what is strategic marketing and what is it for?

Since the advent of inbound marketing, the most important thing is to focus your strategy on the customer, who is the one who will truly bring a benefit to your business, so it is necessary to continue reinventing and creating new strategies that focus on the customer and meet their needs. In this post we will explain what strategic marketing is and what it will serve us within our strategy.

what is strategic marketing?

Strategic marketing is focused on the medium and long term, it uses a series of techniques to analyse the market in order to detect opportunities that make the company grow and stand out from its consumers, this is achieved by detecting the needs of users and the opportunities that our company has to satisfy them. The idea of strategic marketing is based on finding the needs of consumers in order to create products or services that are really what they are looking for or need.

Operational marketing

We have another type of marketing that is in contrast to strategic marketing, this is operational marketing, which, unlike strategic marketing, is based on the short term and wants to put into action strategies that we have already defined previously. Within this we would not include market analysis, but rather the preparation of budgets or the creation of different marketing actions that we can carry out to improve our strategy.

how to elaborate a strategic marketing plan?

Now that we know what strategic marketing is and how it differs from operational marketing, let's take a step-by-step look at how we can create a good plan and put it into action:

1. Study the market
   Launching your products or services to the market without first analysing how it is is is a real folly, you have to see what is the panorama that exists at that moment. From a generic analysis of how the economy is generally to a study of how the economy is in your sector specifically. You have to look for what products similar to yours exist and who produces them, the success they are having and if it is convenient for you to create them too. And it is not only important to look for products that already exist, it is also very beneficial for our strategy to analyse what products do not exist, and with them we will have all the information of those unmet needs that our customers have.
   
   
2. Segment your audience
   

   At this point we have to define who our buyer persona is, it is very important to know who we are targeting, what are their needs, their desires, and their problems. In short, their pain points, along with this we also have all their data, how they behave, psychodemographic characteristics, etc, and with all this information we can segment our audience, why? To have clearer their needs and to direct our content to different sectors, thus making a much more specific content and targeted to a particular sector. Segmenting campaigns will help us to reach a much more personalized and direct way to our potential customers.

3. Study the competition
   Competition is always another factor to analyse in market research, even one of the most important points because depending on how strong our competition is we will be more or less successful. Going deeper into this aspect of the analysis can bring us valuable information to use in our strategy. We need to know everything about our direct competition, from their prices and products to the positioning they have in the different search engines. Thanks to these we can optimise our strategy to distinguish ourselves from them and improve the offer they have in the market.
   
   
4. Define your strategy
   There are many strategies that we can choose once we have all the above points clear. With all this information in our hands we have to be able to choose the best strategy to meet all our objectives.

Examples of strategies

If even with all the information in your hands you are still not clear about which strategy to choose, we bring you a series of examples so that you do not have any doubts.

• Positioning strategy: Within this strategy, what we are going to do is to analyse which is the most convenient positioning for us depending on our sector or our previously analysed conditions. And how to achieve it. We are not only talking about positioning within the different search engines, it also consists of positioning ourselves in the mind of the consumer. If consumers have a good mental image of our brand, we will have a great part of the way done.
  
  
• Loyalty strategy: This strategy is consolidated more in the long term, it seeks that customers who have already purchased a product or service become regular customers, this is something very beneficial, especially because in a marketing strategy, it is much cheaper to retain existing customers than to get new customers. This helps us to create relationships with customers that are more durable and profitable.
  
  
• Growth strategy: This strategy is based on looking for ways in which the company can expand, we can also say that it is a company dedicated to the long term, this can be done by opening up to other audiences, or even 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 and being able to offer them a simple solution adapted to each of them. This strategy helps us to discover new markets and to 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: product, price, communication and distribution. With this strategy we must translate these 4Ps into concrete actions that are coherent with each other.

In conclusion, strategic marketing, as opposed to technical marketing, consists of carrying out a market study that helps to find out what the needs of our target public are. You still don't have a strategic marketing plan? Choose the best strategy and follow step by step how to create the plan. Don't wait any longer!