1. Establish a starting point
In any strategic marketing plan, it’s important to have a good grasp of where your company is, so you can properly chart a course to get to where you need to be. This is where the SWOT analysis comes into play—the tried and true method of identifying your team’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats will help anchor and narrow down the relevant options you can take as you move through the strategic marketing planning process. It’s also worth bringing your company vision and mission statements to the table, to better organize the inputs of the SWOT analysis.
2. Understand your market
After identifying your starting position, it’s time to picture how this relates to the rest of the market—this includes both your competitors, as well as your customers.
With competitors, it helps to find out where your experience is similar and different from theirs. Are they capitalizing on opportunities you have yet to explore? Are their experiences apparent, or are external threats clearly impacting their business? Invest time into finding out how companies have approached similar problems to yours, or what strategies benefited them when conducting similar marketing activities.
For customers, surveys and studies to measure your current performance, as well as trends in the market, can give you a huge advantage in the later steps. Consumer demand is a good constraint to take into account when building project plans, as you want to offer services, solutions, and messaging that address these needs as directly and as efficiently as possible.
3. Outline high-level objectives
After establishing your position against market trends and needs, you can start identifying key objectives to help bridge that gap. Marketing is no stranger to the benefits of defining SMART goals—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound objectives not only better inform your plans, they also encourage stakeholder buy-in, which will lead to efficiency in the decision-making process.
4. Develop relevant marketing plans
Arming yourself with a clear position, an understanding of your market and SMART goals provide the biggest payoff once you start building specific projects to reach your target market. With a growing list of ways to market your business, use this information to filter out relevant options. You can use this great set of guidelines to follow here with the 4 P’s of marketing.
5. Prepare to evaluate your work
With the speed at which industries grow and change, it’s important to arm your strategy with a way to adapt to emerging needs and problems as fast as possible. To do this, build a way to measure your progress and performance, particularly ones that relate to your established objectives. From there, set a regular cadence at which performance is measured, which your team can use to make necessary changes to the strategy.
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