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GILL Solutions

Growing your business..Should be Strategic!

Nov 21 2017

9 Key Elements of a Successful Strategic Marketing Plan

The marketplace in most industries has grown very competitive over the years. To dominate in your industry,  you need a detailed and refined strategic marketing plan.

What Is a Strategic Marketing Plan?

A strategic marketing plan is a detailed framework. It’s used to prepare a company for a targeted and systematic application of its marketing efforts. Such plans are very precise and are developed using data sourced from and for your industry, for better targeting.

Strategic Marketing Plan

When mapped out effectively, your strategic marketing plan will provide growth in conversion by eliminating any initiative that hasn’t proven beneficial for your business.

When preparing an effective strategic marketing plan for your company brand there are several components that must be considered.

Let’s take a look now at 9 of the Key Elements of a Successful Strategic Marketing Plan.

Analysis of current market position.

Sales and analytics reports from the past year should be reviewed to evaluate your business brand’s position in the market. They will also reveal the marketing plans that worked as expected, and those that underperformed.

Measurement is key, and often underutilized. It’s important that you’re gathering the right data to be measured, in order to make solid marketing and business decisions. You should be relying heavily on your Google Analytics, to gather the necessary data.

Doing this will help to evaluate the success of marketing efforts against financial results gathered.

This is one of the best ways to discover your strength and weaknesses. Allowing you to clearly identify what parts of your business you need to keep promoting, and what parts need to be worked on.

Although this is ideal, unfortunately for many businesses, this data is not systematically recorded and reviewed, so can be limiting in its guidance. Lack of measurement is one of the reasons why your marketing struggles to achieve the results you aim for .

Market Opportunities

There’s always a new opportunity for you to make sales, but they need to be identified first.

Your marketing team should engage themselves in extensive buyer research . Identifying emerging and existing customer groups that can be the focus of your marketing efforts. This will help determine what type of marketing efforts will be applied to each group, the expected length of the sales process, and their overall customer lifetime value.

Marketing resources are usually limited, and expending them on the wrong leads will bring in poor ROI.

Goals, Mission and Vision

Every action taken to promote a business should reflect their mission and vision. These are integral parts of a business as they are the building blocks of the brand’s image.

And the goals of any business are usually centred around growth. Those goals will serve as a driving force for implementing any strategic marketing plan.

Goals are not always big, long-term aims. You can also set small goals (like conversion goals) to give your team a clear view of what you’re all working towards.

Interest of Stakeholders and Shareholders

More people than just the owners of a business have a vested interest in the success of the said business.

Your stakeholders, which includes your customers, employees, boards, industry, targeted public, and even government organizations, should be considered when developing your strategic marketing plan.

Detailed Description of Target Market

Your marketing team should be able to identify the groups of people who have needs that your products and services can solve. They can do this by conducting market and customer research that will provide the needed information when preparing marketing plans.

This information could include:

  • their demands in the market,
  • an insight into their buying decision process,
  • their demographics,
  • and even their preferences on a wide number of things.

Potential customers are drawn to your company and brand when they believe that you understand them. They also want to know that you can provide the solution to their needs and challenges.

Your overview of the market should also cover existing customers. This will supplement your understanding of their needs, and keep them loyal to the brand.

Use of Media

The media is a critical tool in your marketing plan. It provides an opportunity for direct communication between you and your potential and existing customers.

Media, in this case, includes both traditional and digital media options.

The media options that take a majority of your marketing efforts should be those that are largely common among your target audience. Strategic marketing is focused on being precise with targeting your ideal audience. Meaning that every marketing effort to be taken, including traditional and online media efforts, should align directly with the groups of people you are trying to reach.

Timeline for Implementation

Timeline for implementation doesn’t just cover the period the marketing strategy will be active. But also includes all actions geared towards it.

For example:  If a video is needed for a campaign, the person or team in charge should project a turnaround time. This will keep everyone accountable. It also helps your marketing team create an overview of the length of time needed to create and implement your marketing plan.

There are situations where people envision a great marketing plan, but forget to factor in how much time will be needed to execute the plan. The results are usually half-baked efforts, or abandonment when the process feels rushed and unproductive. A specific amount of time should also be allowed for correcting errors, in a situation where one or a few are detected.

Expected Risks

Whenever money, time and other resources are invested in a new marketing effort, there’s always the knowledge that it might not produce the expected results.

With strategic marketing, risks are not just expected, they are also planned for. A brand cannot completely insulate itself from mishaps, but it can be proactive about fixing them as quickly as possible.

Your brand should have a practical step-by-step guide. Documented guidelines help employees when they get into situations that can cause them or your company potential harm. This will help them to react immediately and prevent further damage, rather than looking around helplessly for someone who can provide direction.

Budget Being Allocated

Any and all expenditures required to execute your marketing strategy should be considered when developing your plan.

A strict budget should be laid out for all departments to see. However, not all departments in a company are allocated equal resources, that’s okay – that’s how it works. As long as each department knows what their allocated budget is, and works within it, then you’re on the right track.

Note: Creativity is sometimes needed to effectively manage funds provided. Producing solid growth results can often mean surpass the resources that were made available. That’s when you need to take a step back and re-evaluate to see where you can shuffle funds (so as not to go over budget completely).

If your strategic marketing plan is implemented effectively, your company will grow its market share in your industry. Which also means a growth in revenue and profit.

Once your plan is in place, you should continue to monitor it closely. You’ll want to identify errors or initiatives that are not functioning as expected and fix them as quickly as possible.

Listen; creating and implementing a strategic marketing plan isn’t always easy. You’re going to make mistakes, and that’s okay. As long as you identify early on why your marketing strategy isn’t working , and take the necessary steps to get back on track.

Have we missed something? Let us know in the comments below, the components you use in developing your strategic marketing plan.

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About George Gill

George Gill is the founder of GILL Solutions. He lives in Peterborough Canada, and is an avid learner, passionate trainer and speaker. For over 20+ years, he's helped businesses implement growth strategies and systems to consistently out perform their expectations. Measurement is always key!

GILL Solutions Management 7901 4th St. N STE 4155 St. Petersburg, FL 33702

GILL Solutions Management 3080 Yonge Street, Suite 6060 Toronto, Ontario M4N-3N1

GILL Solutions Management P.O. Box 30024 RPO Chemong Peterborough, Ontario, K9H 7R4

basic elements of strategic marketing planning

What is Strategic Marketing Planning? A Step-by-Step Guide

In today’s fiercely competitive business environment, understanding what is strategic marketing planning and creating a successful plan is crucial to achieving growth, profitability, and long-term sustainability.

This step-by-step guide will not only help you comprehend the importance of what is strategic marketing planning but also provide essential insights on how to develop and implement a well-rounded marketing strategy to stay ahead of the competition.

Short Summary

  • Strategic marketing planning is a systematic approach to achieving business objectives and optimizing resources.
  • Key components include market research, target audience identification, objective setting & utilization of the 4 Ps of marketing.
  • The process involves effective execution & monitoring with regular reviews for successful results and continuous improvement.

Understanding Strategic Marketing Planning

Strategic marketing planning is a systematic approach that our agency follows to reach predetermined marketing objectives. It provides the essential foundation, guidelines, and steps to achieve those objectives. Strategic planning plays a pivotal role in optimizing marketing efforts and achieving better results, ultimately leading to business growth and profitability.

Definition and significance

Strategic marketing planning is defined as a systematic approach to achieving marketing goals through the analysis, segmentation, and identification of competitive advantages. Efficient marketing operations are crucial for the successful strategic marketing implementation of the successful strategic marketing plan. By employing successful strategic marketing planning , businesses can ensure that their marketing plan is well-executed and delivers the desired results.

Crafting a successful marketing strategy primarily emphasizes the marketing mix, which consists of the following:

Incorporating price into a strategic marketing plan is essential to guarantee that the value of the product is justified to prospective customers.

Key components

The essential elements of strategic marketing planning include:

  • Market research
  • Identification of the target audience
  • Establishment of objectives
  • Formulation of the marketing mix
  • Assessment of performance

A SWOT analysis is a tool used to evaluate a company’s internal strengths and weaknesses in comparison to external opportunities and threats.

Defining the ideal customer profile is crucial in creating efficient marketing communication strategies, conserving time and resources by concentrating on the requirements of the current consumer, and serving as the foundation of any marketing campaign.

The Strategic Marketing Planning Process

The strategic marketing planning process is a comprehensive approach to achieving business objectives by conducting market research, identifying the target audience, and setting marketing goals that align with overall business objectives. This process enables marketers to gain an understanding of the business’s current standing and craft suitable marketing strategies, optimizing marketing efforts and achieving better results.

By following this process, marketers can ensure that their marketing efforts are aligned with the overall business objectives.

Market research and analysis

Market research and analysis play an essential role in understanding external factors, market trends, and consumer behavior and conducting a competitive analysis to identify potential opportunities and threats. By analyzing the business environment, prevailing market trends, and consumer behavior, the likelihood of the marketing plan’s success is enhanced.

A competitive analysis assists in identifying opportunities for improvement in the largest competitors’ marketing strategies, enabling the agency to focus on areas where they are lagging behind.

Identifying target audience

Identifying the target audience involves:

  • Defining the ideal customer profile based on similarities between existing clients and prospective customers
  • Recognizing the target audience is significant in the strategic marketing planning process
  • Assisting businesses in creating efficient marketing communication strategies
  • Conserving time and resources by concentrating on the requirements of the current consumer
  • Serving as the foundation of any marketing campaign

It is important to understand the target audience in order to create effective marketing campaigns that will reach the target audience.

Setting marketing goals

Setting marketing goals requires using prior data and desired business outcomes to establish realistic objectives that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). In strategic marketing planning, specific marketing goals may include acquiring a certain number of new clients, growing followers on social media, or sourcing additional leads for the sales funnel.

Establishing marketing objectives enables the ability to:

  • Assess performance
  • Assign resources
  • Maintain a clear direction
  • Make decisions based on data
  • Ultimately leads to improved marketing results.

Developing Marketing Strategies

Developing marketing strategies involves crafting the marketing mix and selecting appropriate marketing channels to reach the target audience effectively. The marketing mix is a combination of product, price, promotion, and place, which can be utilized to select marketing channels by determining which channels are most effective at reaching the target audience.

By understanding the target audience and the marketing mix, marketers can determine which channels are most effective.

Crafting the marketing mix

Crafting the marketing mix involves focusing on the four Ps of marketing to create a comprehensive marketing strategy. The components of the marketing mix are:

A successful marketing strategy primarily emphasizes the marketing mix.

Each of the four is one of the four. Ps of marketing must be carefully considered when creating a marketing strategy. Product refers to a product.

Selecting marketing channels

Selecting marketing channels involves choosing the most effective digital and traditional channels to boost brand recognition, draw in new customers, and accomplish marketing objectives. Digital channels such as websites, social media, email, search engine optimization, and online advertising are available, as well as traditional channels such as television, radio, print, and outdoor advertising.

Choosing marketing channels can assist businesses in:

  • Connecting with their target audience
  • Maximizing visibility
  • Utilizing resources effectively
  • Increasing brand recognition
  • Monitoring and assessing outcomes.

Implementing and Monitoring the Strategic Marketing Plan

Implementing and monitoring the strategic marketing plan involves executing the plan, managing projects, and measuring performance to ensure success. Execution and project management are essential components of the strategic marketing plan, which can be ensured by using tools such as Teamwork or Plaky to assign tasks, set timelines, and track milestones.

These tools can help ensure that the plan is executed on time and that all tasks are completed.

basic elements of strategic marketing planning

Execution and project management

We utilize project management tools such as Teamwork or Plaky to assign tasks, set timelines, track milestones, and ensure the successful implementation of the marketing plan . These tools offer a convenient solution to marketing planning by providing capabilities for task management and assignment, as well as a pre-made marketing strategy plan template.

With these tools, teams can easily collaborate on tasks, assign deadlines, and track progress. This is a very good article.

Performance measurement

Performance measurement entails tracking progress, assessing effectiveness, and making data-driven modifications to marketing strategies, tactics, and KPIs/OKRs. Monitoring progress assists in assessing the efficacy of marketing strategies and tactics and in recognizing areas that require adjustment.

Assessing effectiveness enables us to recognize which strategies and tactics are successful and which are not and to make adjustments as needed.

Adapting to Market Changes

Adapting to market changes in the strategic marketing planning process involves:

  • Modifying the marketing strategy to remain competitive
  • Consistently reviewing and updating the marketing plan
  • Recognizing and responding to the changing needs of the target market.

It may also include product adaptation to appeal to a new or evolving customer base.

Regular review and updates

To avoid potential implementation issues caused by fluctuating internal and external factors and to guarantee compatibility with corporate objectives, it is essential to regularly review and revise the strategic marketing plan.

Regular review and updates of the strategic marketing planning process are essential for the following:

  • Assessing effectiveness
  • Responding to changing market conditions
  • Ensuring alignment with business goals
  • Optimizing resources.

Continuous improvement

Continuous improvement involves executing, monitoring, and refining the marketing plan to reach goals, increase competitiveness, and foster strategic thinking. Launching, executing, reporting, and iterating the marketing plan should be done in an orderly fashion to ensure objectives are met, competitiveness is increased, and strategic thinking is promoted.

Ongoing improvement is fundamental for any effective strategic marketing plan. It guarantees that the plan is current and that objectives are being achieved. Moreover, it encourages strategic thinking and boosts competitiveness.

basic elements of strategic marketing planning

In conclusion, a successful strategic marketing plan is pivotal to achieving business growth, profitability, and long-term sustainability. Through a step-by-step approach involving market research and analysis, target audience identification, goal setting, marketing strategy development, implementation, monitoring, and continuous improvement, businesses can adapt to market changes, stay competitive, and achieve their objectives.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the marketing strategy planning.

Strategic marketing planning is the process of creating a plan to achieve a specific marketing goal, such as increasing revenue and profits or improving the brand’s visibility. Companies use this process to outline their objectives, the programs they’ll use to reach them, who is responsible for those metrics, and when they’ll be achieved.

These objectives are typically broken down into short-term and long-term goals, each goal having its own set of strategies and tactics. The plan should also include a timeline for when each goal should be achieved, as well as a budget.

What is the purpose of a strategic marketing plan?

Strategic marketing planning is an essential process that involves creating a plan to reach specific marketing goals. This plan outlines objectives, programs, who is responsible, and when the goals need to be achieved in order to increase revenue and profits, gain visibility, discourage competitors, or improve their appearance.

What are the five parts of a strategic marketing plan?

A strategic marketing plan consists of five core components: product, price, promotion, place, and people. These are the key elements that you need to focus on in order to create a successful plan that will help your brand reach its goals.

Each of these components should be carefully considered and planned out in order to ensure that your plan is effective. The product should be tailored to meet the needs of your target audience, while the price should be reasonable.

What are the 4 phases of strategic marketing planning?

The 4 phases of strategic marketing planning are formulation, implementation, evaluation, and modification. This process involves setting goals and objectives, analyzing internal and external business factors, product planning, implementation, and tracking progress to ensure successful outcomes.

Setting goals and objectives is the first step in the process. This involves identifying the desired outcomes and the resources needed to achieve them. Internal and external business factors must be considered.

What are the key components of strategic marketing planning?

Strategic marketing planning involves market research, target audience identification, goal setting, creating a marketing mix, and assessing performance. It is essential for businesses to have an effective strategy in place to be successful.

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What is a Marketing Plan & How to Write One [+Examples]

Clifford Chi

Published: December 27, 2023

For a while now, you've been spearheading your organization's content marketing efforts, and your team's performance has convinced management to adopt the content marketing strategies you’ve suggested.

marketing plan and how to write one

Now, your boss wants you to write and present a content marketing plan, but you‘ve never done something like that before. You don't even know where to start.

