An ideal marketing strategy has the following five key elements:
- Real Market Segments
- Tailoring the offer
- Unique
- Future challenges
- SWOT alignment
An ideal marketing strategy has the following five key elements:
- Real Market Segments: Real segments are based on customer needs and motivational drivers. This contrasts with the common but much less useful segmentation process of many companies (classification into groups, based on whatever data is available – i.e. age, gender, income (in B2C) or industry, size and usage (in B2B). In data-driven segmentation, the customers will deliver varying and unpredictable (and therefore less cost-effective) responses to any offer made to them.
- Tailoring the offer to each defined segment: Your marketing strategy should make a particular offer to defined segments based on the known customer needs of that segment. This should result in the delivery of an adapted marketing mix to each defined customer segment. This follows the logic that given a choice the customer is most likely to choose the offer that best matches their particular needs.
- How unique is your offer in comparison to that of your competitors? Uniqueness works because it effectively side-steps your competition, rather than head-to-head. By defying or negating direct comparison with the competition, a unique offer often comes to dominate your target market/segment, achieving strong loyalty and relative price inelasticity. To test your offer’s uniqueness, ask yourself: what would happen if your business disappeared overnight?
- Is your marketing strategy developed in such a way to cope with future challenges? Bear in mind that markets, customer needs, distribution channels and competitors’ offerings are constantly changing. The most robust marketing strategies anticipate change and target and design the offer accordingly.
- Marketing strategies work best when they have SWOT alignment. Here your strategy should aim to make good use of what your business is better at than its competition whilst avoiding the effects of any relative weaknesses. By doing this the business targets segments where it is especially well placed to compete.
To infer, keep it simple, focus on your customer needs, communicate the point of difference and have a marketing strategy that will address the future customer and market challenges
