Helen Gemmell, Schueco UK
To undertake strategic planning, you need to define the market you are targeting, who you are targeting, the competitive environment, the needs and wants of the target audience, market forces in terms of costs and pricing, technological advancement and legislation, how you can service the market and what makes you unique.
I have broken it down into several steps:
- Market research and analysis, covering market trends, customer behaviour and competitors – you need to understand what is going on in the marketplace and how it is changing.
- Define clear, measurable objectives and share these across the business, as you will need to involve other people in the business to deliver the plan. Demonstrating how the marketing objectives contribute to delivering the overall business plan with obtain buy in from around the business.
- Positioning – describe what is the business’ unique value proposition, how do you differentiate from the competition and how do you appeal to the target market. Being able to solve a problem, improve service etc will make you appealing to your target audience.
- Marketing channels – which channels will reach your target audience the best and what content do you need to create for these channels?
- Budget & resource – detailed cost and resource plan for your proposed activity including creating content, media space, monitoring performance, will you use an agency to create, implement and monitor the activity or will you do it internally, if this includes social media for example will it be monitored 24/7?
- Implementation – how are you going to execute the strategy, how do you communicate this across the business? Timings, how do you create the content? Where will you place it, what frequency?
- Monitor and evaluation – set clear metrics at the start of the campaign and be clear how these will be measured, where will you obtain the data from? as you may need support from other departments to report on results, what systems will you use, who you need to share them with and on what frequency. Also be prepared to be able to adjust your plan based on results and feedback.
The purpose of strategic planning is to align the business priorities and efforts both resource and financial across the whole organisation to achieve the business goals.
The ultimate goal of marketing strategy is to convince existing customers to remain loyal and spend more and to attract identified targets and convert them into customers.