What is Marketing Strategy ?
Marketing strategy is the comprehensive plan formulated particularly for achieving the marketing objectives of the organization. It provides a blueprint for attaining these marketing objectives. It is the building block of a marketing plan.
It is designed after detailed marketing research. A marketing strategy helps an organization to concentrate it’s scarce resouces on the best possible opportunities so as to increase the sales.
A marketing strategy is designed by:
- Choosing the target market: By target market we mean to whom the organization wants to sell its products. Not all the market segments are fruitful to an organization.
There are certain market segments which guarantee quick profits, there are certain segments which may be having great potential but there may be high barriers to entry. A careful choice has to be made by the organization.
An indepth marketing research has to be done of the traits of the buyers and the particular needs of the buyers in the target market.
- Gathering the marketing mix: By marketing mix we mean how the organization proposes to sell its products. The organization has to gather the four P’s of marketing in appropriate combination. Gathering the marketing mix is a crucial part of marketing task. Various decisions have to be made such as –
- What is the most appropriate mix of the four P’s in a given situation
- What distribution channels are available and which one should be used
- What developmental strategy should be used in the target market
- How should the price structure be designed
Importance of Marketing Strategy
- Marketing strategy provides an organization an edge over it’s competitors.
- Strategy helps in developing goods and services with best profit making potential.
- Marketing strategy helps in discovering the areas affected by organizational growth and thereby helps in creating an organizational plan to cater to the customer needs.
- It helps in fixing the right price for organization’s goods and services based on information collected by market research.
- Strategy ensures effective departmental co-ordination.
- It helps an organization to make optimum utilization of its resources so as to provide a sales message to it’s target market.
- A marketing strategy helps to fix the advertising budget in advance, and it also develops a method which determines the scope of the plan, i.e., it determines the revenue generated by the advertising plan.
In short, a marketing strategy clearly explains how an organization reaches it’s predetermined objectives.
