- Key pathways to meet these objectives should be considered, such as targeting new market segments to increase leads.
- Tools and tactics should be laid out for each strategy, such as launching a new landing page or running paid social media ads.
- TeamGantt offers a free online template for creating and tracking a tactical marketing plan.
- The Gantt chart lets users see when tasks will be executed and how changes affect the timeline.
- Collaboration is easy with TeamGantt’s discussion feature and tagging system for notifications.
- The calendar view makes it easy to evaluate task stacking on any particular day, week, or month, while the list view simplifies checking off tasks during meetings.
Strategic Marketing vs Tactical Marketing: What’s the Difference?
- The video discusses the difference between strategic and tactical marketing.
- Many assume marketing is about tactics like placing ads or attending trade shows.
- However, the strategic side of marketing – what you say, how you say it, and who you say it to – is often more important than the medium used to deliver the message.
- Tactical marketing involves executing a plan by generating leads, creating tools, and implementing follow-up systems.
- Strategic marketing involves understanding customers’ needs and values to create effective messaging.
- Understanding why customers buy is crucial for developing an effective strategy.
- Simply putting a message in an appropriate medium is enough if it resonates with the target audience’s values.
- Strategic marketing is long-term, while tactical marketing is short-term and focused on specific tasks like price discounting or segmentation.
- The table illustrates key differences between strategic and tactical marketing, including a time frame, focus, key tasks, and information.
Marketing Strategy VS Marketing Tactics (What’s The Difference?)
- The video discusses important marketing advice that has yet to be discussed.
- Some businesses are successful, while others need help attracting clients and customers.
- Success is not solely based on the tools or tactics used but on the underlying strategy guiding them.
- Strategy is more important than tactics in building a profitable business.
- Chess is an analogy for how strategies trump tactics in business and marketing.
- Many marketers focus too much on tactics and hacks instead of developing a solid strategy first.
- A strong strategy includes defining your target market, creating a clear offer and messaging, and developing a unique value proposition.
- Tactics are specific actions taken to reach and engage with your target market where they are present online.
- Tools refer to resources used to implement tactics and fulfill your overall strategy.
- Successful marketing campaigns follow the sequence of strategy, tactics, and tools for maximum impact and profitability.
Strategic Marketing Plan Example & Template
- A strategic marketing plan is essential for achieving business goals.
- It maps annual marketing goals to overall business objectives and outlines how the yearly marketing budget will be spent.
- A good marketing plan clearly outlines the target market, key competitors, major goals, key results, and resource allocation.
- Marketing strategy details how specific tactics will be executed with a goal in mind (e.g., email or social media campaign).
- Six important marketing plan elements include company-wide strategy alignment, SWOT analysis, research on industry trends and sub-industries served by the company, target audience identification, and competitor analysis.
- Strategic marketing goals should support company-wide objectives and establish a timeline using Gantt charts to monitor progress.
- Metrics are used to measure success based on market research data that defines specific KPIs (key performance indicators).
- Marketing channels are chosen based on the expected ROI for each channel’s purpose in supporting overall strategy/business goals.
- Budgeting is crucial for maximizing ROI while minimizing wasted spend; ongoing expenses must be accounted for, as well as any new costs expected during the year, such as hiring freelance workers or third-party agencies needed to complete work tasks/projects outlined in the plan.
- Templates can help structure your strategic marketing plans, including text documents like Google Docs templates or visual timelines like Gantt chart templates available through TeamGantt, which also offers collaboration features such as discussion threads within task comments sections where stakeholders can share documents/chat directly from their project view/export PDFs/share view-only links so everyone stays informed about the progress made towards meeting set targets/goals throughout implementation phases of campaigns/initiatives outlined in these plans.
Strategic Vs. Tactical Marketing (with Marketing Tips)
- The video is about the difference between strategic and tactical marketing.
- Marketing managers must write both a strategic plan and a tactical one.
- It’s important to understand the difference between the two plans.
- There’s no harm in wrapping the two documents together, but ensure you have both halves in the same document.
- Strategic marketing is about solving a problem for your customer and explaining how your product or service solves that problem.
- Tactical marketing is about communicating your point of differentiation to customers through various channels such as social media, websites, or printed collateral.
- The tactical plan should be separate from the strategic plan or at least a separate part of it.
- Understanding these differences can help improve overall marketing efforts.
- Both plans are necessary for successful marketing campaigns.
Strategy vs. Planning: A Plan Is Not a Strategy
- Planning and strategy are different.
- Strategic planning in business often needs a coherent strategy.
- A strategy is an integrative set of choices that positions a company to win on a playing field of their choice.
- The strategy involves specifying an outcome, which may include customers wanting your product or service enough to make the profitability you desire.
- Planning typically involves resources spent by the company, while strategy specifies competitive outcomes customers desire.
- Southwest Airlines had a successful strategy for winning against competitors who were only focused on participating in the market rather than winning it.
- To escape the comfort trap of planning without a clear strategy, managers must accept that there will be angst associated with developing and implementing one.
- The logic behind a company’s chosen strategy should be laid out so that it can be tweaked based on how well it aligns with reality over time.
- Strategies should be simple; they should ideally fit onto one page outlining where and how to win, what capabilities are needed, what management systems are required, and what goal/aspiration is being pursued.
- The strategy gives companies the best chance of winning compared to just planning alone.
6 Effective Marketing Strategies for Any Business in 2023
- Attention spans are decreasing, making marketing more challenging.
- Education marketing is a great way to establish customer credibility by providing solutions and insights into your expertise.
- Community marketing involves bringing people who resonate with your content into a closed group to build meaningful relationships through events, podcasts, talk shows, meetups, etc.
- Contests are a fun way of engaging customers and increasing participation with your brand or product.
- Entertainment can be used as a strategy to grab attention but should align with the tone of your brand.
- Tapping into customer references is an untapped marketing strategy that can generate high-probability leads for products or services.
- Joining business referral networking organizations can help leverage their networks for generating leads and inquiries for products or services.
- A business model must be sustainable before leveraging marketing strategies for growth.
- The six strategies mentioned above are evergreen and bound to work in 2023
Marketing strategies are typically developed through market research, including customer surveys, focus groups, and competitor analysis, to gain insights into customer behavior, preferences, and pain points. This information establishes marketing goals and objectives, and a plan is developed to achieve them. This may include a mix of tactics, such as social media advertising, email marketing, search engine optimization, and content marketing, tailored to specific audiences and channels.
Effective strategic marketing requires a deep understanding of the customer, the market, and the competitive landscape. It also requires strong leadership, clear communication, and ongoing monitoring and evaluation to ensure that the marketing strategy is aligned with the business and continues to deliver results.