What is a marketing strategy?
The easiest way to explain this is to explore the differences between marketing strategies and marketing plans.
| Your marketing strategy will define what you’re going to do to reach your objectives. Your marketing plan will detail how you’re going to get there. |
It needn’t be a complex spreadsheet or an expansive document, it’s more an acknowledgement in writing of how you plan to approach and achieve your objectives – so it can be as short or as long as it needs to be.
But before you create your strategy, firstly there’s the need to set the business objectives. This is most likely to be a revenue target but could also be market share, social followers, number of new customers, and so on. (You can have more than one, and different ones for different parts of the business – but don’t over complicate things). Objectives should always be S.M.A.R.T.
- Specific – What exact result do you want to achieve?
- Measurable – How will you know when you’ve achieved it?
- Attainable – Is it possible to achieve it?
- Relevant – Is it the most important thing to achieve right now?
- Timely – When do you want to achieve it by?
Try not to get caught up in not knowing the exact details of how long the objective might take to reach and if it’s achievable in that time. The important thing is to set a S.M.A.R.T. objective. It’s a target to aim for the future (so you can’t possibly know exactly) and there will have to be a certain amount of guesswork that’s based on the information that you have access to.
Let’s take a look at a business example of marketing objectives, strategies and plans…
Yellow Leaf Hotel is a ten bedroom boutique hotel based in Cornwall and has been running for four years.
Business objective: To increase turnover by 15% every year – this year £350,000. To do this they’d like to increase the average length of stay from 2 to 2.5 nights and average spend per booking from £180 to £220.
Marketing strategy: Increasing average length of stay and average spend per booking by encouraging guests to turn their short break into a longer holiday. They’ll do this by focusing on communicating how much there is to do in the area, targeting the type of people likely to take longer trips, and offering promotions and special packages for longer stays.
Marketing plans: The hotel’s marketing plans detail the marketing techniques and tactics, including communication channels and promotions to reach customers, with budgets and timings.