Your Marketing Strategy

Chapter 18: Strategy is Focus - Page 18.3

Your Marketing Strategy

Your marketing strategy normally involves target market focus, emphasis on certain services or media, or ways to position your company and your service uniquely.

Your marketing strategy depends a great deal on which market segments you've chosen as target market groups. You covered this in detail in Gathering Information: Know Your Market and Forecasting: Your Target Market. You may also have developed strategy using the pyramid or value proposition. Obviously, you want to make sure to preserve the same basic focus and themes.

Aside from the target market strategy, your marketing strategy might also include the positioning statement, pricing, promotion, and whatever else you want to add. You might also want to look at media strategy, business development, or other factors. Strategy is creative, and hard to predict. Some of the material below will give you more ideas.

Positioning Tactics

Positioning statements can be a good way to define your marketing strategy. The positioning statements should focus on the most important target market, that market's most important market need, how your product meets that need, what the main competition is, and how your product is better than the competition.

Consider this simple template:

For [target market description] who [target market need], [this product] [how it meets the need]. Unlike [key competition], it [most important distinguishing feature].

For example, the positioning statement for the original Business Plan Pro®, was: "For the businessperson who is starting a new company, launching new products or seeking funding or partners, Business Plan Pro® is software that produces professional business plans quickly and easily. Unlike [name omitted], Business Plan Pro® does a real business plan, with real insights, not just cookie-cutter fill-in-the-blanks templates."

Pricing Tactics

You ought to provide detail on product pricing, and relate pricing to strategy. Pricing is also supposed to be intimately related to the positioning statement in the previous topic, since pricing is probably the most important factor in product positioning. Your value proposition, for example, will normally include implications about relative pricing, and therefore, you should check whether your detailed product-by-product pricing matches the implied pricing in the value proposition.

Promotion Tactics

Think of promotion in a broader sense than simply sales promotion, including the whole range of advertising, public relations, events, direct mail, seminars, and sales literature.

How will you spread the word about your business to your future customers?

Do you look for expensive ads in mass media, or targeted marketing in specialized publications, or even more targeted, with direct mail?
Do you have a way to leverage the news media, or reviewers?
Do you advertise more effectively through public relations events, trade shows, newspaper, or radio?
What about telemarketing, the World Wide Web, or even multilevel marketing?

Are you satisfied with how this is working for you now, or is it a problem area that needs to be addressed? Are you meeting your needs, and in line with your opportunities?

How does your promotion strategy fit with the rest of your strategy? Check for alignment between what you say here and what you say in your strategy pyramid, and your value proposition. As you described market trends and target market segments, did you see ways to improve your promotion strategy?

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