Download Now: Free Marketing Plan Template [Get Your Copy]

Fortunately, we've curated the best content marketing plans to help you write a concrete plan that's rooted in data and produces results. But first, we'll discuss what a marketing plan is and how some of the best marketing plans include strategies that serve their respective businesses.

What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is a strategic roadmap that businesses use to organize, execute, and track their marketing strategy over a given period. Marketing plans can include different marketing strategies for various marketing teams across the company, all working toward the same business goals.

The purpose of a marketing plan is to write down strategies in an organized manner. This will help keep you on track and measure the success of your campaigns.

Writing a marketing plan will help you think of each campaign‘s mission, buyer personas, budget, tactics, and deliverables. With all this information in one place, you’ll have an easier time staying on track with a campaign. You'll also discover what works and what doesn't. Thus, measuring the success of your strategy.

Featured Resource: Free Marketing Plan Template

HubSpot Mktg plan cover

Looking to develop a marketing plan for your business? Click here to download HubSpot's free Marketing Plan Template to get started .

To learn more about how to create your marketing plan, keep reading or jump to the section you’re looking for:

How to Write a Marketing Plan

Types of marketing plans, marketing plan examples, marketing plan faqs, sample marketing plan.

Marketing plan definition graphic

If you're pressed for time or resources, you might not be thinking about a marketing plan. However, a marketing plan is an important part of your business plan.

Marketing Plan vs. Business Plan

A marketing plan is a strategic document that outlines marketing objectives, strategies, and tactics.

A business plan is also a strategic document. But this plan covers all aspects of a company's operations, including finance, operations, and more. It can also help your business decide how to distribute resources and make decisions as your business grows.

I like to think of a marketing plan as a subset of a business plan; it shows how marketing strategies and objectives can support overall business goals.

Keep in mind that there's a difference between a marketing plan and a marketing strategy.

basic elements of strategic marketing planning

Free Marketing Plan Template

Outline your company's marketing strategy in one simple, coherent plan.

  • Pre-Sectioned Template
  • Completely Customizable
  • Example Prompts
  • Professionally Designed

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

Marketing Strategy vs. Marketing Plan

A marketing strategy describes how a business will accomplish a particular goal or mission. This includes which campaigns, content, channels, and marketing software they'll use to execute that mission and track its success.

For example, while a greater plan or department might handle social media marketing, you might consider your work on Facebook as an individual marketing strategy.

A marketing plan contains one or more marketing strategies. It's the framework from which all of your marketing strategies are created and helps you connect each strategy back to a larger marketing operation and business goal.

For example, suppose your company is launching a new software product, and it wants customers to sign up. The marketing department needs to develop a marketing plan that'll help introduce this product to the industry and drive the desired signups.

The department decides to launch a blog dedicated to this industry, a new YouTube video series to establish expertise, and an account on Twitter to join the conversation around this subject. All this serves to attract an audience and convert this audience into software users.

To summarize, the business's marketing plan is dedicated to introducing a new software product to the marketplace and driving signups for that product. The business will execute that plan with three marketing strategies : a new industry blog, a YouTube video series, and a Twitter account.

Of course, the business might consider these three things as one giant marketing strategy, each with its specific content strategies. How granular you want your marketing plan to get is up to you. Nonetheless, every marketing plan goes through a particular set of steps in its creation.

Learn what they are below.

  • State your business's mission.
  • Determine the KPIs for this mission.
  • Identify your buyer personas.
  • Describe your content initiatives and strategies.
  • Clearly define your plan's omissions.
  • Define your marketing budget.
  • Identify your competition.
  • Outline your plan's contributors and their responsibilities.

1. State your business's mission.

Your first step in writing a marketing plan is to state your mission. Although this mission is specific to your marketing department, it should serve your business‘s main mission statement.

From my experience, you want to be specific, but not too specific. You have plenty of space left in this marketing plan to elaborate on how you'll acquire new customers and accomplish this mission.

mission-statement-examples

Need help building your mission statement? Download this guide for examples and templates and write the ideal mission statement.

2. Determine the KPIs for this mission.

Every good marketing plan describes how the department will track its mission‘s progress. To do so, you need to decide on your key performance indicators (KPIs) .

KPIs are individual metrics that measure the various elements of a marketing campaign. These units help you establish short-term goals within your mission and communicate your progress to business leaders.

Let's take our example of a marketing mission from the above step. If part of our mission is “to attract an audience of travelers,” we might track website visits using organic page views. In this case, “organic page views” is one KPI, and we can see our number of page views grow over time.

These KPIs will come into the conversation again in step 4.

3. Identify your buyer personas.

A buyer persona is a description of who you want to attract. This can include age, sex, location, family size, and job title. Each buyer persona should directly reflect your business's current and potential customers. So, all business leaders must agree on your buyer personas.

buyer-persona-templates

Create your buyer personas with this free guide and set of buyer persona templates.

4. Describe your content initiatives and strategies.

Here's where you'll include the main points of your marketing and content strategy. Because there's a laundry list of content types and channels available to you today, you must choose wisely and explain how you'll use your content and channels in this section of your marketing plan.

When I write this section , I like to stipulate:

  • Which types of content I'll create. These might include blog posts, YouTube videos, infographics, and ebooks.
  • How much of it I'll create. I typically describe content volume in daily, weekly, monthly, or even quarterly intervals. It all depends on my workflow and the short-term goals for my content.
  • The goals (and KPIs) I'll use to track each type. KPIs can include organic traffic, social media traffic, email traffic, and referral traffic. Your goals should also include which pages you want to drive that traffic to, such as product pages, blog pages, or landing pages.
  • The channels on which I'll distribute my content. Popular channels include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram.
  • Any paid advertising that will take place on these channels.

Build out your marketing plan with this free template.

Fill out this form to access the template., 5. clearly define your plan's omissions..

A marketing plan explains the marketing team's focus. It also explains what the marketing team will not focus on.

If there are other aspects of your business that you aren't serving in this particular plan, include them in this section. These omissions help to justify your mission, buyer personas, KPIs, and content. You can’t please everyone in a single marketing campaign, and if your team isn't on the hook for something, you need to make it known.

In my experience, this section is particularly important for stakeholders to help them understand why certain decisions were made.

6. Define your marketing budget.

Whether it's freelance fees, sponsorships, or a new full-time marketing hire, use these costs to develop a marketing budget and outline each expense in this section of your marketing plan.

marketing-budget-templates

You can establish your marketing budget with this kit of 8 free marketing budget templates .

7. Identify your competition.

Part of marketing is knowing whom you're marketing against. Research the key players in your industry and consider profiling each one.

Keep in mind not every competitor will pose the same challenges to your business. For example, while one competitor might be ranking highly on search engines for keywords you want your website to rank for, another competitor might have a heavy footprint on a social network where you plan to launch an account.

competitive-analysis-templates

Easily track and analyze your competitors with t his collection of ten free competitive analysis templates .

8. Outline your plan's contributors and their responsibilities.

With your marketing plan fully fleshed out, it's time to explain who’s doing what. I don't like to delve too deeply into my employees’ day-to-day projects, but I know which teams and team leaders are in charge of specific content types, channels, KPIs, and more.

Now that you know why you need to build an effective marketing plan, it’s time to get to work. Starting a plan from scratch can be overwhelming if you haven't done it before. That’s why there are many helpful resources that can support your first steps. We’ll share some of the best guides and templates that can help you build effective results-driven plans for your marketing strategies.

Ready to make your own marketing plan? Get started using this free template.

Depending on the company you work with, you might want to create various marketing plans. We compiled different samples to suit your needs:

1. Quarterly or Annual Marketing Plans

These plans highlight the strategies or campaigns you'll take on in a certain period.

marketing plan examples: forbes

Forbes published a marketing plan template that has amassed almost 4 million views. To help you sculpt a marketing roadmap with true vision, their template will teach you how to fill out the 15 key sections of a marketing plan, which are:

  • Executive Summary
  • Target Customers
  • Unique Selling Proposition
  • Pricing & Positioning Strategy
  • Distribution Plan
  • Your Offers
  • Marketing Materials
  • Promotions Strategy
  • Online Marketing Strategy
  • Conversion Strategy
  • Joint Ventures & Partnerships
  • Referral Strategy
  • Strategy for Increasing Transaction Prices
  • Retention Strategy
  • Financial Projections

If you're truly lost on where to start with a marketing plan, I highly recommend using this guide to help you define your target audience, figure out how to reach them, and ensure that audience becomes loyal customers.

2. Social Media Marketing Plan

This type of plan highlights the channels, tactics, and campaigns you intend to accomplish specifically on social media. A specific subtype is a paid marketing plan, which highlights paid strategies, such as native advertising, PPC, or paid social media promotions.

Shane Snow's Marketing Plan for His Book Dream Team is a great example of a social media marketing plan:

Contently's content strategy waterfall.

When Shane Snow started promoting his new book, "Dream Team," he knew he had to leverage a data-driven content strategy framework. So, he chose his favorite one: the content strategy waterfall. The content strategy waterfall is defined by Economic Times as a model used to create a system with a linear and sequential approach.

Snow wrote a blog post about how the waterfall‘s content strategy helped him launch his new book successfully. After reading it, you can use his tactics to inform your own marketing plan. More specifically, you’ll learn how he:

  • Applied his business objectives to decide which marketing metrics to track.
  • Used his ultimate business goal of earning $200,000 in sales or 10,000 purchases to estimate the conversion rate of each stage of his funnel.
  • Created buyer personas to figure out which channels his audience would prefer to consume his content.
  • Used his average post view on each of his marketing channels to estimate how much content he had to create and how often he had to post on social media.
  • Calculated how much earned and paid media could cut down the amount of content he had to create and post.
  • Designed his process and workflow, built his team, and assigned members to tasks.
  • Analyzed content performance metrics to refine his overall content strategy.

I use Snow's marketing plan to think more creatively about my content promotion and distribution plan. I like that it's linear and builds on the step before it, creating an air-tight strategy that doesn't leave any details out.

→ Free Download: Social Media Calendar Template [Access Now]

3. Content Marketing Plan

This plan could highlight different strategies, tactics, and campaigns in which you'll use content to promote your business or product.

HubSpot's Comprehensive Guide for Content Marketing Strategy is a strong example of a content marketing plan:

marketing plan examples: hubspot content marketing plan

At HubSpot, we‘ve built our marketing team from two business school graduates working from a coffee table to a powerhouse of hundreds of employees. Along the way, we’ve learned countless lessons that shaped our current content marketing strategy. So, we decided to illustrate our insights in a blog post to teach marketers how to develop a successful content marketing strategy, regardless of their team's size.

Download Now: Free Content Marketing Planning Templates

In this comprehensive guide for modern marketers, you'll learn:

  • What exactly content marketing is.
  • Why your business needs a content marketing strategy.
  • Who should lead your content marketing efforts?
  • How to structure your content marketing team based on your company's size.
  • How to hire the right people for each role on your team.
  • What marketing tools and technology you'll need to succeed.
  • What type of content your team should create, and which employees should be responsible for creating them.
  • The importance of distributing your content through search engines, social media, email, and paid ads.
  • And finally, the recommended metrics each of your teams should measure and report to optimize your content marketing program.

This is fantastic resource for content teams of any size — whether you're a team of one or 100. It includes how to hire and structure a content marketing team, what marketing tools you'll need, what type of content you should create, and even recommends what metrics to track for analyzing campaigns.

4. New Product Launch Marketing Plan

This will be a roadmap for the strategies and tactics you‘ll implement to promote a new product. And if you’re searching for an example, look no further than Chief Outsiders' Go-To-Market Plan for a New Product :

marketing plan examples: chief outsiders

After reading this plan, you'll learn how to:

  • Validate a product
  • Write strategic objectives
  • Identify your market
  • Compile a competitive landscape
  • Create a value proposition for a new product
  • Consider sales and service in your marketing plan

If you're looking for a marketing plan for a new product, the Chief Outsiders template is a great place to start. Marketing plans for a new product will be more specific because they target one product versus its entire marketing strategy.

5. Growth Marketing Plan

Growth marketing plans use experimentation and data to drive results, like we see in Venture Harbour’s Growth Marketing Plan Template :

marketing plan examples: venture harbour

Venture Harbour's growth marketing plan is a data-driven and experiment-led alternative to the more traditional marketing plan. Their template has five steps intended for refinement with every test-measure-learn cycle. The five steps are:

  • Experiments

Download Now: Free Growth Strategy Template

I recommend this plan if you want to experiment with different platforms and campaigns. Experimentation always feels risky and unfamiliar, but this plan creates a framework for accountability and strategy.

  • Louisville Tourism
  • University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
  • Visit Oxnard
  • Safe Haven Family Shelter
  • Wright County Economic Development
  • The Cultural Council of Palm Beach County
  • Cabarrus County Convention and Visitors Bureau
  • Visit Billings

1. Louisville Tourism

Louisville Tourism Marketing Plan

It also divides its target market into growth and seed categories to allow for more focused strategies. For example, the plan recognizes Millennials in Chicago, Atlanta, and Nashville as the core of it's growth market, whereas people in Boston, Austin, and New York represent seed markets where potential growth opportunities exist. Then, the plan outlines objectives and tactics for reaching each market.

Why This Marketing Plan Works

  • The plan starts with a letter from the President & CEO of the company, who sets the stage for the plan by providing a high-level preview of the incoming developments for Louisville's tourism industry
  • The focus on Louisville as "Bourbon City" effectively leverages its unique cultural and culinary attributes to present a strong brand
  • Incorporates a variety of data points from Google Analytics, Arrivalist, and visitor profiles to to define their target audience with a data-informed approach

2. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

University Illinois

For example, students who become prospects as freshman and sophomore will receive emails that focus on getting the most out of high school and college prep classes. Once these students become juniors and seniors — thus entering the consideration stage — the emails will focus more on the college application process and other exploratory content.

  • The plan incorporates competitive analysis, evaluation surveys, and other research to determine the makeup of its target audience
  • The plan lists each marketing program (e.g., direct mail, social media, email etc.) and supplements it with examples on the next page
  • Each marketing program has its own objectives, tactics, and KPIs for measuring success

3. Visit Oxnard

This marketing plan by Visit Oxnard, a convention and visitors bureau, is packed with all the information one needs in a marketing plan: target markets, key performance indicators, selling points, personas, marketing tactics by channel, and much more.

It also articulates the organization’s strategic plans for the upcoming fiscal year, especially as it grapples with the aftereffects of the pandemic. Lastly, it has impeccable visual appeal, with color-coded sections and strong branding elements.

  • States clear and actionable goals for the coming year
  • Includes data and other research that shows how their team made their decisions
  • Outlines how the team will measure the success of their plan

4. Safe Haven Family Shelter

marketing plan examples: safe haven family shelter

This marketing plan by a nonprofit organization is an excellent example to follow if your plan will be presented to internal stakeholders at all levels of your organization. It includes SMART marketing goals , deadlines, action steps, long-term objectives, target audiences, core marketing messages , and metrics.

The plan is detailed, yet scannable. By the end of it, one can walk away with a strong understanding of the organization’s strategic direction for its upcoming marketing efforts.

  • Confirms ongoing marketing strategies and objectives while introducing new initiatives
  • Uses colors, fonts, and formatting to emphasize key parts of the plan
  • Closes with long-term goals, key themes, and other overarching topics to set the stage for the future

5. Wright County Economic Development

marketing plan examples: wright county

Wright County Economic Development’s plan drew our attention because of its simplicity, making it good inspiration for those who’d like to outline their plan in broad strokes without frills or filler.

