What To Consider When Developing A Marketing Strategy

Developing a marketing strategy can be an overwhelming task, as it is often hard to know where to start. A good marketing model to use, which helps generate effective and considered marketing plans is the SOSTAC model. Ensuring you have the correct strategy is vital to help generate growth, sales and leads. The SOSTAC model helps identify strengths and weaknesses and to then reconsider your targeting, positioning and segmentation. 

Situational Analysis: 

When starting to develop a marketing strategy, before anything else, the most important thing is understanding where the business and brand is currently. To do this, a situational analysis would be beneficial. This is looking at both internal and external factors that can affect the brand:

• Customer analysis

• Competitor analysis

• Company analysis ( strengths and weaknesses)

• External Analysis 

• Look at the following and how it affects the business: Political, Economic, Social, Technological,Environmental and Legal.

There are many different academic models which can guide and help you with your situational analysis, such as Porter’s 5 forces, SWOT analysis and the 5 C’s analysis. The key is to have as much understanding as possible about the company and the customer. This way you can identify areas of improvements and how to best recognise the necessary objectives of the future marketing strategy and campaign. 

Objectives: 

After looking at where the company currently is with the situational analysis, it’s best to identify objectives which will help solve or fix the current problems within the company. Whether that's the customer perception or not reaching financial targets. Setting objectives is all about where you want to be as a company and the best way to do this is setting SMART objectives. In other words they need to be: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound.

Strategy: 

Strategy is all about clarifying your positioning, segmentation, target market, customer experience and any partnerships. This is a small yet crucial step in the development of a marketing strategy, the process and strategy of how you are going to achieve your objectives and solve the identified problems is what makes a marketing plan work or not. 

Tactics: 

The next thing to consider in developing a marketing strategy is looking how your strategy is going to look creatively in a campaign. You need to consider how you are going to achieve your Targeting, positioning and segmentation. What marketing channels are you going to use? How are you going to communicate this to your customers? Consider your tactics in as much detail as you can, to ensure it is seamlessly implemented. 

Actions:

The implementation of the strategy is important in understanding the timeline of your strategy and the different deadlines necessary throughout the process. To achieve this it is best to create a Gantt chart or a spreadsheet calendar to identify what will be done on each day to help, reach, act, convert and engage your customer.

Control: 

To ensure you achieve your objectives and analyse what went well and what doesn't, it is important to have a spreadsheet to track the data and success of the strategy. 

If you would like any guidance or advice on developing your marketing strategy and how to identify or even develop a solution to your current business problems, Method Marketing is here to help. Contact us on, 01252 265166 or email hello@methodmarketing.org.uk and we will be happy to assist you.