Strategic marketing is the medium and long term aspect of marketing, which uses different market analysis techniques to identify opportunities that allow a company to grow and stand out from its customers, always keeping the needs of the user in mind.
Instead of manufacturing products and services and then thinking about how to sell them to users, strategic marketing first analyses the market situation, the competition and consumers, and then develops products and services based on the niches detected.
what are the functions of strategic marketing?
The main functions of strategic marketing are:
-Analysing new consumer habits and trends.
-Studying competitors.
-Observing the evolution of demand.
-Detecting new customer needs.
-Studying market opportunities and threats.
-Create a sustainable competitive advantage.
-Study our capacities to adapt the company to the market.
-Define the marketing strategy to achieve the objectives set by the company.
how to draw up a strategic marketing plan to help my company?
- study the market, from a generic analysis of how the world economy is doing to a study of how the economy is doing in your sector specifically. You have to find out what products similar to yours exist, who is producing them, how successful they are in their companies, whether it would be convenient for you to create them too..
- segment your audience: At this point we must define who our buyer persona is, as it is very important to know who we are targeting, what their needs are, their desires, their problems, etc. Segmenting campaigns will help us to reach our potential customers in a much more personalised and direct way .
- study the competition: Going deeper into this aspect can bring us valuable information to use in our strategy. We need to know everything we can about our direct competition, from their prices and products to the positioning they have in the different search engines so that we can end up surpassing them in sales.
- define your strategy. There are many strategies that we can choose from once we have all the above points clear. Here are some examples of them.
Examples of strategic marketing strategies
- Positioning strategy: Within this type of strategy what we are going to do is to analyse which is the most convenient positioning for us depending on our sector or our conditions analysed previously. We are not only talking about the positioning within the different search engines, it also consists of positioning ourselves in the mind of the consumer.
- Loyalty strategy: This strategy is more consolidated in the long term because it seeks to convert customers who have already purchased a product or service into regular customers. This is quite beneficial, especially because in a marketing strategy it is much cheaper to retain existing customers than to get new ones.
- Growth strategy: This strategy is based on looking for ways in which the company can expand, for example by internationalising the brand.
- Product strategy: In this strategy, the aim is to define the most suitable products and launch them on the market with the best possible characteristics and profitability.
- Segmentation strategy: This strategy is based on dividing the market into different groups with similar needs in order to offer them a simple solution adapted to each of them. This strategy helps us to discover new markets and adapt our offer to our buyer persona.
- Functional strategy: This strategy will help us to make decisions related to the 4Ps of the marketing mix.
Examples of companies that apply strategic marketing
1. Swatch: Since the Second World War, Switzerland had always been a leader in the quality watch industry. But in the early 80's, Switzerland suffered one of the biggest crises in its history with a drop in sales of quality watches. Two of the main factors that affected the industry were aspects related to new buying habits of customers and the irruption of Asian watches (Japan and Hong Kong) of low cost and good quality, becoming a commercial success.
Concerned about the loss of market share, the Swiss manufacturers analysed what was happening in the watch market and what the customers' expectations were. Thanks to strategic marketing, they created a new marketing strategy to adapt it to a new need they had detected.
Asian digital watches were low cost but had a sloppy design, all black, dark and all looked similar to each other. The new marketing strategy would be to continue with the luxury and quality watch brands so deeply rooted in Switzerland. But on the other hand they would follow a strategy of launching new products to compete with oriental watches. These new Swiss watches would be affordable and would have innovative, attractive designs and bright colours to compete with the sad image of Asian watches.
if you still don't have a strategic marketing plan, choose the best strategy, get to work and develop this type of Inbound Marketing to the maximum.
