Small business owners can assure that their marketing strategies change during products life cycle and be more successful in business. Marketing strategies change because demand and competition changes with each stage.

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Not having a marketing strategy is one of the biggest marketing mistakes that I see small business owners make.

Do you use a marketing strategy? Do you understand the difference in a marketing strategy, a marketing tactic, and a marketing idea?

I’ve been monitoring some business forums looking for what people most want from marketing. I’ve found that the most inquiries and questions relate to “Give me a marketing strategy to do ___________.” Yet context reveals that they are really wanting marketing ideas.

So my posts for the next few days will define the difference between and explain the need for a marketing strategy, marketing tactics, and marketing ideas. This post will define a marketing strategy and explain why you need one.

What Is A Marketing Strategy?

A marketing strategy is the overall marketing plan that will enable you to reach your marketing and business goals. It represents how your plan to accomplish what you need to do in order for your marketing to succeed.

For instance, if you are an Internet marketer, you have to get traffic to your site in order to be successful. That is a marketing goal that all Internet marketers share. But how you plan to reach that goal may differ from many other Internet marketers.

You may have a strategy that involves being ranked on the first page of Google for a specific keyword. Or you may instead concentrate on social networking to bring traffic.
These are strategies that require multiple tactics to implement.

You have to know your marketing strategy before you can select the best marketing ideas to use as your marketing tactics. Tomorrow’s post will provide more information on marketing tactics.

To read about executive summaries for marketing plans, click here.

Would you like to learn marketing from one of the biggest names in marketing, Dan Kennedy? Dan’s offering loads of marketing in  his Magnetic Marketing System.

Get more marketing information like this. Subscribe to my blog, and I’ll send you weekly post summaries and a copy of my matrix Market Segmentation report. Just complete the form below:

Posted 7-29-08:
Do You Use A Marketing Strategy?

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This post on the elements of intentional marketing covers the first major element and is the second in a series of posts on intentional marketing.

The three major elements of intentional marketing include:

Planning marketing to meet goals and objectives,

Marketing to a specific, identifiable and known target market,

Marketing to create a specific action.

The post covers the first element of intentional marketing.

Elements of Intentional Marketing
Strategic Planning

Intentional marketing requires that you know the purpose of all your marketing efforts. In other words, intentional marketing is strategic marketing. All marketing activities combine to reach an overall goal, and each individual marketing effort meets an objective that leads to that goal.

Although, all marketing should be intentional and designed to meet specified goals and objectives sometimes small business owners fail to plan their marketing to evolve in a systematic way to meet goals and objectives.

Some small business owners just move haphazardly from one marketing effort to another without a plan or a specific goal beyond making sales. As a result, they fall prey to advertising and marketing sales people. They make their products or services sound like they will solve all of the small business owners’ problems. At best their solutions provide a small surge in sales that quickly fades.

Intentional marketing avoids such hit-and-miss methods and bases every marketing decision on short-term objectives and longer-term goals. So your marketing efforts will build on one another and have long-term, as well as short-term effects, on your small business.

If you’re not planning all your marketing activities to grow you business toward a specified goal, then you are not getting the best return on your marketing investments. You can improve your ROI by using all three elements of intentional marketing, starting with this first one.

Would you like to learn marketing from one of the biggest names in marketing, Dan Kennedy? Dan’s offering loads of marketing tools in his Magnetic Marketing System.

My next two posts cover the second and third elements of intentional marketing. You can link to the next Elements of Intentional Marketing post in this sentence.

Get more marketing information like this. Subscribe to my blog, and I’ll send you weekly post summaries and a copy of my matrix Market Segmentation report. Just complete the form below:

Posted 7-15-08:
Elements of Intentional Marketing 1:
Goals and Objectives

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Market segmentation and intentional marketing are related because intentional marketing requires target marketing. And target marketing requires market segmentation.

If you are unfamiliar with intentional marketing, it’s just what its name implies. It’s marketing with intention to accomplish specific goals by getting a target market to take specified actions. Thus, the three major elements of intentional marketing are:

• marketing to meet a specific goal with objectives that move you step-by-step to that goal,
• marketing to a identified and known target market, and
• marketing to get target market members to take specific actions that fulfill objectives and lead to your goal.

Elements of Intentional Marketing
Have A Marketing Plan

The first element requires that you have a marketing plan – that you know what you want to accomplish with your marketing, and you know how you plan to accomplish it.

Elements of Intentional Marketing
Use Market Segmentation

It’s for the second and third elements that market segmentation generates much valuable information. First, market segmentation helps you to identify the people most likely to buy your product or service. They comprise your target market.

Second, market segmentation helps you to relate to your target market members so that your marketing offers will effectively persuade them to take actions that you propose. These actions may or may not include buying a product or service.