It includes key information such as marketing partners, goals, initiatives, and costs. The sections are easy to scan and contain plenty of information for those who’d like to dig into the details. Most important, it includes a detailed breakdown of projected costs per marketing initiative — which is critical information to include for upper-level managers and other stakeholders.

  • Begins with a quick paragraph stating why the recommended changes are important
  • Uses clear graphics and bullet points to emphasize key points
  • Includes specific budget data to support decision-making

6. The Cultural Council of Palm Beach County

marketing plan examples: cultural council of palm beach county

This marketing plan presentation by a cultural council is a great example of how to effectively use data in your plan, address audiences who are new to the industry, and offer extensive detail into specific marketing strategies.

For instance, an entire slide is dedicated to the county’s cultural tourism trends, and at the beginning of the presentation, the organization explains what an arts and culture agency is in the first place.

That’s a critical piece of information to include for those who might not know. If you’re addressing audiences outside your industry, consider defining terms at the beginning, like this organization did.

  • Uses quality design and images to support the goals and priorities in the text
  • Separate pages for each big idea or new strategy
  • Includes sections for awards and accomplishments to show how the marketing plan supports wider business goals
  • Defines strategies and tactics for each channel for easy skimming

7. Cabarrus County Convention & Visitors Bureau

marketing plan examples: carrabus county

Cabarrus County’s convention and visitors bureau takes a slightly different approach with its marketing plan, formatting it like a magazine for stakeholders to flip through. It offers information on the county’s target audience, channels, goals, KPIs, and public relations strategies and initiatives.

We especially love that the plan includes contact information for the bureau’s staff members, so that it’s easy for stakeholders to contact the appropriate person for a specific query.

  • Uses infographics to expand on specific concepts, like how visitors benefit a community
  • Highlights the team members responsible for each initiative with a photo to emphasize accountability and community
  • Closes with an event calendar for transparency into key dates for events

8. Visit Billings

marketing plan examples: visit billings

Visit Billing’s comprehensive marketing plan is like Cabarrus County’s in that it follows a magazine format. With sections for each planned strategy, it offers a wealth of information and depth for internal stakeholders and potential investors.

We especially love its content strategy section, where it details the organization’s prior efforts and current objectives for each content platform.

At the end, it includes strategic goals and budgets — a good move to imitate if your primary audience would not need this information highlighted at the forefront.

  • Includes a section on the buyer journey, which offers clarity on the reasoning for marketing plan decisions
  • Design includes call-outs for special topics that could impact the marketing audience, such as safety concerns or "staycations"
  • Clear headings make it easy to scan this comprehensive report and make note of sections a reader may want to return to for more detail

What is a typical marketing plan?

In my experience, most marketing plans outline the following aspects of a business's marketing:

  • Target audience

Each marketing plan should include one or more goals, the path your team will take to meet those goals, and how you plan to measure success.

For example, if I were a tech startup that's launching a new mobile app, my marketing plan would include:

  • Target audience or buyer personas for the app
  • Outline of how app features meet audience needs
  • Competitive analysis
  • Goals for conversion funnel and user acquisition
  • Marketing strategies and tactics for user acquisition

Featured resource : Free Marketing Plan Template

What should a good marketing plan include?

A good marketing plan will create a clear roadmap for your unique marketing team. This means that the best marketing plan for your business will be distinct to your team and business needs.

That said, most marketing plans will include sections for one or more of the following:

  • Clear analysis of the target market
  • A detailed description of the product or service
  • Strategic marketing mix details (such as product, price, place, promotion)
  • Measurable goals with defined timelines

This can help you build the best marketing plan for your business.

A good marketing plan should also include a product or service's unique value proposition, a comprehensive marketing strategy including online and offline channels, and a defined budget.

Featured resource : Value Proposition Templates

What are the most important parts of a marketing plan?

When you‘re planning a road trip, you need a map to help define your route, step-by-step directions, and an estimate of the time it will take to get to your destination. It’s literally how you get there that matters.

Like a road map, a marketing plan is only useful if it helps you get to where you want to go. So, no one part is more than the other.

That said, you can use the list below to make sure that you've added or at least considered each of the following in your marketing plan:

  • Marketing goals
  • Executive summary
  • Target market analysis
  • Marketing strategies

What questions should I ask when making a marketing plan?

Questions are a useful tool for when you‘re stuck or want to make sure you’ve included important details.

Try using one or more of these questions as a starting point when you create your marketing plan:

  • Who is my target audience?
  • What are their needs, motivations, and pain points?
  • How does our product or service solve their problems?
  • How will I reach and engage them?
  • Who are my competitors? Are they direct or indirect competitors?
  • What are the unique selling points of my product or service?
  • What marketing channels are best for the brand?
  • What is our budget and timeline?
  • How will I measure the success of marketing efforts?

How much does a marketing plan cost?

Creating a marketing plan is mostly free. But the cost of executing a marketing plan will depend on your specific plan.

Marketing plan costs vary by business, industry, and plan scope. Whether your team handles marketing in-house or hires external consultants can also make a difference. Total costs can range from a few thousand dollars to tens of thousands. This is why most marketing plans will include a budget.

Featured resource : Free Marketing Budget Templates

What is a marketing plan template?

A marketing plan template is a pre-designed structure or framework that helps you outline your marketing plan.

It offers a starting point that you can customize for your specific business needs and goals. For example, our template includes easy-to-edit sections for:

  • Business summary
  • Business initiatives
  • Target market
  • Market strategy
  • Marketing channels
  • Marketing technology

Let’s create a sample plan together, step by step.

Follow along with HubSpot's free Marketing Plan Template .

HubSpot Mktg plan cover

1. Create an overview or primary objective.

Our business mission is to provide [service, product, solution] to help [audience] reach their [financial, educational, business related] goals without compromising their [your audience’s valuable asset: free time, mental health, budget, etc.]. We want to improve our social media presence while nurturing our relationships with collaborators and clients.

For example, if I wanted to focus on social media growth, my KPIs might look like this:

We want to achieve a minimum of [followers] with an engagement rate of [X] on [social media platform].

The goal is to achieve an increase of [Y] on recurring clients and new meaningful connections outside the platform by the end of the year.

Use the following categories to create a target audience for your campaign.

  • Profession:
  • Background:
  • Pain points:
  • Social media platforms that they use:
  • Streaming platforms that they prefer:

For more useful strategies, consider creating a buyer persona in our Make My Persona tool .

Our content pillars will be: [X, Y, Z].

Content pillars should be based on topics your audience needs to know. If your ideal clients are female entrepreneurs, then your content pillars can be: marketing, being a woman in business, remote working, and productivity hacks for entrepreneurs.

Then, determine any omissions.

This marketing plan won’t be focusing on the following areas of improvement: [A, B, C].

5. Define your marketing budget.

Our marketing strategy will use a total of [Y] monthly. This will include anything from freelance collaborations to advertising.

6. Identify your competitors.

I like to work through the following questions to clearly indicate who my competitors are:

  • Which platforms do they use the most?
  • How does their branding differentiate?
  • How do they talk to their audiences?
  • What valuable assets do customers talk about? And if they are receiving any negative feedback, what is it about?

7. Outline your plan's contributors and their responsibilities.

Create responsible parties for each portion of the plan.

Marketing will manage the content plan, implementation, and community interaction to reach the KPIs.

  • Social media manager: [hours per week dedicated to the project, responsibilities, team communication requirements, expectations]
  • Content strategist: [hours per week dedicated to the project, responsibilities, team communication requirements, expectations]
  • Community manager: [hours per week dedicated to the project, responsibilities, team communication requirements, expectations]

Sales will follow the line of the marketing work while creating and implementing an outreach strategy.

  • Sales strategists: [hours per week dedicated to the project, responsibilities, team communication requirements, expectations]
  • Sales executives: [hours per week dedicated to the project, responsibilities, team communication requirements, expectations]

Customer Service will nurture clients’ relationships to ensure that they have what they want. [Hours per week dedicated to the project, responsibilities, team communication requirements, expectations].

Project Managers will track the progress and team communication during the project. [Hours per week dedicated to the project, responsibilities, team communication requirements, expectations].

Get started on your marketing plan.

These marketing plans serve as initial resources to get your content marketing plan started. But, to truly deliver what your audience wants and needs, you'll likely need to test some different ideas out, measure their success, and then refine your goals as you go.

Editor's Note: This post was originally published in April 2019, but was updated for comprehensiveness. This article was written by a human, but our team uses AI in our editorial process. Check out our full disclosure t o learn more about how we use AI.

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What Is a Marketing Strategy?

  • How It Works
  • Marketing Strategies vs. Plans

How to Create a Marketing Strategy

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  • Marketing Essentials

Marketing Strategy: What It Is, How It Works, and How to Create One

basic elements of strategic marketing planning

Investopedia / Daniel Fishel

A marketing strategy refers to a business’s overall game plan to facilitate the buying and selling of its products or services. A marketing strategy determines how to reach prospective consumers and turn them into customers. It contains the company’s value proposition , key brand messaging, data on target customer  demographics, and other high-level elements.

A thorough marketing strategy covers the four Ps of marketing: product, price, place, and promotion.

Key Takeaways

  • A marketing strategy is a business’s game plan for reaching prospective consumers and turning them into customers of their products or services.
  • Marketing strategies should revolve around a company’s value proposition.
  • The ultimate goal of a marketing strategy is to achieve and communicate a sustainable competitive advantage over rival companies.

Understanding Marketing Strategies

A clear marketing strategy should revolve around the company’s value proposition, which communicates to consumers what the company stands for, how it operates, and why it deserves its business.

This provides marketing teams with a template that should inform their initiatives across all of the company’s products and services. For example, Walmart ( WMT ) is widely known as a discount retailer with “everyday low prices,” whose business operations and marketing efforts are rooted in that idea.

Marketing Strategies vs. Marketing Plans

The marketing strategy is outlined in the marketing plan —a document that details the specific types of marketing activities that a company conducts and contains timetables for rolling out various marketing initiatives.

Marketing strategies should ideally have longer life spans than individual marketing plans because they contain value propositions and other key elements of a company’s brand, which generally hold constant over the long haul. In other words, marketing strategies cover big-picture messaging, while marketing plans delineate the logistical details of specific campaigns.

For example, a marketing strategy might say that a company aims to increase authority in niche circles where their clients visit. The marketing plan puts that into action by commissioning thought leadership pieces on LinkedIn.

Benefits of a Marketing Strategy

The ultimate goal of a marketing strategy is to achieve and communicate a sustainable competitive advantage over rival companies by understanding the needs and wants of its consumers. Whether it’s a print ad design, mass customization , or a social media campaign, a marketing asset can be judged based on how effectively it communicates a company’s core value proposition.

Market research can help chart the efficacy of a given campaign and can help identify untapped audiences to achieve bottom-line goals and increase sales.

Creating a marketing strategy requires a few steps. Here are some of the steps you should consider when creating your marketing strategy.

  • Identify your goals: While sales are the ultimate goal for every company, you should have more short-term goals such as establishing authority, increasing customer engagement, or generating leads. These smaller goals offer measurable benchmarks for the progress of your marketing plan. Think of strategy as the high-level ideology and planning as how you accomplish your goals.
  • Know your clients: Every product or service has an ideal customer, and you should know who they are and where they hang out. If you sell power tools, you’ll choose marketing channels where general contractors may see your messaging. Establish who your client is and how your product will improve their lives.
  • Create your message: Now that you know your goals and who you’re pitching to, it’s time to create your message. This is your opportunity to show your potential clients how your product or service will benefit them and why you’re the only company that can provide it.
  • Define your budget: How you disperse your messaging may depend on how much you can afford. Will you be purchasing advertising? Hoping for a viral moment on social media organically? Sending out press releases to the media to try to gain coverage? Your budget will dictate what you can afford to do.
  • Determine your channels: Even the best message needs the appropriate venue. Some companies may find more value in creating blog posts for their website. Others may find success with paid ads on social media channels. Find the most appropriate venue for your content.
  • Measure your success: To target your marketing, you need to know whether it is reaching its audience. Determine your metrics and how you’ll judge the success of your marketing efforts.

Why Does a Company Need a Marketing Strategy?

A marketing strategy helps a company direct its advertising dollars to where it will have the most impact. Compared with the data from 2018, the correlation between organization and success in marketers jumped from being almost four times more likely to almost seven times more likely in 2022.

What Do the Four Ps Mean in a Marketing Strategy?

The four Ps are product, price, promotion, and place. These are the key factors that are involved in the marketing of a good or service . The four Ps can be used when planning a new business venture, evaluating an existing offer, or trying to optimize sales with a target audience. It also can be used to test a current marketing strategy on a new audience.

What Does a Marketing Strategy Look Like?

A marketing strategy will detail the advertising, outreach, and public relations campaigns to be carried out by a firm, including how the company will measure the effect of these initiatives.

They will typically follow the four Ps. The functions and components of a marketing plan include market research to support pricing decisions and new market entries, tailored messaging  that targets certain demographics and geographic areas, and platform selection for product and service promotion—digital, radio, Internet, trade magazines, and the mix of those platforms for each campaign, and metrics that measure the results of marketing efforts and their reporting timelines.

Is a Marketing Strategy the Same as a Marketing Plan?

The terms “marketing plan” and “marketing strategy” are often used interchangeably because a marketing plan is developed based on an overarching strategic framework. In some cases, the strategy and the plan may be incorporated into one document, particularly for smaller companies that may only run one or two major campaigns in a year. The plan outlines marketing activities on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis, while the marketing strategy outlines the overall value proposition.

Companies need to sell their products and services to generate revenue and put them on the path of being a successful business. To sell their products or services, they have to let consumers know of them. They must also convince consumers to buy them as well as convert consumers from competitors. Having a marketing strategy that outlines this process and more is a crucial step in converting consumers into customers.

Walmart Corporate. “ About .”

CoSchedule. “ Trend Report: Marketing Strategy 2022 .”

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  • How to Write a Strategic Marketing Plan (With Free…

How to Write a Strategic Marketing Plan (With Free Templates)

James Parsons

Businesses come in two forms: companies starting with a marketing plan and companies that languish without growth or progress for months or years.

A strategic marketing plan is a decisive, detailed document encompassing a plan to grow the business over time. It might sound like a lot of work, but it's necessary to build a brand.

After all, you wouldn't set out to climb a mountain with nothing but a walking stick, and you wouldn't try to play golf without knowing how to swing a club, so why would you run a business without knowing where to take it?

What Goes into a Strategic Marketing Plan?

A strategic marketing plan is three things.

1. First, it's a set of business goals. These are SMART goals, meaning they're specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and time-bound. I  go into greater detail on setting clear goals in this post , so I won't dig deep into it here.

SMART Goals

Imagine you're planning to drive from Los Angeles to New York City. You have a starting point and an ultimate destination, but you still need to know what route to take and where to stop along the way. Your business objectives are your destination and the stops you make along the way.

2. Second, your strategic marketing plan is your method . This is how you're going to get to your goals. I will spend the bulk of this post talking about it, so read on to learn more. Mostly, it's about itemizing your digital marketing channels, identifying how you plan to use them, and figuring out how they all work together to improve your overall business synergistically.

Marketing Channels

3. Third, your strategic marketing plan is the KPIs you use to reinforce the first two parts . It's the metrics you identify that form your key performance indicators, and it's how you measure them. How do you know what success means?

KPI Glossary

Your goals help you define what metrics to track and what levels they should reach using the channels you define in your plan.  It all works together .

Channels and Methods in a Strategic Marketing Plan

As a core part of your strategic marketing strategy, you need to outline the marketing channels you plan to use and how you plan to use them.

Setting your goals here is essential because it helps you identify your target audience. Once you know your target market, you can pinpoint where that audience exists and how you can reach them across various channels.

