Marketing Strategy

The Art of Crafting an Effective Marketing Strategy

Written by Samuel Muriithi for Gaebler Ventures

You have already decided on the product or service you will introduce to the market. You have also ascertained what your target market is. How do you go about penetrating this market and reaching the customers? It all has to do with your marketing strategy.

Getting to sell a product or service successfully in a given market is normally quite difficult.

It requires an effective marketing strategy and corresponding implementation efforts on your part to do so. Any entrepreneur worth his/her salt knows that business is not just about selling but rather making enough sales to cover all the expenses incurred and getting a good profit too. An entrepreneur will often realize that something he did on a particular day resulted in increased sales but that thing was not quite enough to generate the anticipated amount of sales. That thing may have also forced the business to incur expenses that were almost at par with the sales generated thus diminishing the anticipated gross profit. Crafting an effective marketing strategy is the only way to curtail such sales blunders.

The marketing strategy you decide to go with should be informed by the type of product/service you want to sell and the market you want to sell the same to. Say, for example, that you want to sell mobile phones, accessories that virtually everyone uses in this day and age. Your marketing strategy will be very much dependent on the nature of your target market. In a low-income market you will most likely base your approach on the price - in this case this should be low enough to be affordable.

If you intend to sell mobile phones in an affluent market then price will most likely take a backseat to the features offered by individual phone models. Your marketing strategy will perhaps be more effective if you can offer different phone models that offer different features applicable to the business persons, students, teenagers, or frequent overseas travelers in that target market. Crafting an effective marketing strategy will sometimes require an increased investment of time and effort but the profitability that results will probably be greater than if you were to use a simple blanket approach to a certain target market.

This is an era where cutthroat competition is the order of the day. In many respects price is no longer the major determining factor for sales volumes. This distinction is accorded to the convenience that can be accrued from using a given product or service. Your marketing strategy should ideally be based on the fact that in a market that hosts several competing products, the most successful of those will be the one which offers the customers the most advantages. The smart entrepreneur will always seek to establish the advantages that lack from competing products and then incorporate these in his/her product. This is essentially how you go about crafting an effective marketing strategy for cutthroat markets.

To design a viable marketing strategy you should resist the urge to gauge a product/service's desirability on your standards. Instead, let the prospective customers preferences be your yardstick.

Samuel Muriithi is a business owner in Nairobi, Kenya. He has extensive international business experience in the United States and India.

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