Marketing Plans

Marketing Strategies

Every marketing plan should outline the marketing strategies that the company will pursue. Remember, marketing strategies are very different from marketing tactics and marketing programs!

Marketing strategies define the approach by which you will accomplish your marketing objectives.

After defining your marketing strategies, you then will be in a position to discuss marketing tactics and marketing programs. So, before writing the marketing strategies section of your marketing plan, make sure you understand marketing strategies versus marketing tactics.

Marketing strategies explain how you will achieve marketing goals. Marketing tactics explain what you will do to execute a given marketing strategy. Marketing programs aggregate marketing tactics into something larger than an individual tactic and are created to ensure well-timed execution of marketing tactics.

Just to be clear, "start a company blog" is not a marketing strategy. It's a marketing tactic. A marketing program might be to "offer a seminar to educate prospective customers on the value of our products, write a bylined article to highlight the value of our products, and promote the value of our products on a new company blog."

In this case, the marketing strategy in play is to "convince consumers that our products are more valuable to them than they realize...and more valuable than competitive offerings."

So what are some other examples of marketing strategies? They are things like "emulate the competition to make sure we keep parity with them," "bring our products to a new market," "make our pricing more competitive," "leverage our partner companies' brands to bring legitimacy to our own brand" or "get more customers to try our product and increase trial-to-sale conversion rates."

You get the idea. These marketing strategy samples may not be right for your company, but they convey the general idea that a marketing strategy is a high-level answer to the question "How will you achieve your marketing objectives?" It stays out of nitty-gritty tactical details.

If you own a small or mid-sized business, it's a good idea to limit your marketing plan's discussion on marketing strategies to no more than three marketing strategies. If you have more marketing strategies, you may be taking on more than you can realistically accomplish.

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