It doesn't do you any good to advertise on TikTok if none of your potential customers use the app, right?

You can generally divide your marketing channels into specific groups and categories. Each of these categories is broken down into particular channels, and each channel includes what you need to do using that channel, how to do it, and how often you'll be doing it, along with any other relevant information.

1. Paid Marketing Channels

Technically, all marketing activities are paid marketing. You decide between paying with your time or paying with your money.

Google Ads Dashboard

For this section, though, think about the channels you use by fueling them with money.

  • Google search ads.
  • Google display ads.
  • Facebook display ads.
  • Facebook boosted posts.
  • Twitter boosted tweets.
  • YouTube video ads.
  • Twitch video ads.
  • Ads on other social networks.
  • Ads on non-social advertising platforms.

Paid marketing is generally where a large portion of your marketing budget is going to go, so you need to be able to spend extra time on these. It would be best if you were careful with picking the KPIs you measure as well.

2. Social Marketing Channels

There are a ton of social networks out there, and they're all free to sign up, post organically, and interact with your community.

Linking Post to Social Media

  • Facebook , organic feeds, business pages, groups, and events.
  • YouTube , both for longer videos and for shorts.
  • Instagram , primarily for photos and videos.
  • TikTok , for that added dose of micro-video marketing.
  • Twitter , which is still one of the best customer service networks despite imploding.
  • Reddit , which ties in with content marketing and social marketing.
  • Tumblr  is experiencing a resurgence due to the aforementioned Twitter implosion.
  • LinkedIn , which can still be used for marketing in specific markets.
  • Pinterest , another heavily visual network specializing in certain markets.
  • WhatsApp  is one of the most extensive non-US-centric networks.

This selection is a very US-centric list, and it still just scratches the surface. But this is critical: you don't need to pick all of them.

In fact, the more you try to do at once, the less likely you are to pull off any of them effectively.

I recommend picking at most 3-4 of the networks most heavily used by your target audience and starting there. Once you've established patterns, habits, demographics, content pipelines, and practical strategies on those networks, you can expand into others for added reach.

3. Content Marketing Channels

Content marketing is the foundation of other kinds of marketing because all effective marketing relies, to some extent, on the content you produce. But, more than just "the content of the ads you run," content marketing requires you to create long-form blog posts, eBooks, videos, podcasts, and other media, to post for free on your website and around the web.

WordPress CMS

Content marketing requires a keen knowledge of SEO and how Google's search engine algorithms work. Your content plan also requires investment in content production, which often means hiring teams or gathering freelancers to do the work.

We create blog content that converts - not just for ourselves, but for our clients, too.

We pick blog topics like hedge funds pick stocks. Then, we create articles that are 10x better to earn the top spot.

Content marketing has two ingredients - content and marketing. We've earned our black belts in both.

That's paid work, of course.

Content marketing can also include your email marketing channels as well. You write content for your blog and share it across the web on social media.

You gather sign-ups for your newsletter and spread your news and content links in those regular email digests.

This also overlaps with paid marketing in the form of sponsored content , where you pay for your content to be published on other sites, often those with more exposure to your niche than you would have on your own.

4. Partnership Marketing Channels

Partnership marketing can include marketing channels where you create the content and marketing channels where you don't.

Channels, where you create the content, include things like guest posting . Guest posting is your content published on other sites because of a partnership or agreement you make with those other sites. Of course, if you pay money for it, it goes right back up into paid advertising. See how it all muddles together?

Partnering With Industry Leaders

On the other hand, channels where you  don't  create the content include things like:

  • Affiliate marketing , where you offer monetized links to anyone who is a content creator and wants to promote your content through their preexisting channels.
  • Referral marketing , where you allow your customers to earn rewards, points, or money for promoting you to others they know.
  • White label reselling , where you offer a version of your product with the serial numbers filed off for someone else to slap their brand sticker on and sell on their own, with you getting a cut.

Which (if any of these) are effective for  you  depends on  your  business, your audience, and your marketing plan. Your analysis of the niche and industry will help you determine whether or not it's worth pursuing any of them.

5. Putting It All Together

As you can see, there's a significant amount of overlap between all of these channels.

Every channel can work, but they all work better together than they do apart. Small businesses that try to create "the social media team," "the blog team," and "the SEO team" are generally doomed to have disjointed marketing and inconsistent content. Instead, you need teams that work together as one whole, overarching marketing team .

Experimentation  is key.

Conversion Value and ROAS

Part of your strategic marketing plan should be identifying which channels are most important and focusing on them first and foremost. Then, develop a roadmap of which channels to expand into (and when) when those metrics reach specific milestones. There's always going to be some flexibility here, but you need to be able to handle what's on your plate before you take on more.

Other Elements of a Strategic Marketing Plan

Of course, plenty goes into a strategic marketing strategy that isn't part of the marketing channels section.

Blog Plan

Let's run down what else you need.

  • Goals . I already mentioned this above, so head over to this link to learn more about setting marketing goals for your business.
  • A SWOT analysis. SWOT is a two-part, two-axis analysis of the Strengths and Weaknesses of your brand and the Opportunities and Threats of your position in the industry. Knowing these helps you identify where you can leverage your marketing efforts for the best effect and what you need to do to defend yourself against the competition edging in on your territory.
  • Executive Summary, Mission Statement, Values, and Vision. This is all high-level introductory content, meant not necessarily for you but for the people in your management team who work with you to implement the strategic marketing strategy. It's a bird's-eye level overview of what your company is, what you're trying to do, and the driving forces behind you.
  • Market Analysis. A specific itemized list of competitors, new and old. This can tie in with your SWOT analysis, or it can be its own set of information. You want some level of awareness of  what the competition is doing  and who they are, kept in one place for easy reference later.
  • Audience Information and Buyer Personas. This is information about who your audience is , who your ideal customers are, where to find them, what they like, what they dislike, and the value of reaching them. It's all very standard stuff for marketing, and I've written extensively on the subject.
  • Budgets. Money makes the world go-'round, and that's more true than ever in the realm of marketing. Whether you're bootstrapping yourself with growth hacks or you're leveraging venture funding to saturate a market, you have a finite amount of money, and you need to know where to spend it for the best effect.

All of this is put together into one comprehensive living document that grows, changes and is edited as information in it needs to change.

How to Set Your Marketing Budget

Budgeting your plan is an essential part of making sure that your plan is successful.

The most popular business promotion strategies are organic marketing, advertising, and partnerships.

Each has its unique advantages and disadvantages. Organic marketing is a cost-effective way to increase brand awareness and reach new customers. Advertising can be a powerful tool for reaching specific audiences and creating urgency around products or services. Partnerships leverage each other's networks and resources to promote both brands.

Budget Exhausted

Let's break these down in more detail to help you determine your budget for each:

  • Organic marketing is a great way to build trust with potential customers by providing helpful content while creating an organic search presence. Organic marketing involves content creation , social media, search engine optimization (SEO), and influencer marketing. These activities build relationships with customers and leads without requiring additional investments in advertising or partners. Organic marketing takes time and effort but can pay off in the long run. For this reason, I wouldn't recommend that newly established companies invest all of their marketing dollars into organic marketing strategies. Some of these don't pay off for months or years, and it's important to start building traction in parallel with some of the other marketing methods.
  • Advertising is a more targeted approach that helps businesses reach their target audiences quickly and more effectively than organic marketing. You can focus ad campaigns on specific demographics, regions, interests, or products. With this type of campaign, businesses can ensure their message reaches the right people at the right time. It's essential to track the effectiveness of your ad campaigns to ensure that you're getting the most out of your budget. Ads are effective at generating sales immediately, and you'll know pretty quickly if they aren't working. I think it's a good idea to invest in ads and slowly taper off by investing into other organic marketing strategies as your company grows.
  • Partnerships involve two companies working together to promote each other's brands, whether affiliate, referral, whitelabel, collaborations, private label, and so on. These collaborations are great for leveraging each other's networks and resources to gain exposure to new customers and drive traffic. This strategy can benefit both companies if they target similar audiences and have complementary products or services. However, it's necessary to ensure that both parties get something out of the partnership to remain mutually beneficial.

Organic marketing, advertising, and partnerships are all valuable tools for any business. Each has its benefits, but finding the right balance between them is necessary when developing your marketing strategy. The combination will depend on your target market, budget, and goals. Ultimately, maximizing your return on investment (ROI) is the goal.

Strategic Marketing Plan Templates and Examples

It's one thing to give you a bunch of theories and tell you to have fun, but it's another to give you tangible examples of what you can put together.

Marketing Plan Free Template

Here are a bunch of examples and marketing plan templates from around the web.

  • Ten Templates from Visme.co . This post, in addition to running down through all the elements of a strategic marketing plan, also includes ten templates you can use to get started. The templates are based on a core concept, like the kind of business (restaurant, real estate ) or the kind of marketing (content, social), but they can give you a great idea of what you should be putting together for yourself.
  • A Plan and Template from Vital . There's only one template here, but it's one of the more comprehensive examples I've seen, and the article that accompanies it is fantastic.
  • Mayple's Marketing Plan Spreadsheet . This is a great example of how you don't actually need all of the wild graphical design and typography that some of these plans use in their templates. It's fine to work on that aspect, but making your plan look good doesn't have nearly as much of a tangible benefit as making it function properly.
  • HubSpot's Templates . It's HubSpot. If you don't already trust their expertise, I don't know what to tell you. Their templates range from basic to advanced, so there's something in there for everyone, though you may have to find related posts to dig into deeper templates and guidelines for some of the strategies they mention.

Do you have a favorite example or template of a strategic marketing strategy you've used? Have you put together something you're proud of or consider impressive? Feel free to let me know; I'd love to see it!

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James Parsons is the founder and CEO of Content Powered, a premier content marketing agency that leverages nearly two decades of his experience in content marketing to drive business growth. Renowned for founding and scaling multi-million dollar eCommerce businesses through strategic content marketing, James has become a trusted voice in the industry, sharing his insights in Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Journal, Forbes, Entrepreneur, Inc, and other leading publications. His background encompasses key roles across various agencies, contributing to the content strategies of major brands like eBay and Expedia. James's expertise spans SEO, conversion rate optimization, and effective content strategies, making him a pivotal figure in the industry.

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Top 5 elements of a marketing plan

By kesha thillainayagam.

Congrats! If you’ve made it this far, you have the strategic foundation set for your marketing plan. You know your target audience, have analyzed the competition and assessed your market opportunities and where your organization is strongest with a SWOT analysis. 

Hopefully, you’ve written down all that good thinking in a marketing plan that records your decisions. You’ll need to be sure everyone is on the same page with your overall plan, including the campaign goals. Here are some questions you should discuss so you can agree on the answers: 

What differentiates our product or service?

Why do our customers love us?

Who are we marketing to?

What does our target audience need?

How are we going to meet those needs?

How will we measure success?

Not sure everyone is aligned? Try the marketing plan template from Confluence to gather your thinking. Ask all the decision makers to react and sign off!

Before you jump into creating the assets and getting them into market, now it is time to get more granular. Your campaign plan isn’t complete until you’ve also got: 

  • An overall content strategy
  • A channel strategy and corresponding KPIs
  • The cadence
  • A plan for your ad campaign
  • The final budget

Here’s a closer look at each of the elements: 

Content strategy

If you think you don’t need a content strategy, you’re almost certainly wrong. You may have gotten away without one in the past, but every business today has some element of content production. At the very least you likely have a website or Facebook page, right? You created your positioning that covers what you do, why you are the best one to deliver the product or service, and why customers should pick you — but now you need to explain those things to your audience. You’ll need some kind of content to do it, from ad copy to a web page, tweets to a video. You could also show you’re a thought leader by sharing fresh, regular content in blog posts on your website, which can boost its ranking on search engines. To get the most out of your content efforts on your site and elsewhere, you need a content strategy.  

At the planning stage, here is what you will want to outline:

  • What content do you already have? Conduct a content audit, mark down what can be reused, refreshed, or retired. If you unearth useful assets, you’ve just gotten a head start without spending time or money on content development.
  • What types of content will you produce and where will you put it?  Can you create and publish blog posts?  Video?  Web pages? Print, online, or downloadable  guides? Newsletters? Webinars? Virtual and/or live events? Audio/podcasts? Consider your internal talent and resources, vendors, or partners who can help you create content.
  • How much content do you need?  Do you need to fill a website, keep a blog fresh, or post on social media regularly? Can you create some new content out of existing assets — like making an infographic out of a blog post full of stats?  How much original content will need to be created? Think about the talent and budget so you make a plan you can sustain.
  • Who will be in charge of content? All your new content will need to be assigned, written, designed, produced, deployed — and tracked every step of the way. It might also need to be checked for grammar and spelling, for copyright, and perhaps go through a legal and brand internal review. Who will shepherd it through? 
  • What topics and keywords will you cover? Refer back to your positioning and messaging, personas, and competitive analysis. Where can you stand out in your field with your content? Are there SEO keywords you should target?
  • What events require content? Are there trade shows, holidays, and theme months that are opportunities for content that meets customer needs or drives leads? 

You guessed it: You’ll want to write it all down, share it with your team and stakeholders for their feedback, and then finalize your content strategy. 

Content strategy template

Yes, we’ve got a Confluence template for content strategy to help you capture all the necessary info in one place — and make sure you don’t leave anything out. 

If you are expecting some resistance to your plan, it helps to be more data-driven in your approach. Include data points and numbers about where you're at today, and let them inform where you need to go next.

Channels and KPIs

Next, you need a channel strategy, which boils down to picking where it’s best to reach your target audience. There are so many options to choose from. Here are a few ideas to help narrow down the options:

  • Age : Different ages hang out on very different channels. Looking for 18 to 24 year olds? Skip direct mail and Facebook.Go for Instagram, SMS, or newer social channels. Speaking of social media channels, each one has its key demographics listed.  Take a look at this data to confirm you are picking the right platform.
  • B2B : For B2B, be sure to set up a LinkedIn company page, send some emails, and have a presence at industry events (virtual or live). These tactics are top-notch for reaching businesses you want as customers. Paid ads work too (more on that later). 
  • Competition : Take a look at competitors’ channel selections for “inspiration.” You may find some useful ideas for where they’re doing their marketing, the types of content they’re using, and get a sense of the social engagement they’re getting. It’s fair game to get inspired to try similar tactics for your brand.

Beyond that, you need to set a strategy that works particularly well for your product and target audience. Not sure where to start with picking channels? This is where your personas come in. They can point you in the right direction if you follow your thinking all the way to the channels they’re likely to be using. 

Pick some channels to test, and then select the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you’ll use to judge if your marketing is effective. You won’t know for sure until you measure the results.

 Here are some KPIs to consider tracking:

  • Email : Open rates, click through rates, unsubscribes, bounces
  • Direct mail : Mail quantity, response rate, pay rate
  • Social media : Likes, shares (retweets for Twitter), comments
  • YouTube (Video) : Reach, views, completes, comments, likes, shares
  • Display ads : Impressions, click through rates
  • Website : Visits, new visits, page views, bounce rate, page views per visit, source of traffic (referrals)
  • Audio/podcasts : Downloads, listen time, ratings and reviews

Set your cadence

Of course, even the best content or ad could flop if you deliver it too often or not often enough. That’s why you need a plan for the cadence. The main factor may be your budget, but remember that more isn’t always better. Too many emails can make your open rates drop and your unsubscribes increase. Those are signs to cut back.

And don’t forget that there’s a lot you can do for free. You can even get email and social media management tools you can use for free, if your needs are simple and your cadence is below the threshold. 