Intentional marketing actions may relate to objectives other than actually selling a product.

For example, in the Internet marketing business, building a list is fundamental to success. So list building is an important marketing objective.

Most Internet marketers don’t try to sell you something the first time that you visit their sites. Instead they offer to give you something in return for your name and email address. After you are on a list, smart list owners will build a relationship with you by offering additional helpful information.

So building a relationship is a second important marketing objective. It requires that list owners learn as much as possible about their list members. Some Internet marketers use surveys to gather this information and offer rewards to you for completing the survey.

Others choose a less formal and less reliable method of learning about their list members. Two common examples include encouraging you to provide feedback by replying to messages or by going to their blogs for information and leaving a comment.

Only after they have built a good relationship with you, will the best internet marketers attempt to sell you something which is, of course, their ultimate goal. Internet marketers like all business owners must make a profit or eventually get out of business.

Market segmentation aids relationship building for any type of business. It reveals psychographic, sociographic, and buying behavior characteristics that help you to meet your intentional marketing objectives and ultimate goal.

You can read more about Intentional Marketing through the link in this sentence.

Would you like to learn marketing from one of the biggest names in marketing, Dan Kennedy? Dan’s offering loads of marketing tools in his Magnetic Marketing System.

Get more marketing information like this. Subscribe to my blog, and I’ll send you weekly post summaries and a copy of my matrix Market Segmentation report. Just complete the form below:

Posted 7-14-08:
Market Segmentation And
Intentional Marketing

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Definition of strategy and strategic planning, part 1 covered knowledge of the business, its industry, the situation, the problem and the target public. With this information, the business owner is now prepared to set the campaign goal and objectives.

Strategic Planning
Objectives

Now remember, each campaign is designed to reach an objective that advances the business to the core goal. This long-term goal could guide the business for a five to ten year period. The goal for each campaign then is an objective toward the core goal. Each campaign goal is for a shorter period, such as one year. The objectives for the campaign are for still shorter terms such as a month or 6 weeks.

But no matter the time period, strategic objectives all have common traits. They are:

• be based on research,
• concentrate on strengths and weaknesses,
• complement organizational goals,
• be stated clearly and concisely,
• be improvement oriented,
• be specific and measurable,
• be attainable, and
• complement the gore goal.

Strategic Planning
Tactics

Next communications, activities and tactics must be planned to reach each objective. This includes:

• informing and persuading target market members,
• training target market members in skills to translate intention into action,
• using the media most closely identified with the position of the public,
• using a communication source that enjoys high credibility for the public,
• playing down the differences between the communication and attitudes of the public, and
• supporting messages with events.

Strategic Planning
Timing And Budgeting

Next all must be planned to make the best use of resources. This includes timing, delegating and budgeting.

Strategic Planning
Timing

Time planning includes:

• identifying every step necessary to complete the campaign,
• identifying the time that each step will take,
• arrange steps for each tactic together,
• identify steps that come due about the same time,
• listing steps from the beginning to the end.

Strategic Planning
Budgeting

Several budgeting methods are available, but the following guidelines relate to all methods:

1. Know the cost of what you propose to buy – photography, artwork, printing, folding, mailing lists, labeling and sorting, delivery, postage, etc.
2. Communicate the budget as what it costs to achieve specific results, linking costs to performance and outcomes.
3. Use computer power to manage the program – develop master spreadsheets, tracking individual projects and linking to master spreadsheet. This allows estimating cash-flow, and monitoring expenditures against cost estimates.
4. Use budgets to direct staff efforts, to schedule staff resources, to contract for services, to track project costs and to establish accountability.
5. Review them frequently with clients and top management.

Strategic Planning
Evaluation

The last step in any campaign is to evaluate how well it reached its goal. This requires that data is collected at the beginning of the campaign to establish a benchmark and is then collected again at the end of the campaign to measure progress from the benchmark.

The type of data collected depends upon the campaign goal. A combination of qualitative and quantitative usually provides the best evaluation data.

The most effective evaluations also compare completion of each objective with the benchmark and monitors progress at several points throughout the campaign. These frequent evaluation points enable corrections to be made during the campaign and generally assure a more successful final result.

Evaluation data from one campaign provides not only a measurement of campaign success, but also benchmark data and background research for the next campaign.

Click to read more about the definition of strategy.

To read more about goals, and planning  click the links below:

Strategic Planning Process: Setting Goals

Strategic Planning Process: Types and Elements of Plans

A Guide For Information Planning

How would you like 7 Easy Steps To Strategic Planning?  This information product will power your business to greater profit and help you discover the key skills for your business success.

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Originally Submitted to EzineArticles:
Definition of Strategy and
Strategic Planning – Part 2

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