Working with a plan
Let’s first make sure you understand the difference between a marketing strategy and a marketing plan, since people do get confused and it is crucial that a company’s marketers and its decision-makers are on the same page regarding these two concepts.
The marketing strategy: This regards a range of approaches from medium to long-term for realising a company’s goals. Your marketing strategy is informed by what you want your business to achieve.
The marketing plan: This is the part where marketing campaigns, initiatives and promotions are developed to achieve what your marketing strategy has outlined.
It’s as simple as figuring out what your company’s goals are and then proceeding to work on how you will accomplish it. In a nutshell, strategy is the thinking behind your actions and planning is the doing.
After constructing a marketing plan, a company can proceed to implementation with the confidence that there’s method behind the madness – that everything they do follows a design specific to their business needs and objectives.
Plan your marketing spend … and save
A marketing strategy and marketing plan will save you money – that’s no secret. Strategic marketing planning saves you from making marketing decisions that are impulsive and possibly damaging. Simply jumping from promotion to promotion and launching advertisements left and right can be more expensive than effective.
The advantages of strategic marketing for your business
- Strategic marketing will help your business grow successfully by eliminating ineffective tactics and unproductive marketing methods while optimising value-creating initiatives.
- It helps companies by providing guidance that is focused on the most appropriate prospects to engage in.
- It curbs wasting time and money by directing the available resources to marketing campaign investments that strengthen the company’s principal objectives.
- Strategic marketing reveals the channels that a company can best use to gain a competitive advantage.
- It creates more opportunities to differentiate a company form competitors, producing targeted awareness among key audiences and emphasising the advantage that the company holds for them.
- Strategic marketing becomes the base on which a company positions all its communication strategies and implementations, resulting in consistent and recognisable messaging.
While your strategic marketing plan must be as far-reaching in terms of time lines as possible, it also needs to be flexible to accommodate sudden changes in company structure, goals or capacity as well as changes in terms of socio-economic demands.
Lemonade Hub will get you thinking strategically marketing-wise in a way that works for your business, whether you’ve been around for a while or presently laying the foundations to start building your brand.
And once we’re working with a plan, we’ll create and implement your marketing campaigns creatively, effectively and affordably.