Paid advertising

Free tactics are awesome, but most marketing plans include at least some paid advertising. Of course, when you’re spending money, things get even more complex — from setting budgets to tracking results so you can check the return on investment (ROI). Your ad plan may even have it’s own workflow from writing copy to designing ads to buying placements. You’ll need to figure out who runs the show and how it all gets done. 

It’s not easy to organize teams to get work done — and that’s why we’ve developed the DACI Decision Making Framework to help smooth the process from start to finish. 

Here are some decisions you’ll need to make, plus the benefits of writing it down in a campaign plan:

  • Establish your campaign goals . Are you aiming for brand awareness? Expanding your reach? Or is lead generation your main focus? Think this through up front.
  • Who are the decision makers?  If you have creative or other items that need to be reviewed and approved, document who will need to see the campaign assets and sign off before launch.
  • What is your timing? A schedule with steps and accountability is key to keeping your campaign on track. As you hit deadlines (or miss them, as the case may be) update the campaign plan so that all team members know what’s happening.
  • What do you project the results will be? Hint: Look at industry benchmarks as a starting point. After the campaign is running, you’ll use this projection to decide how to optimize the plan. 
  • How is the campaign faring compared to budget?  Track expenses such as creative hours, image licensing, and media costs. Set the budget with your team and vendors in writing and keep it updated to easily track and report anyplace that goes over as well as any savings.

Try the marketing campaign template so everyone on your team is always up on the latest information. And check out the other marketing templates from Confluence . There’s a template to make it easier to accomplish many typical tasks — or create one of your own.

Nail your brand positioning and messaging

Set up an engaging editorial calendar.

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9 Elements of an Effective Marketing Plan

There is no short-cutting the most critical part of any marketing campaign — the plan. That’s why this article goes into detail about the nine ingredients every effective marketing plan should have. You’ll gain clarity about each component’s purpose, along with specific examples to crystallize your thinking.

What you’ll gain from this article:

  • How to develop the right marketing goals
  • How to identify your plan’s truest key performance indicators
  • The insights you may be lacking about your target audience(s)
  • The difference and relationship between marketing strategy and tactics
  • The greatest pitfall when it comes to the marketing budget

Estimated read time = 12 mins

It’s very easy to get distracted and jump right into the weeds. By “weeds,” we mean marketing tactics. Marketers have experienced this far too often. We get a group of colleagues together to develop an annual marketing plan or an upcoming campaign, and folks start blurting out specific ways to go to market. Email marketing. Facebook ads. Publicity. A TV spot. Google ads. Etc.

Please avoid this temptation with all your might. This type of planning is no longer sustainable, especially with today’s marketers being asked to do more than ever. Often with less budget and less staff. We need to be more thoughtful and more measurable with our actions, and a sound marketing plan should be that blueprint. So let’s cover each of these elements in detail:

  • Business goals
  • Marketing goals
  • Target audiences

BUSINESS / ORGANIZATIONAL GOALS

Every organization — for-profit or non-profit, large or small — has goals. Goals give businesses purpose and must have a direct impact on their existence. They come in many forms, including:

  • increases in sales revenue
  • increases in average order value
  • increases in customer lifetime value
  • increases in applications and enrollments (colleges and universities)
  • increases in fundraising revenue (non-profits)
  • increases in the total number of people helped or served (non-profits)

And the list could go on. There are many forms of business goals, and we as marketers have little to no control over how they get created. That said, there’s one key thing we need to remember when creating our marketing plan: Good marketing goals must concretely support business goals . So what should our marketing goals be and how must they support business goals?  Read on …

MARKETING GOALS

First, good marketing goals must consist of five key attributes. Many of us have heard about SMART goals , which are:

  • Time-related

We set ourselves up for failure if even one of these criterion is lacking. SMART goals give us a foundation for holding ourselves accountable, and knowing when we’ve succeeded (or failed). Here are some SMART examples (let’s assume they’re assignable and realistic, too):

  • To increase consumer phone calls (leads) by 10% year-over-year between now and June 30
  • To increase in-store foot traffic by 5% during Q4 for the NYC store location
  • To increase consumer unaided awareness of our brand by 10% within 1 year
  • To increase average donation amounts by 10% during November

Next, we fuse our SMART marketing goals with business goals through an activity called Performance Modeling. (Hubspot also refers to this as Smarketing , FYI for you inbound lovers.) A performance model essentially maps the entire consumer journey in a linear progression from the start of campaign promotion to the resulting consumer activity (i.e. leads), and then to actual sales and profitability. Think of the performance model as another way to express the traditional marketing funnel , but with two, key exceptions :

  • It gives volume and conversion details for each “micro” conversion of the journey, and
  • It reflects sales conversion rates and business goals

Here’s a performance model example for one of our clients offering a high-end kitchen design and installation service:

marketing-funnel-with-performance-model

Performance modeling also offers a framework for future marketing reports at the management/CMO level. It provides crystal clear understanding of which metrics need to be tracked and reported as a campaign progresses. These become our Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The model essentially becomes a real-time barometer of the campaign’s health and likelihood of reaching its goals. More importantly, it “sounds the alarm” when things are under-performing and prompts much needed campaign adjustments with budget and time still remaining.

And finally, performance modeling gets everyone on board — leadership, marketing and sales . It provides a direct “line of sight” from promotions to profitability, and is easily understood by anyone (not just marketers).

TARGET AUDIENCE(S)

For this blog article, we’ll assume you already know the basics of your target audience. This is usually demographic information such as:

  • Male/female (or skew toward one of them)
  • Countries, regions, and cities and towns in which they live and work
  • Annual household income
  • Race or ethnicity

That’s a great start, but many marketers overlook the behavioral and psychographic attributes of their target audiences. Some of these are:

  • “Mindset” – How do they think about your product or service?
  • economic factors (recession that decreases household spending)
  • competitors (with better price points, benefits/features, etc.)
  • consumer trends (new ways of thinking that have permanently changed spending habits … think “gluten free”)
  • political landscape (new gov’t regulations or election year influences)
  • “Habits” – What do they do at each stage of the consumer decision-making process , and what can we do to get in front of them?

The answers to these questions may involve both qualitative (focus groups, interviews, etc.) and quantitative (polls/surveys) research, while some insights could be gained from secondary research (i.e., paying providers like GfK MRI or Nielsen-Scarborough for the data). Either way, the time and investment for these insights will produce a more effective strategy and tactics in the long run.

Surprisingly, this is an area we see far too many clients lacking in. This is especially painful for sales teams, which are responsible for closing. How can we expect them to convert customers if we don’t equip them with the necessary tools?

Key considerations:

  • Establishing the brand position
  • Developing a messaging platform to support the brand position (tagline/slogan, elevator pitch, support points/key benefits, competitive differentiation, etc.)
  • Understanding how the messaging translates into multiple marketing formats

Bottom line : If we can’t explain the value of what we’re promoting, how can we expect to meet our marketing goals?

It’s very easy to confuse marketing strategy and marketing tactics, so we’ll address these two elements together:

  • A strategy is the approach for achieving marketing (and business) goals,
  • Tactics are the specific things that execute on the strategy

It’s easiest to think of strategy as “what we need to do” and tactics as “how we’ll get it done”.

Example #1: Old Spice

Business goal: To increase U.S. sales of men’s deodorant by 10% in 12 months Marketing goal: To increase consumer unaided awareness (by 50%) and favorability (by 20%) of Old Spice deodorant over other brands Strategy: Target women (wives/girlfriends) because they do the household shopping One Tactic: Air national TV spots showing an attractive man talking directly to these women … like this …

Example #2: Fictional e-commerce business

Let’s say you sell products through your website. The goal is to increase sales revenue by 15% in 6 months with only a very modest budget.

After much research, you decide that the strategic elements of your marketing plan should be to:

  • Increase return visitors to the website
  • Increase repeat purchases with current/loyal customers
  • Increase the average order value of each checkout

Corresponding tactics for those strategic elements could be:

  • Show Google re-marketing ads to customers who viewed specific products, but left without making a purchase
  • Email free shipping offers to current customers
  • Optimize the checkout process by suggesting complementary products (“you may also like …”) with each item added to the online shopping cart

It is critically important to have a firm and realistic marketing budget. This is a decision that only management — not your marketing department and certainly not your consultant! — can make given how much the organization wishes to invest in future marketing efforts in order to meet its goals.

Businesses too often come to us and say, “Why don’t you tell us how much we should spend?” Or, “We have a zero-based budget … what would you recommend based on our business goals?” The truth is that no marketer or consultant knows how to objectively answer this question. The only way would be an unbelievably perfect scenario of a business knowing their conversion rates for every marketing tactic  and how they generated sales for every product or service . (That would be a performance modeling dream, but it is just that.)

The pitfall of this question is the internal marketing team and/or consultant(s) must then needlessly spin their wheels to develop multiple marketing plans for multiple budget scenarios. It’s valuable time and resources wasted. Urge management to give you a firm budget from which to plan. It doesn’t help anyone to develop elaborate marketing plans when there’s only enough money to pay for Google advertising at the end of the day.

The marketing plan or campaign’s timing should be influenced by the following:

  • The organization’s budget cycle (fiscal year or calendar year)
  • Seasonality (holiday shopping season, the Super Bowl, etc.)
  • Organizational events (date of a new product launch, store opening, sales promotion, etc.)

A good campaign reflects a timeline to accommodate these circumstances. But a great marketing plan takes it a step further, and projects how it will support sales revenue milestones each month in order to provide cash flow. Here’s an example going back to our kitchen design and installation client. A simple spreadsheet of the performance model is more than sufficient:

campaign-timing-with-revenue-goals

And finally, no marketing plan will ever meet its goals unless there’s a proper team in place, with each member having clearly defined roles and responsibilities.The best plan in the world is nothing more than ideas unless it can be executed. And it takes the right person or people to do that. There are also great (and cheap) project management tools, like Basecamp or Trello , to keep everyone organized and accountable.

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Marketing During a Pandemic

  • 2.2 The Role of Marketing in the Strategic Planning Process
  • 1 Unit Introduction
  • In the Spotlight
  • 1.1 Marketing and the Marketing Process
  • 1.2 The Marketing Mix and the 4Ps of Marketing
  • 1.3 Factors Comprising and Affecting the Marketing Environment
  • 1.4 Evolution of the Marketing Concept
  • 1.5 Determining Consumer Needs and Wants
  • 1.6 Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
  • 1.7 Ethical Marketing
  • Chapter Summary
  • Applied Marketing Knowledge: Discussion Questions
  • Critical Thinking Exercises
  • Building Your Personal Brand
  • What Do Marketers Do?
  • Marketing Plan Exercise
  • Closing Company Case
  • 2.1 Developing a Strategic Plan
  • 2.3 Purpose and Structure of the Marketing Plan
  • 2.4 Marketing Plan Progress Using Metrics
  • 2.5 Ethical Issues in Developing a Marketing Strategy
  • 2 Unit Introduction
  • 3.1 Understanding Consumer Markets and Buying Behavior
  • 3.2 Factors That Influence Consumer Buying Behavior
  • 3.3 The Consumer Purchasing Decision Process
  • 3.4 Ethical Issues in Consumer Buying Behavior
  • 4.1 The Business-to-Business (B2B) Market
  • 4.2 Buyers and Buying Situations in a B2B Market
  • 4.3 Major Influences on B2B Buyer Behavior
  • 4.4 Stages in the B2B Buying Process
  • 4.5 Ethical Issues in B2B Marketing
  • 5.1 Market Segmentation and Consumer Markets
  • 5.2 Segmentation of B2B Markets
  • 5.3 Segmentation of International Markets
  • 5.4 Essential Factors in Effective Market Segmentation
  • 5.5 Selecting Target Markets
  • 5.6 Product Positioning
  • 5.7 Ethical Concerns and Target Marketing
  • 6.1 Marketing Research and Big Data
  • 6.2 Sources of Marketing Information
  • 6.3 Steps in a Successful Marketing Research Plan
  • 6.4 Ethical Issues in Marketing Research
  • 7.1 The Global Market and Advantages of International Trade
  • 7.2 Assessment of Global Markets for Opportunities
  • 7.3 Entering the Global Arena
  • 7.4 Marketing in a Global Environment
  • 7.5 Ethical Issues in the Global Marketplace
  • 8.1 Strategic Marketing: Standardization versus Adaptation
  • 8.2 Diversity and Inclusion Marketing
  • 8.3 Multicultural Marketing
  • 8.4 Marketing to Hispanic, Black, and Asian Consumers
  • 8.5 Marketing to Sociodemographic Groups
  • 8.6 Ethical Issues in Diversity Marketing
  • 3 Unit Introduction
  • 9.1 Products, Services, and Experiences
  • 9.2 Product Items, Product Lines, and Product Mixes
  • 9.3 The Product Life Cycle
  • 9.4 Marketing Strategies at Each Stage of the Product Life Cycle
  • 9.5 Branding and Brand Development
  • 9.6 Forms of Brand Development, Brand Loyalty, and Brand Metrics
  • 9.7 Creating Value through Packaging and Labeling
  • 9.8 Environmental Concerns Regarding Packaging
  • 9.9 Ethical Issues in Packaging
  • 10.1 New Products from a Customer’s Perspective
  • 10.2 Stages of the New Product Development Process
  • 10.3 The Use of Metrics in Evaluating New Products
  • 10.4 Factors Contributing to the Success or Failure of New Products
  • 10.5 Stages in the Consumer Adoption Process for New Products
  • 10.6 Ethical Considerations in New Product Development
  • 11.1 Classification of Services
  • 11.2 The Service-Profit Chain Model and the Service Marketing Triangle
  • 11.3 The Gap Model of Service Quality
  • 11.4 Ethical Considerations in Providing Services
  • 12.1 Pricing and Its Role in the Marketing Mix
  • 12.2 The Five Critical Cs of Pricing
  • 12.3 The Five-Step Procedure for Establishing Pricing Policy
  • 12.4 Pricing Strategies for New Products
  • 12.5 Pricing Strategies and Tactics for Existing Products
  • 12.6 Ethical Considerations in Pricing
  • 13.1 The Promotion Mix and Its Elements
  • 13.2 The Communication Process
  • 13.3 Integrated Marketing Communications
  • 13.4 Steps in the IMC Planning Process
  • 13.5 Ethical Issues in Marketing Communication
  • 14.1 Advertising in the Promotion Mix
  • 14.2 Major Decisions in Developing an Advertising Plan
  • 14.3 The Use of Metrics to Measure Advertising Campaign Effectiveness
  • 14.4 Public Relations and Its Role in the Promotion Mix
  • 14.5 The Advantages and Disadvantages of Public Relations
  • 14.6 Ethical Concerns in Advertising and Public Relations
  • 15.1 Personal Selling and Its Role in the Promotion Mix
  • 15.2 Classifications of Salespeople Involved in Personal Selling
  • 15.3 Steps in the Personal Selling Process
  • 15.4 Management of the Sales Force
  • 15.5 Sales Promotion and Its Role in the Promotion Mix
  • 15.6 Main Types of Sales Promotion
  • 15.7 Ethical Issues in Personal Selling and Sales Promotion
  • 16.1 Traditional Direct Marketing
  • 16.2 Social Media and Mobile Marketing
  • 16.3 Metrics Used to Evaluate the Success of Online Marketing
  • 16.4 Ethical Issues in Digital Marketing and Social Media
  • 17.1 The Use and Value of Marketing Channels
  • 17.2 Types of Marketing Channels
  • 17.3 Factors Influencing Channel Choice
  • 17.4 Managing the Distribution Channel
  • 17.5 The Supply Chain and Its Functions
  • 17.6 Logistics and Its Functions
  • 17.7 Ethical Issues in Supply Chain Management
  • 18.1 Retailing and the Role of Retailers in the Distribution Channel
  • 18.2 Major Types of Retailers
  • 18.3 Retailing Strategy Decisions
  • 18.4 Recent Trends in Retailing
  • 18.5 Wholesaling
  • 18.6 Recent Trends in Wholesaling
  • 18.7 Ethical Issues in Retailing and Wholesaling
  • 19.1 Sustainable Marketing
  • 19.2 Traditional Marketing versus Sustainable Marketing
  • 19.3 The Benefits of Sustainable Marketing
  • 19.4 Sustainable Marketing Principles
  • 19.5 Purpose-Driven Marketing

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

  • 1 Explain the role of marketing in the strategic planning process.
  • 2 Discuss the business portfolio and identify planning tools.
  • 3 Describe a SWOT analysis.
  • 4 List and describe marketing strategies based on analytics.

