Stratergy Development :

Strategy development, also known as strategic planning, is fundamental to creating and running a business. Simply put, it’s a game plan that sets specific goals and objectives but like a game plan, it is capable of being changed in response to shifting market dynamics. Here are the basic steps to strategic planning.

Marketing strategies give your small business a direction toward effective promotion. Marketing strategies differ from one business to the next and should be customized to suit the needs of the particular company. The development of a marketing strategy involves the isolation of a target market segment, a set of clear-cut goals, a fair amount of consumer research, and the implementation of initiatives aimed at getting the word out.

Why Strategy Development Is Important?

Because one aspect of a marketing plan affects all of the others, coordinating your activities is critical to eliminating interference and maximizing your profits. A marketing strategy looks at all of the areas of your selling activities and helps each one support the next, making sure all of your departments are aware of what each is doing. Understanding how to create an integrated marketing strategy will help you make better individual decisions regarding specific marketing tactics.

Streamlines Product Development

A marketing strategy helps you create products and services with the best chances for making a profit. This is because marketing strategy starts with marketplace research, taking into consideration your optimal target customer, what your competition is doing and what trends might be on the horizon. Using this information, you determine the benefit customers and clients want, what they’re willing to pay and how you can differentiate your product or service from the competition

Helps Determine Optimal Prices

Part of a marketing strategy is setting the right price for your product or service based on what you learned in your market research. If you learned that customers want a high-end product in your category, your pricing strategy might require you to sell at prices that create a high-end perceived value. If your target customer is bargain conscious and is willing to accept fewer bells and whistles on your product in exchange for paying less, your pricing strategy will require you to sell at or below the competition’s price.

Establishes Effective Distribution

Once you know what product features you’ll offer, who your target customer is and what your price points will be, you can select where you want to sell to maximize your marketing effectiveness. Younger customers will be more likely to shop using a smartphone or on a website, paying with PayPal or a credit card. Older customers might prefer to shop at retail outlets. If your market research shows you need to be in retail stores but you don’t have a sales force, you can use a wholesaler or distributor.

Assists with Marketing Communications

Your market research will help you create your brand, or image you want to establish about your business. Without marketplace research and a strategic marketing plan, you might respond to solicitations from advertising salespeople on an individual, reactionary basis, sending messages that don’t fit in with the brand identity you’ve created based on your product development efforts. A marketing strategy lets you determine if a particular magazine, radio station or website fits into your selling plans.

Organizational Impact

When you have a marketing strategy, your departments can better work with each other, because they are all working from the same plan. For example, your advertising people will talk with your product development people to determine what message you should send about your benefit. Your sales people will talk with the people responsible for managing your image to determine if they can offer discounts, coupons or rebates without damaging your brand.

Steps In Stratergy Development

Define the Need

The first step in developing a marketing strategy is to define the need. If a need has been defined by other purveyors, your task is to develop a strategy to convince the client that your product is better than your competitor's. Witness the fast food wars as an example of competition for consumers with a defined need. Being first to market may give you a lead, but being the most effective at addressing the need will lead you to success.

Demographics are Critical

Identification of buyers is critical. If you deal in consumer products, you need to know the age, income level and social status of your most likely buyer. In the case of business to business transactions, you need to know company maturity and size, either in terms of employees or sales, before you can effectively execute a strategy.

Cost of Customers

A key measure of an effective marketing strategy is determining the cost to acquire each customer. Since your plan must dovetail into the company profit plan, evaluating the price of each sale is critical. The second element in the calculation is the cost of retaining a client. You can be more competitive and retain profitability if you have repeat clients because it is less costly to keep an existing client than to gain a new one.