Marketing Strategies
Begin with Marketing Reengineering Process

Marketing strategies outline the manner in which your marketing mix is used to attract and satisfy your target market, thus fulfilling your business's objectives, which is to derive net profit from your business activities.

At the heart of marketing strategies lies your product. The product is the ENGINE that drives a profitable business. Without an excellent product (the engine), your business (the airplane) may not go very far, even if it has a great marketing system (the glider).

Thus, developing an effective marketing strategy starts with the product (engine), using the 4-step Marketing Reengineering Process outlined below:-.

Step 1: Sensing

The cost of marketing lies in sending the message to the target market. The clearer the target marketing, the lower the marketing costs.

Therefore, the first step "Sensing" is to perform information gathering about the target market. You will need to perform a few analysis:-

SWOT analysis
Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats

PEST analysis
Political, Economic, Social and Technological factors

Marketing Physics
Overt Benefit, Real Reason to Believe, Dramatic Difference

There is no need to obtain a perfect answer for your questions, follow the 80/20 rule. Revisit and question certain assumptions in the process to uncover potential blind spots. Based on the beliefs, attitudes, values and culture of your business, setup your strategic objectives.

Step 2: Planning

Once you are able to pin down and clearly define your target market, you can go on to plan the path of least resistance to enter your target market.

From the information you have gathered and ideas you have developed during the "Sensing" step, start weaving these ideas together in a coherent manner to create marketing plan. The plan should contain a sequence of steps for implementation.

List down also R.I.C.E required to implement the marketing plan.

Resources

Ideas

Contacts

Expertise

Step 3: Implementing

With the marketing plan in your hand, you can tend start implementation. You should create a Marketing Funnel, that converts your visiting suspects to qualified prospects to paying customers to loyals members to raving fans. The key thing to do during implementation is to test and measure the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you have defined in Step 1 "Sensing" under strategic objectives.

You need to put in place tracking mechanisms for all the different marketing channels that you have and then perform testing for different versions of your marketing messages.
You must be able to apply Marketing Mathematics to measure the response of your marketing efforts, so that you can continually improve the effectiveness of your marketing campaign.

Step 4: Reflecting

Lastly, with the results coming in from Step 3 "Implementing", you will then assess if the strategic objectives (such as specific key performance indicators) laid out in Step 1 "Sensing" are met.

Based on the numbers from Step 3, you will know which of your marketing efforts are winners and which are non-performers. You can then decide to cut the losers and put more resources into the winners, and repeat the cycle of "Sensing", "Planning", "Implementing" and "Reflecting".

Successful marketing strategies must contain ways to out-manoeuvre your competition. It is an on-going process that builds and leverages on your competitive advantages, and must be adaptable, sustainable and forward looking.