Explain the Role of Marketing in the Strategic Planning Process

To get a better idea of the importance of marketing in the strategic planning process, let’s imagine that you’re the owner of a manufacturing business that produces widgets. You’ve been able to recruit top engineering talent to design these widgets and source components from trusted, reliable vendors, and your manufacturing facility is efficient and can produce the widgets in a cost-effective manner. Sounds like a winning business, doesn’t it?

Well, the only thing we’ve left out of the equation for success is customers, and without customers, the finest engineering staff and manufacturing facility in the world won’t ring the bell in terms of profits or revenue. You need to determine who your customers are, what their needs and wants are, how you’re going to reach them, and how you’re going to persuade them to buy your widgets. That’s where marketing comes into the strategic planning process, and that’s why it plays a crucial role.

Marketing in the strategic planning process has several basic but critical functions:

  • First, marketers assist the strategic planning team in executing a marketing philosophy throughout the strategic planning process.
  • Second, marketers assist the organization in gathering and analyzing information necessary to examine the current situation (the first step in a gap analysis).
  • Third, marketers are responsible for the identification of trends in the marketing environment and assessing the potential impact of those trends. 24

Business Portfolio Definition

As noted above, many businesses have a single product or business unit. However, larger organizations such as Apple , Alphabet , General Electric , Meta , and Microsoft often have multiple diverse business units called strategic business units. Despite the fact that these SBUs report directly to the parent company’s headquarters, they typically develop their own vision statements, mission statements, objectives, and goals, and the strategic planning for these SBUs is performed separately and apart from other SBUs within the organization. 25 When companies have multiple products or business units, these comprise the business portfolio —the total group of product lines, services, and business units that the company possesses.

To give you a better sense of what a business portfolio entails, look at Figure 2.5 , which illustrates the products and services of Microsoft and how each offering contributes to the overall strategic plan of the company. 26 Microsoft reported $168 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2021, and each of its product lines (or strategic business units) contributes to this revenue in differing amounts. 27 It’s easy to see from this breakdown why each of these businesses under the Microsoft “umbrella” would have different strategic plans to execute within the markets they serve. You likely wouldn’t have one overarching marketing or business strategy for all of these SBUs because the markets for Office, Gaming, LinkedIn , and the other SBUs are likely very different and would require different strategies to reach and retain customers.

Analyze and Design the Business Portfolio

There are many reasons why an organization would establish separate business units or product lines as it grows. For example, if the current product line is in a market where growth is limited, it may choose to branch out to other product lines or markets. Alternatively, an organization may choose to expand into other product lines to take advantage of emerging opportunities.

Emerson Electric , headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, has five business segments: Network Power, Process Management, Industrial Automation, Climate Technologies, and Commercial and Residential Solutions (i.e., tools and storage). These business segments provide products as diverse as hardware and software technologies; motors; fluid control systems; heating and air-conditioning products and services; and tools, storage products, and appliances for residential, health care, and food services. 28 When you consider divisions as diverse as these, it should be readily evident why each is a separate division with separate strategies to compete in its respective marketplaces.

Conversely, a business may choose to expand in areas in which it already has experience and can use the power of its core competencies to establish sustainable competitive advantage with new products in existing markets.

There are a few tools that can help determine which course of action is best advised given the current circumstances of the organization, the marketplace, and other factors. Let’s take a look at a few of them.

Boston Consulting Group (BCG) Matrix

The BCG matrix is a model developed by Boston Consulting Group that can be used to analyze a business’s product lines or SBUs and make decisions about which to invest in in the future and which they should try to minimize further investment in or even eliminate. The bottom line is that no business has unlimited funds to invest in its product lines, and the BCG matrix is a useful model in determining how to allocate money in terms of marketing, research and development (R&D), etc. to that portfolio.

As shown in Figure 2.6 , the BCG matrix considers both market share and market growth rate. The SBUs or products that have high market share in a high-growth market are called stars and are placed in the upper left quadrant. These are the opportunities that hold the most promise for the organization.

Conversely, those SBUs or products that have low market share in a low-growth market are referred to as dogs and are placed in the lower right quadrant. These are prime candidates for divestiture or elimination because they have relatively low growth potential, and although the business has significant funds tied up in them, they bring in virtually nothing in terms of revenues. Divestiture could also provide needed capital to invest in your stars or question marks.

Cash cows , in the lower left quadrant, are an interesting breed, so to speak. A cash cow is an SBU or product that has high market share in a low-growth market. They’re valuable to a business because they generate significant revenue that can fund other strategic initiatives or emerging opportunities. Incidentally, they’re called cash cows because the thinking is to “milk” these products for profits.

Those SBUs or products that have a low market share in a high-growth market are called question marks (sometimes also called “problem children”) and are placed in the upper left quadrant. Question marks are among the most complex decisions to be considered when developing a BCG matrix because a root cause analysis may be required in order to determine why these SBUs are, in fact, question marks. Obviously, with high-market growth, the market is strong, but there are one or more reasons why your organization hasn’t been able to capitalize on it and gain market share. Does the product line need more investment in order to move into the “star” category? Is competition so strong in this market that additional funding in terms of advertising campaigns or other marketing tactics render them useless? Is the question mark just a trend in which you can expect high growth without a lot of market share for a short period of time?

Once you have categorized each of your SBUs or products on the BCG matrix, you’ll have a crystal-clear vision of where each stands and can identify which you should prioritize and which need to be divested.

To better understand the BCG model, let’s do a simplified matrix for Apple and some of its products (see Figure 2.7 ). Because Apple has so many products and services, we’re showing only four hardware products in this matrix.

In this sample matrix, we’re going to place the Apple iPhone in the star category. You’ll recall from our discussion above that stars have relatively high market share in a growing market. Let’s face it: the iPhone is the shining gem of Apple’s portfolio. Even though Apple has diversified its product line, the iPhone is still responsible for 52 percent of the company’s revenue, raking in an astounding $192 billion in 2021. 29

Next, we’re going to put the iPad and the MacBook in the cash cow category. Remember that the BCG matrix is built on two parameters—market share and market growth. Both the iPad and the MacBook have relatively high market share compared to competitors, but the market for these products is not growing much anymore. 30 The Apple iPad had a 31.5 percent share of the global tablet market during the first quarter (down from 38 percent in the previous quarter), and the MacBook still holds popularity, garnering 15.3 percent of the market share. 31 Both the iPad and the MacBook are well-established products that continue to generate substantial income for Apple, and these products require relatively little additional investment for them to remain profitable.

Let’s move on to the question mark category. Remember that question marks have low market share in a high-growth market, and we’re going to place the Apple iWatch in this category. The iWatch has the potential to become as big of a hit as the iPhone, but the jury is still out because there are too many unknowns in the market. Global sales of smartwatches increased by 13 percent in the first quarter of 2022, and the Apple iWatch continues to lead in market share. 32 However, Apple will need to analyze its iWatch vis-à-vis its other products to decide if it should continue to invest in the product. 33

Finally, let’s move on to the dog quadrant of the matrix. We’re going to place the iPod in this category because market growth has slowed considerably as people use their phones to listen to music or podcasts. The iPod has experienced a shrinking market share as a result, and it wouldn’t make sense for Apple to continue to invest in the iPod. 34 As a matter of fact, Apple announced in May 2022 that it would discontinue the iPod Touch, while the touch-screen model launched in 2007 will remain on sale until supplies run out. 35

Link to Learning

Would you like to learn more about the BCG Matrix? Watch this brief video from Solve It Like a Marketer.

SWOT Analysis

SWOT is an acronym for a business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and it is a useful aid for zeroing in on a feasible marketing strategy. The purpose of a SWOT analysis is really quite simple. Marketers want to identify the strengths and weaknesses in the organization’s internal environment as well as the opportunities and threats that exist in the organization’s external environment. It is generally presented in the format seen in Figure 2.8 . You would complete the template with bullet points in each of the four quadrants.

A SWOT analysis will aid in taking advantages of the organization’s strengths and opportunities while avoiding (or at least minimizing) weaknesses and threats to its success. Realistically, some of the factors are in the control of the company (i.e., strengths and weaknesses), but other factors are outside the control of the company (i.e., opportunities and threats). Let’s consider each of these in a little more detail.

Strengths can be factors such as patents or trademarks possessed by the company that hinder competitors in participating in the market; a better cost structure than competitors; a talented, innovative staff; or strong brand recognition in the market. Strengths are internal to the organization, and they’re also positives. Questions to ask when developing this section may be: What do you do well? What unique resources you can draw on? Consider a company like Starbucks . If you were preparing a SWOT analysis for Starbucks, its strengths might include a strong brand image, solid financial performance, impressive growth in the number of stores, and an extensive international supply chain. 36

Weaknesses are also factors within a company’s internal environment, but these are hindrances to your success, so they’re categorized as negatives. Weaknesses may be difficulty in accessing capital or funding, outdated technology, an unmotivated workforce, weak brand recognition, or high levels of debt. Let’s go back to Starbucks. If you were preparing a SWOT analysis for Starbucks, some of its weaknesses may be high prices versus the competition and the imitability of its products. 37

Now we’ll switch over to external factors that affect the business. Opportunities are openings for something positive to happen if (and only if) you can capitalize on them. Opportunities can be moving into a new market segment that offers improved profits (like a snack food manufacturer moving into the health foods sector), competitors that have quality or delivery problems, or impending legislation that would favorably affect your organization if you’re able to capitalize on it. Once again, let’s go back to Starbucks. If you were preparing a SWOT analysis for Starbucks, some of its opportunities might be expansion in developing markets, a coffee subscription service similar to that offered by Panera Bread , and the introduction of new products and holiday flavors. 38

Finally, threats are anything external to your organization that can negatively impact your business. These may include supply chain problems, ongoing staffing problems, new competitors entering the market, or impending legislation that would negatively impact your organization, like tariffs. If you were doing a SWOT analysis for Starbucks, you might identify threats such as competition with lower-cost coffee sellers, tightening discretionary spending due to inflation, or the rising price of coffee beans. 39

Check out this video for a very simple example of a SWOT analysis.

When preparing a SWOT analysis, it is also helpful to compare elements by ranking strengths and weaknesses (internal factors) in terms of relative competitive importance. Marketers can also rank threats and opportunities (external factors) in terms of their likelihood and magnitude. 40

Earlier in this chapter, we pointed out the differences between corporate-level strategy, business-level strategy, and functional strategy. If you’re a fan of movies like Other People’s Money or Wall Street , you might think that corporate strategy focuses on hostile takeovers, mergers, and ruthless acquisitions.

The movie Moneyball is about a baseball general manager assembling a team by using computer analysis to hire new players. This is a great example of using analytics to inform strategy. Watch a clip of the movie here, where you see the analytics applied.

Market Penetration

When a company focuses on growing its market share in its existing markets, it is using what’s known as a market penetration strategy . This approach generally entails significant expenditures in advertising and other marketing efforts in order to influence consumers’ brand choice and create a brand reputation for the company, thereby increasing its market share.

In some mature industries (like soap, laundry detergent, or toothpaste), a market penetration strategy becomes a way of life because nearly all competitors are also engaged in intensive advertising and battle for market share. It becomes a way of life because companies fear that if they don’t advertise as much as or more than their competitors, they will lose market share.

To give you an idea of how fierce the competition is with a market penetration strategy, consider Procter & Gamble , which spent $4.7 billion on advertising in 2020. 41

Product Development

As noted above, a market penetration strategy focuses on existing products and existing markets. By contrast, a product development strategy involves the creation of new or improved products in order to drive growth in sales, revenue, and profit. Although the advertising expenditures involved with a market penetration strategy may be significant, they often pale compared to the expenditures involved in a product development strategy. This is because product development generally requires significant investment in R&D activities. 42

The automobile industry provides a good illustration of the product development strategy. Car makers generally refresh their models every few years to encourage car owners to trade in their old vehicles and buy the redesigned cars with the latest tech features such as driver assist, Wi-Fi hotspots, and Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. 43 At the same time, all the manufacturers are spending billions of dollars developing new electric vehicle models to meet ambitious goals for phasing out gasoline-powered engines.

Another great example of a product development strategy is Tide laundry detergent. Tide has undergone more than 50 formulation changes over the past 40 years in an effort to continually improve its product’s performance. The name always stays the same, but Tide has a “new and improved” formula with each new product release. 44

If you doubt the power of a product development strategy, the next time you go to the grocery store or supermarket, just look at how many “new and improved” products are on the shelves!

Market Development

A market development strategy involves searching for new market segments and uses for a company’s products. This strategy can involve the launch of its existing products into new markets or different geographical areas. In doing so, the company attempts to capitalize on the strength of the brand name it has developed in the existing markets and find new markets in which to compete.

Facebook is a great example of a market development strategy. It’s difficult to remember when Facebook wasn’t a household word, but Facebook started out as a small platform that enabled Harvard University students to compare headshots. The popularity of the platform spread to other college campuses, and eventually Facebook allowed nonstudents to join. It looks like the strategy worked—Facebook is now the largest social network in the world, with nearly 3 billion users! 45

To help you better understand these strategies, let’s consider each one from the perspective of one company— Harley-Davidson . If Harley-Davidson were to adopt a market penetration strategy, the company would focus on selling more Harley-Davidson motorcycles in the US market. If the company were to adopt a product development strategy, it would begin selling a new product such as biker clothing for children under the Harley-Davidson brand in the US market. Harley-Davidson is currently pursuing a market development strategy, with plans to develop a new motorcycle to manufacture and sell in China. Harley-Davidson’s diversification strategy might entail selling new products like children’s biker clothing in China for the first time.

Product Diversification

A product diversification strategy is still another tool that companies can use to improve profitability and increase sales of new products. This strategy can be utilized at both the business level and the corporate level. At the business level, marketers would expand into a new segment of an industry in which the company is already operating. 46 For example, consider Apple . The company launched its revolutionary iPhone in 2007, but it didn’t stop there. It has since diversified into tablets and other technology-related products. 47 At the corporate level, let’s consider a dine-in restaurant that adds corporate catering and perhaps a fleet of food trucks—both businesses outside the scope of its existing business.

There are three types of diversification techniques, as shown in Figure 2.9 .

Let’s look at each of these strategies in a little more detail.

The concept of concentric diversification revolves around the addition of similar products or services to an existing business. 48 If a picture is worth a thousand words, then an example has to be worth even more, particularly an example to which you can easily relate as a student. As you’re reading this chapter, consider book publishers, like Harper Collins , Simon & Schuster , or Penguin/Random House . These book publishers don’t only print the works of one author; rather, they have hundreds or perhaps thousands of authors’ works in their arsenals. These publishers will publish print books, e-books (like the one you’re reading right now), and audiobooks and may even sell the rights to some of the books for film and TV adaptations, allowing them to garner additional streams of revenue for one product. 49

Conversely, the concept of horizontal diversification involves making available to existing customers new and perhaps even unrelated products or services so that you can garner a larger customer base. 50 For example, consider a company that produces dental hygiene products like toothbrushes and dental floss. In order to increase sales to existing customers, the company may decide to introduce into the market a line of oral irrigators or teeth whiteners. These products are new to the company, but they still serve the same customer base as its existing products.

