A Marketing Strategy is a plan of action designed to promote and sell a product or service, this will need to encompass every stage of your product delivery. Let’s consider the following marketing strategy topics:

• Marketing Plan
• Internal & External Environments
• Mission Statement
• Marketing Objective
• Research
• Planning and Development
• Packaging
• Pricing
• Marketing Mix
• Distribution
• After-sales

Marketing Plan

The marketing plan is the application of your marketing strategy. A strategy is the thinking, and planning is the doing

Internal & External Environments

These are very difference spaces.

Internal is within the walls of your company – its where you develop positioning statements and craft your messaging. A positioning statement is usually quite short, maybe one or two sentences, that aims to articulate your product or service’s unique value to your customers. A typical positioning statement format might be:

For [insert Target Market], the [insert Brand] is the [insert Point of Differentiation] among all[insert Frame of Reference] because [insert Reason to Believe]

So, put this into practice for a company called Tully Made that creates specialised hand made bowls:

For affluent women aged 35-49 the Tully Made Company is the only company that offers bespoke resin infused handcrafted wooden products for the home among all the wood craftspeople in Ireland because we know how important it is to have unique artistic pieces in the home to feel proud of.

Remember, a positioning statement is an internal statement that will help to form many of your external communications but as you can see it is not particularly customer friendly.

External is what the market sees and hears, this is where you need to carefully craft messages so that they are customer friendly and easily digestible.

Mission Statement

Think of your mission statement as your goal, essentially what you want to ultimately achieve. A good mission statement for Tully Made would be:

To be Ireland’s premier craftsmen of handcrafted resin infused wooden objects for the home or office

Marketing Objective

The marketing objective is how you are going to realise your mission statement, and this needs to be SMART:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Realistic
• Timely

For example: “We’re going to introduce a suite of products online and offline that will generate a profit of 10% by the end of Q3 2017”

Research

The process of a typical market research activity is to collect, organise, and document data to help you find out if there is a real and sustainable market for your product or service. A typical research program will have the following steps:

1. Define the objective & what the problem is that you’re trying to solve.
2. Determine your research design, figure out how you will gather your data. Will you use surveys, data research, focus groups, interviews, field research, or all of the above?
3. Design & prepare your research instrument(s) as defined in step 2.
4. Collect your data, consider using spreadsheets or databases to help you organise.
5. Analyse your data. For this you could use excel or bespoke analysis tools.
6. Visualise your data and communicate results. It is a great idea to use charts and tables to help readers quickly understand your conclusions and reasoning for your recommendations.

Planning and Development

With your research done, you need to start planning and developing your new product or service to meet the expectations of your target market(s). Alternatively, you may be modifying an existing product or service. For many people in this situation, they are entering into a fine tuning exercise to ensure what they have fits the market as well as possible.

Packaging

What you wrap your product or service in can mean success or failure in meeting your goals. You should take great care to ensure you meet the expectations of your market.

Carefully consider your choice of colours. Should you choose bright colours or more subtle tones, or perhaps none at all?

What about the quality of packaging? Consider the thickness of the material you are using, and the quality of paper or card. Perhaps rounded edges would give your packaging an edge?

Consider the size of your packaging, sometime less really is more.

Pricing

Remember what pricing is: it is the perceived value of your product, or how much the customer will feel comfortable paying for it. Consider your profit margin and the TRUE cost of producing a product which often includes the following:

• Materials and Manufacturing
• Storage and Transportation
• Marketing and Sales
• After-sales, Support and Training
• Taxes, Fees and Charges

Marketing Mix

Your marketing mix is like a tool bag of marketing activities that you can use to help you promote your product or service to get it sold. Typical promotional activities include:

• Advertising (TV, Radio, Banners, Social Media Ads, etc.)
• Vouchers (paper or digital)
• Sales, special offers
• Product Placement
• Sponsorship
• Good Deed activities (ties in with Corporate Social Responsibility)

Distribution

This is all about how you intend to move your product or service from manufacturing to customer. The channels available to you will be largely determined by the nature of the product; for example if it is a physical product it will need to be shipped, or if it is a virtual product or software it could be either downloaded or shipped, or both.  You could consider using retail outlets or eCommerce to help with distribution.

After-sales

Wikipedia defines After-sales as the “provision of services, support and spare parts after making an initial sale”, but from a marketing perspective it is much more than that. It is an opportunity to promote trust and confidence in you and your product that can contribute to further sales.

You should carefully consider the level of after sales that you can commit to, bearing in mind that this has a financial cost. You could provide after-sales on a subscription based longer term support or education facility. After-sales is something that can make or break repeat sales or referrals so it should be taken very seriously.

Up Next

Next we will continue with the development of a marketing strategy and consider the use of market analysis and and risk assessment.