Finally, conglomerate diversification takes horizontal diversification one step further. Conglomerate diversification involves the development and addition of new products or services that are significantly unrelated. You’re not only introducing a new product, you’re introducing a new product that is completely unrelated to your existing line of business. 51 Consider General Electric when looking for an example of conglomerate diversification. General Electric started out as a lighting business, but over the years, it has diversified into medical devices, household appliances, aircraft engines, financial services, and more. That’s taking conglomerate diversification to a whole new level!

Blue Ocean Strategy

Learn about market-creating strategies known as the Blue Ocean strategy from Harvard Business Review , where it uses Cirque du Soleil as an example.

Knowledge Check

It’s time to check your knowledge on the concepts presented in this section. Refer to the Answer Key at the end of the book for feedback.

  • Opportunity
  • Market share and market growth rate
  • Market size and market share
  • The ratio of dogs to cash cows in the product portfolio
  • The potential for question marks to cross over and become stars
  • Question mark
  • Market development
  • Product diversification
  • Horizontal diversification
  • Product development

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  • Authors: Dr. Maria Gomez Albrecht, Dr. Mark Green, Linda Hoffman
  • Publisher/website: OpenStax
  • Book title: Principles of Marketing
  • Publication date: Jan 25, 2023
  • Location: Houston, Texas
  • Book URL: https://openstax.org/books/principles-marketing/pages/1-unit-introduction
  • Section URL: https://openstax.org/books/principles-marketing/pages/2-2-the-role-of-marketing-in-the-strategic-planning-process

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Here’s how to make sure both you and your patients know what makes your practice special .

REBECCA ANWAR, PhD, AND JUDY CAPKO

Fam Pract Manag. 2001;8(10):39-43

basic elements of strategic marketing planning

For many physicians, marketing is simply a matter of putting an advertisement in the local newspaper, redecorating the waiting room or conducting a direct mailing to people in the community. But this is a haphazard approach that will accomplish little more for your practice than draining its marketing budget.

The key to successfully marketing your practice begins with developing a strategic marketing plan in which each activity is based on solid research and specific goals, and is implemented and carefully evaluated in a timely manner. The plan serves as a road map to help you achieve your marketing goals.

Why should you market your practice?

Some physicians still feel that marketing is at best unprofessional and at worst unethical. In fact, good marketing is no more than educating your patients and your community about your expertise and services, and there are a wide range of reasons for doing it, not all of which have a purely financial basis. However, if you do want to determine the value of each new patient to your practice, calculate the average of the revenue that 10 new patients generated during their first 12 months with you.

You might consider marketing your practice for any or all of the following reasons: to increase your income, expand your patient base, discourage competition, improve your practice image, promote current and new services, introduce new providers, enter a new marketplace or gain or retain market share. Whatever your motivation, make sure to get your staff involved right from the start. Share your reasons for marketing with them, and ask them for their ideas. If your staff is not involved early, it will be difficult to convince them to support the marketing plan and take on any additional work that comes with it.

The elements of a plan

There are nine major steps required to develop a well-crafted, strategic marketing plan: set your marketing goals, conduct a marketing audit, conduct market research, analyze the research, identify your target audience, determine a budget, develop specific marketing strategies, develop an implementation schedule for the strategies and create an evaluation process.

1. Set your marketing goals. Once you’ve decided to market your practice, you need to set realistic and measurable goals to achieve over the next 18 to 24 months. This time span allows you to plan activities around community events that are in line with your marketing goals. For example, you might help sponsor an annual walkathon for breast cancer or speak at your community’s annual health fair. Because of the rapid changes occurring in the health care environment, we don’t recommend planning specific activities more than two years in advance. One way to define your goals is to separate them into the following three categories: immediate, one to six months; short-term, six to 12 months; and long-term, 12 to 24 months. Here are some examples of measurable goals:

Increase the number of new patients seen in the practice by 5 percent within the first six months and 10 percent by the end of the first year.

Shift your patient mix by expanding the pediatric and adolescent patient base from 15 percent to 25 percent of total patient visits within 18 months.

Increase your gross revenue by 30 percent within 24 months.

Improve your practice’s image, which may be measured by “before” and “after” scores on a community survey or by reviews from focus group participants.

It’s important to share these goals with your staff members. They can tell you from their perspectives whether they believe the goals are reasonable. If you want your marketing plan to be successful, your staff needs to support your efforts to achieve the marketing goals.

Marketing can increase your income, introduce new providers or improve your practice image, among other things.

A strategic marketing plan requires you to define your practice in terms of what it does for patients.

Every goal, strategy and action in your marketing plan is subject to change as you evaluate your progress.

2. Conduct a marketing audit. A marketing audit is a review of all marketing activities that have occurred in your practice over the past three years. Be as thorough as possible, making sure to review every announcement, advertisement, phonebook ad, open house, brochure and seminar and evaluate whether it was successful.

3. Conduct market research. The purpose of market research is to draw a realistic picture of your practice, the community you practice in and your current position in that community. With this research, you can make fairly accurate projections about future growth in the community, identify competitive factors and explore nontraditional opportunities (such as offering patients nutritional counseling, smoking-cessation programs or massage therapy). Your research may even bring to light some problem areas in your practice as well as solutions you can implement right away. (See “ A guide to market research ” to find out what kind of information you need to gather and where to find it.)

Conducting market research is often the most time-consuming step in this process. However, it’s also one of the most important steps. It’s from this research that you’re able to find out what your practice does best and what you need to work on, what the needs of your community are, who your practice should be targeting and how you should go about it.

4. Analyze the research. Next, you need to analyze the raw data you collect and summarize it into meaningful findings that will be the foundation for determining which marketing strategies make the most sense and will get the best results for your practice The research will identify the wants and needs of your current and potential patients and will help you to define your target audience (for more on target audiences, see step 5, below). This is also a good time to look back at the goals you’ve chosen. Based on your research findings, you may need to modify some of your goals.

A strategic marketing plan requires that your practice be defined in terms of what it does for patients. The research analysis will reveal your practice’s strategic advantages. After looking closely at your own practice as well as your competitors’, you can ask yourself some key questions: What are the similarities and differences between your practice and your competitors’? What sets your practice apart from your competition? Is your location more desirable than your competitors’? Do you offer a broader scope of services than the competition? Is there a service you provide that no one else in the community currently offers? Your competitive edge may lie in your style of practice, the range of services you offer, the ease of making an appointment or the way you and your staff communicate with patients.

A GUIDE TO MARKET RESEARCH

To gather the kind of information you need to develop a strategic marketing plan for your practice, you need to conduct market research on your practice, your competition and your community. You can’t rely on intuition, judgment and experience; your practice needs hard data. Although it will take some time to gather this information, a number of resources are available that can make the process easier for you.

Your practice

Much of the information you need about your own practice can be found through discussions with staff members and other physicians, or by reviewing your patient records. You can also find out about your practice and whether it’s meeting the needs of your current patients by asking them to fill out a patient survey about the practice. Here are some of the questions you need answered about your practice:

What is the background and history of your practice? Has it been in the current community for a long time?

What are your practice’s strengths and weaknesses? Are there problems with scheduling, cancellations, staff turnover or reimbursement management?

Who are your current patients in terms of their age, sex, ethnic origin, type of insurance coverage, chief complaints and where they live?

What are the services provided by your practice? Who needs these services? Are these needs changing?

How is your practice perceived by your patients?

Your competition

You need to find out who your competitors are and what they have to offer. Check with your county or state medical society and your local hospital to find out how many other family physicians, nurse practitioners and general internists are in your service area, how long they’ve practiced in that location and how many have moved into your area over the past five years.

Once you’ve determined who your competitors are, you need to assess them. This information may be a little harder to come by, but you can try to gather as much information as you can by simply asking other physicians, listening to your patients, friends and neighbors when they talk about their physicians and keeping your eye out for competitors’ advertisements. To assess your competition, you need to ask the following questions:

What are your competitors’ target audiences and niche markets?

Why do certain patients or groups of patients particularly like or dislike your competitors?

How are your competitors viewed within the community?

What marketing activities have your competitors tried?

Your community

In addition to gathering information about your practice and your competitors’ practices, you need to learn as much as you can about the people in your community. You can find answers to the following questions by contacting your local Chamber of Commerce, your state vital statistics department or the U.S. Census Bureau ( www.census.gov ). Census data is available for every state, county, city, ZIP code, neighborhood, etc.:

How many people live in your service area? Is the population expected to grow or shrink? What are the demographic characteristics of the population in your area?

How is your practice perceived in the community? Are you known in the community?

Who are your potential patients? Are their wants and needs being met elsewhere in the community? If not, how can your practice meet those needs?

5. Identify a target audience. With the help of your market research analysis, you should be able to identify your practice’s “target audience,” which is the specific group of patients to which you’d like to direct your marketing efforts. Your target audience might include patients of a certain age, gender, location, payer type or language/ethnicity and patients with certain clinical needs. Keep in mind that your target audience should not only be the patients you want to attract but also the people who can influence and provide exposure to that segment of the population. For example, if you wish to treat patients with arthritis, you might want to get involved in the local and regional Arthritis Foundation and explore senior organizations in the community. If you want to treat young athletes, you might consider giving talks on sports safety and first-aid tips to coaches and athletes at the local high schools, colleges and YMCAs. The key to marketing lies in targeting the audience that your practice can serve better than your competition – and communicating this to that group.

6. Determine a budget. Before you can decide what specific marketing strategies you want to implement to achieve your goals, you need to examine your financial information and come up with a marketing budget. Marketing budgets vary by the type of market a practice is in, the age of a practice and whether the practice has marketed before. There’s no standard for how much a practice should spend. However, in our experience, practices in open markets have spent 3 percent to 5 percent of their annual gross incomes on marketing. If your practice is new, in a highly competitive market or has never been marketed before, or if you intend to roll out an ambitious new program or service, you can expect to spend 10 percent or more of your annual gross income the first year you implement the plan.

Some of the initial marketing activities can be expensive. For example, it can cost more than $5,000 to have a corporate image package (i.e., logo, stationery and collateral pieces) developed by a professional and as much as $10,000 if you add a brochure. On the other hand, some of the best marketing activities cost practically nothing. For example, to build your referral network, you might try meeting with new physicians in your community and sending follow-up/thankyou notes to referring physicians. Big or small, these are all worthwhile investments that will give the community a positive image of your practice.

7. Develop marketing strategies. With your budget in place, you can begin to define specific marketing strategies that will address your goals, reach your target audience and build your patient base. Remember to focus your strategies on the elements of your practice that can be used to create a special value in the minds of patients and referral sources. Each strategy should be related to a specific goal and should be made up of numerous actions. For example, one strategy related to the goal of increasing patient satisfaction might be to make the office more patient friendly. The actions required for that strategy might include the following:

Provide patient satisfaction training sessions to staff;

Develop a patient self-scheduling system within the practice Web site to eliminate the need to telephone the office for an appointment;

Improve the reception-room decor;

Provide name tags for staff;

Require staff to introduce themselves to each new patient;

Conduct post-encounter telephone interviews with new patients within three days of their appointments.

[Watch for an upcoming article in FPM about specific, cost-effective marketing actions you can try in your practice.]

8. Develop an implementation schedule. An implementation schedule is a time-line that shows which marketing actions will be done when and by whom. The schedule should also include the cost of each marketing action and how it fits into the budget estimates for the 24-month period. When creating the schedule, carefully consider how the activities will affect the current practice operations and whether there are sufficient resources (such as staff, time and money) to accomplish the necessary tasks. In some cases, it may be necessary to whittle down the list or postpone some activities. In other cases, it might be best to go ahead with full implementation of your plan. If you want to fully implement the plan but don’t quite have the staffing resources, you might consider bringing in a consultant to coordinate the marketing activities and/or adding a part-time staff member to handle the majority of the marketing tasks. The implementation schedule will also give you a basis on which to monitor the progress of your marketing plan.

9. Create an evaluation process. The value of a marketing plan is its effectiveness, which requires deliberate and timely implementation and monitoring and evaluation of results. It’s important to measure your results against the standards you set in establishing your goals. Review your plan periodically (we recommend quarterly) by comparing your progress with the implementation schedule. There are several ways you can measure the results of your progress: patient survey scores, referral sources, increased income, increased new patients and decreased complaints.

If at any time you find your progress does not measure up to your expectations, you need to determine why. Perhaps the advertisement about a new service you are marketing has not attracted new patients. If the ad campaign has been carried out as directed without results, dump the campaign and try other actions. Perhaps you’ll want to try giving a series of seminars specifically targeted to the group you want to attract or developing a new segment on your Web site for patients that describes the benefits of the new service. You may even find that if each physician in the practice talks about the new service with his or her patients as merely informational conversation, favorable results will follow. In other words, the actions – and even the strategies and goals – in the marketing plan are not written in stone. By regularly monitoring and evaluating each action, you can always change and try new approaches.

As good as you make it

A good marketing plan outlines realistic marketing goals, strategies and actions based on sound information and research about your practice and your community. But the plan is only as good as your commitment to implementing it, dedicating sufficient resources to the endeavor, involving your staff and communicating openly with them. The marketing plan should not merely be written, reviewed and put away on a shelf. Instead, your practice marketing plan should be an evolving blueprint that guides your efforts and monitors your success. Marketing works when the dedication is there. It’s up to you!

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Kent Huffman

7 Elements of an Effective Strategic Marketing Plan

Strategic Marketing Plan

I’ve seen it happen to marketers many times. I’ve even done it myself. You start a new job or a new year, excited about the opportunity to be successful and truly make a difference for your company. But you’re so anxious to get the ball rolling and to prove your value that you jump right into redesigning the logo, overhauling the website, or any number of other tactical tasks, hoping to move the needle quickly.

Big mistake.

This time around, take a more thoughtful, strategic approach to marketing—and dramatically increase your chances of short- and long-term success—by spending the time to develop an effective marketing plan. It’s really not that difficult, but it does take time to get it right.

Start by addressing the questions in these seven categories:

#1: Situational Analysis

  • What problem(s) do you solve for your customers?
  • What products, services, or solutions do you provide?
  • Do you understand the current state of your industry and the segments therein?
  • Who are your competitors, and what are their strengths and weaknesses?
  • Who are your partners, and what do they bring to the table?
  • Have you conducted thorough SWOT and PEST analyses?

#2: Goals and Objectives

  • What are the three or four most important goals you want to accomplish during the plan period?
  • What specific, measurable objectives do you need to achieve to enable you to reach those goals?

#3: Strategy and Branding

  • What’s the vision for your company?
  • How will you reach your goals and objectives?
  • How do you want your brand to be perceived?
  • Do you have a compelling, unique value proposition ?
  • Have you developed marketing personas for your target customers?
  • Do you have the ability to scale the business?

#4: Tactics

  • What analog (traditional) marketing activities do you plan to implement?
  • What digital marketing activities do you plan to implement?
  • How will you use marketing automation and CRM tools to manage leads and nurture prospects?
  • What will you do to increase conversions?
  • Are your marketing, sales, and customer service functions properly aligned?
  • What’s the marketing budget, and how is it segmented and prioritized?
  • How was the budget determined?
  • Is the budget adequate to enable you to reach your goals?

#6: Measurement

  • How will you define success or failure?
  • What specific marketing metrics /KPIs (key performance indicators) will you track?
  • Which analytical and organizational tools will you use to measure your progress?

#7: Refinement and Improvement

  • How will you ensure your marketing plan is continually refined and improved over time?

I can tell you from experience that taking the time to develop a strategic marketing plan now will pay huge dividends to you and your company next week, next month, and even next year. Don’t put it off!

A final thought: “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~Sun Tzu

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The six elements of effective strategic planning.

6 Elements of Effective Strategic Planning

While the business operations framework is a continuous cycle in which each stage informs the next, developing a strategic plan is the best place to start.

During the strategic planning process, an organization performs three steps:

  • Builds or modifies the foundational strategic vision and mission
  • Commits to goals that drive overall health
  • Develops a long-term plan to achieve the goals

A strong strategic plan positions the organization for success and clearly defines it at every level.

A common mistake we see businesses make is starting tactical initiative execution without first communicating and aligning on the goal. Skipping these important steps can leave your organization without direction.

Read ahead to learn more about the six vital elements of strategic planning: vision , mission , objectives , strategy , approach , and tactics . 

Rainbow Strategic Planning Pyramid with elements representing vision, objectives, strategy, approach, and tactics

1.     Define your vision

An organization’s vision statement is an aspirational description of what it wants to achieve in the future..

A vision statement serves as a clear guide for choosing current and future courses of action — a definition of where you want your organization to be in the long term. It sets the tone and provides a North Star on the horizon.

One example of a company with a strong vision statement is Warby Parker, the online prescription glasses retailer founded in 2010 that is now worth an estimated $3 billion.

Warby Parker’s vision statement has two parts: “We believe that buying glasses should be easy and fun. It should leave you happy and good-looking, with money in your pocket. We also believe that everyone has a right to see.”

With just three sentences, the vision statement tells you exactly what the company aims to achieve. Namely, to make the process for buying prescription glasses and sunglasses fun and straightforward (unlike the traditional method). The vision also aims for customers to have fashionable frames, but at a lower cost than existing options.

The last sentence of the vision statement adds in a purpose statement (aka why the company exists): “We also believe that everyone has a right to see.” Since the beginning, Warby Parker has touted its “Buy a Pair, Give a Pair” program that donates glasses to people who can’t otherwise afford them. According to the CEO, this purpose is what motivates employees to join and stay with the company. Not all leaders include a social impact focus in their company’s vision and purpose statement, but it’s becoming increasingly popular with the growing buying power of Millennial and Gen Z consumers.

A powerful vision statement helps company employees focus their work in the right direction — and a strong vision statement will do the same for your organization.

2.     Create your mission

While your vision is an organization-wide goal, your mission how you plan to achieve the vision..

Without a mission, your organization lacks the why and how. If everyone in your organization has their own interpretation of the vision, it can lead to conflicting strategies and initiatives.

For Warby Parker, there are many possible routes to achieve the company vision that states “buying glasses should be easy and fun. It should leave you happy and good-looking, with money in your pocket.”

The company’s mission statement is: “By circumventing traditional channels, designing glasses in-house, and engaging with customers directly, we’re able to provide higher-quality, better-looking prescription eyewear at a fraction of the going price.”

After the founding team realized early on that one large company dominated the eyewear industry with inflated prices, they decided to find a way to lower prices and increase quality, while also turning a profit. The resulting actions included bringing many traditionally outsourced services in-house, such as design and consumer marketing/sales.

3.     Set your objectives

Objectives are specific results that a person or system aims to achieve within a time frame..

Defining success early lets you know if you are on the path to achieve your mission and vision. Clearly articulating your objectives creates goal posts by which your organization can measure its overall health and the impact of strategic initiatives.

In general, good objectives should be clear, measurable and be supported by multiple strategic initiatives across the organization.

While Warby Parker isn’t a public company and is not legally required to release annual financial statements, the organization does voluntary release an annual impact report. The report provides a window into the company’s strategic objectives with the inclusion of priority issues relevant to both stakeholders and the company. For the most recent 2019 report , the top issues cited are the Buy a Pair, Give a Pair program, customer experience, innovation, product safety, and responsible sourcing.

For the Buy a Pair, Give a Pair program, Warby Parker’s relevant objective might be aimed at growing the program, while the innovation priority may be tied to the objective of innovating to meet the strategic vision and mission. The issue of responsible sourcing could lead to an objective of using all recycled packaging or becoming carbon neutral. While the listed issues are presented through an impact lens, they also have a financial purpose.

4.    Develop your strategy

Your strategy is a long-term plan that enables you to achieve your organization’s objectives..

An effective strategy brings together vision and execution. Strategies are much more specific than an organization’s vision, mission, and objectives. They are typically only shared within an organization and ideally built around an organization’s needs and market context. Strategies should map long-term plans to objectives and actionable steps, foster innovative thinking, as well as anticipate and mitigate potential pitfalls.

Strategic plans often look out 3-5 years, and there may be a separate plan for each individual objective within the organization. In the Warby Parker annual impact report, we have insight into the strategy for each of the objectives identified above. We’ll highlight potential strategies for two areas: the Buy a Pair, Give a Pair program and innovation.

By the end of 2019 Warby Parker had distributed seven million pairs of glasses to 23 countries through the Buy a Pair, Give a Pair Program and will be likely focus on expanding those numbers in 2021 and beyond. According to the impact report, 2.5 billion people around the world lack access to affordable glasses to learn and work. In order to make a positive impact, Warby Parker needed to develop strategies to continue chipping away at that need, as well as meet company objectives, mission and vision. An example strategy for this program could be expanding the US-based Pupils Project, which gives school children access to free vision services and glasses. In the 2019-2020 school year, Warby Parker expanded the program from New York City and Baltimore to Philadelphia, providing vision services to an estimated 25,000 students in the School District of Philadelphia.

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In addition, Warby Parker has traditionally been focused on eyewear and reimagining the customer experience for glasses wearers, so naturally the company’s leadership identified an innovation opportunity to add daily contact lenses in November 2019, which was likely the result of a multi-year strategic plan. Like Warby Parker’s eyeglasses process, the company allows a trial period for contact wearers, who can request 6 days of contacts in their prescription before committing to a full 90-day supply.

5.     Outline your approach

An approach provides a methodology for executing your strategy..

The approach is a framework for answering key questions that will later determine tactics. Plus, it guides an organization on how to execute the strategic plan.

Within our Warby Parker example, each strategic plan included an approach that guided the leadership team in their analysis and plan execution. While we won’t cover each decision the company made in 2019, we’d like to focus on two big ones: the Pupils Project expansion and the launch of the contact lens brand Scout.

When it came to expanding the Pupils Project, the Warby Parker leadership team needed an approach for addressing each key decision for the program. There were likely more decisions than we can cover in one whitepaper, but will focus on two: whether to partner with existing non-profits or create its own program and how to make the greatest impact with the funds available.

Leading up to the decision points, like whether to expand the Pupils Program to Philadelphia, the leadership’s approach probably included a consideration of whether to develop the program infrastructure and manage it internally or partner with existing non-profits. The approach also likely included a cost-benefit analysis of that question, evaluating the financial ROI and social impact of each option. The company ultimately choose to work with two local Philadelphia nonprofits.

Another key decision requiring a strong approach within the Pupils Program was how to have the greatest impact with the funds available. The company needed an approach that would help them answer and inform key decisions. Those decisions could have included an analysis of whether to contribute the glasses directly or make a cash equivalent donation to the nonprofits, how to identify schools for the project (for example considering the greatest overall need or the number of glasses Warby Parker can provide), as well as who should manage the logistics of the screenings and eyeglasses deliveries.

On the innovation side, Warby Parker needed a quality approach to ensure the contact lens brand launch (called Scout) was aligned with the existing mission, vision, objectives and strategies. In order to create a contact lens that was high quality, affordable, and with lower waste packaging, the company needed a multi-pronged approach. Two crucial areas of planning for the Scout contact lenses were undoubtedly the design of the product and choosing the right manufacturer.

Because contact lenses were completely new to the company, Warby Parker needed to either design them in house or hire an outside design team that would meet the high standards the leadership outlined in the 2019 impact report , “On top of creating a great shopping experience for our customers, we have high expectations for what a daily contact lens should be—high quality, moist, breathable, comfortable, innovative, and affordable. It’s a lot to ask of one product, but we were relentless in our search for a contact lens that checked all of those boxes.”

While the company does not say in the report which route it chose for design, the leadership likely did a cost benefit analysis of designing it in-house vs. working with an outside design company or freelance designers. The key considerations were likely the cost to design, the strategic importance of certain attributes (like breathability, moisture content, shape), the cost to manufacture, and the sustainability considerations.

In terms of the approach to find the right manufacturer, Warby Parker needed to find a partner that met the company’s quality, cost, and environmental standards. The sustainability standards included finding packaging with significant less waste and incorporating recycled materials from the manufacturing process. The company’s approach to finding a manufacturer probably included research and a ranking of multiple companies with the above criteria in mind, then doing a comparison across the top choices and additional due diligence before choosing a partner.

Through these examples, you can see how an approach ladders up to strategies, outcomes and eventually the company’s mission.

6.    Get down to tactics

Tactics are focused initiatives, projects, or programs that allow organizations to execute a strategic plan..

Tactics are the key to execution. They are the actions you take to make it all happen.

Within each decision Warby Parker made, the company used different tactics to move it from an idea to actual product or program. While each decision could have dozens of tactics, we’ve highlighted one or two examples for each.

For the Pupils Project at Warby Parker, the decision for how to have the largest impact possible required several tactics or initiatives to make that happen. The company choose to have the nonprofit partners run the screenings while Warby Parker provided the glasses and had the students choose their styles from 40 options in a truck show. One necessary tactic was bringing together the design and logistics teams to narrow down the style options that would be appealing to kids, cost effective, and easy to produce in large numbers.

Another important tactic was likely determining how to produce and deliver the glasses to the students, whether the glasses should deliver to their homes or the schools, and how to ensure the glasses fit correctly after they arrived. The Pupils Project’s overall goal is for children to have glasses to enable their ability to learn, and in order to do that, they need to actually use the glasses for the long-term, so it’s important to have styles that appeal to children, as well as well-fitting frames.

Appraise your process: uncover your strengths with our free go-to-market  assessment 

In terms of tactics for the Scout contact lens launch, once the company made the decision on a design team, the project leaders determined tactics to make the contacts idea a reality. The designers had specific research guidelines to find material and construction that fit the criteria of “high quality, moist, breathable, comfortable, innovative, and affordable.” The final product is made with a material that resists drying and constructed using new technology to increase eye comfort during wear.

The company design team also created flat pack packaging that is more hygienic, uses less raw materials, and takes up less space compared to traditional contact lens packaging. Even the placement of the contact (upside down) was intentional to reduce the chance of contamination from dirt or bacteria when the wearer puts them in their eye. Each of these items were likely framed as tactics and initiatives used to create the Scout lenses. Each was directly related to Warby Parker’s approach to the decision, the overall strategy, and aligned with the larger mission and vision.

On the surface, each tactic might not seem connected, but as you dig deeper, you’ll find that effective tactics should always tie back to the strategy, objectives, mission, and vision of the company.

Graphic of the four steps of business operations: strategic planning, operations, design, initiative execution and business intelligence, with an emphasis on strategic planning

This is the second in a 5-part blog series defining Spur Reply’s unique perspective on the often overlooked, but incredibly valuable world of business operations. 

Part 1: Overall business operations

Part 2: this blog focuses on strategic planning, part 3: operations design, part 4: initiative execution, part 5: business intelligence.

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Dan Overgaag

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Industrial Marketing Strategy--An Overview

By: E. Raymond Corey

Provides an integrated discussion of the basic elements of industrial marketing strategy and develops a strategic marketing planning model. May be used as either an introductory or a summary reading…

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  • Publication Date: Mar 31, 1989
  • Discipline: Marketing
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Provides an integrated discussion of the basic elements of industrial marketing strategy and develops a strategic marketing planning model. May be used as either an introductory or a summary reading for an industrial marketing course or course segment.

Mar 31, 1989 (Revised: Oct 8, 1996)

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basic elements of strategic marketing planning

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Launching and managing a business involves a labyrinth of planning and strategic decision-making. While many entrepreneurs focus on product development, marketing, and sales, several critical elements often go underprepared or entirely overlooked. These aspects can significantly impact the long-term sustainability and growth of a business. From handling private company stock to establishing robust recruitment policies and ensuring the safety of traveling employees, here’s a deep dive into the critical business elements that demand your attention.

Managing Private Company Stock: A Strategic Approach

One often overlooked aspect of business planning is the management of private company stock. As your business grows, offering stock options can be a way to attract top talent and align the interests of employees with those of the company. However, it's crucial to have a clear strategy for how you're going to deal with issuing stock, allowing for its sale, or buying it back in the future. Considerations should include setting up a vesting schedule to retain talent, understanding the tax implications for both the company and the employees, and deciding on a fair valuation method for the stock. You may also need to draft guidance or information regarding whether you’d allow individuals and companies to sell private company stock . Planning for these eventualities early can prevent complex legal and financial issues down the line and ensure that stock options serve as an effective incentive and reward mechanism.

Recruitment Policies: Laying the Groundwork for Success

Another element that requires foresight and strategic planning is the development of effective recruitment policies. Hiring the right people is fundamental to any business's success, but determining the best approach to attract and retain talent can be challenging. Implementing clear, fair recruitment practices helps in building a strong company culture and ensuring a fit between the company’s needs and the employees’ skills and values. This involves:

  • Creating detailed job descriptions to attract suitable candidates
  • Establishing a structured interview process that assesses both skills and cultural fit
  • Developing an onboarding program that integrates new hires into the company effectively
  • Ensuring diversity and inclusion are at the forefront of the recruitment strategy

By putting thoughtful recruitment policies in place, businesses can enhance their team's quality, reduce turnover, and foster a productive and positive working environment.

Cultivating a Resilient Company Culture

Building Strength from Within

A strong, positive company culture is often one of the most overlooked aspects of business success. It's the glue that holds a team together during challenging times and fuels innovation and collaboration. Cultivating a resilient company culture involves more than just team-building activities; it requires consistent efforts in transparent communication, recognizing and rewarding employee contributions, and fostering an environment where feedback is encouraged and acted upon. A culture that supports risk-taking, learning from failures, and celebrating successes can significantly enhance employee engagement and loyalty, which in turn, drives productivity and business growth.

Financial Contingency Planning

Preparing for the Unexpected

Many businesses , especially in their early stages, fail to prepare adequately for financial downturns or unexpected expenses. Financial contingency planning is critical to ensuring that your business can weather storms without crippling operations. This involves identifying potential financial risks, setting aside emergency funds, and having access to credit facilities or insurance products that can provide a financial cushion. Regularly reviewing and updating your financial plans to reflect current market conditions and business realities can help you navigate financial challenges more effectively.

Ensuring Safe and Effective Business Travel

In today’s globalized economy, business travel is often a necessity. However, the safety and security of employees on the move can be an overlooked concern. Beyond booking flights and accommodations, ensuring that traveling employees can communicate securely and access essential resources is paramount. The use of Virtual Private Networks ( VPNs ) is a practical measure for protecting sensitive information and ensuring employees can safely access the company network from anywhere in the world. Additionally, providing employees with travel insurance, clear guidelines on travel safety practices, and emergency contacts are crucial steps in safeguarding their well-being.

While the excitement of growing a business often focuses on product development and market expansion, the backbone of a successful business lies in effectively managing the less glamorous elements. Handling private company stock strategically, implementing robust recruitment policies, and ensuring the safety of traveling employees are just a few of the areas that require careful planning and attention. By addressing these overlooked aspects, businesses can build a strong foundation for long-term success, characterized by a dedicated team, operational resilience, and a commitment to employee well-being.

Copyright © 2023 SCORE Association, SCORE.org

Funded, in part, through a Cooperative Agreement with the U.S. Small Business Administration. All opinions, and/or recommendations expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the SBA.

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