What Separates ‘Strategic Marketing’ from ‘Marketing’?
Results in marketing don’t happen by accident; you need a marketing strategy and action to back it up.
Marketing is tactical in nature. It involves advertising a good, service, or brand to attract customers with the intention of boosting sales and profit. Strategic marketing, on the other hand, simply charts the long-term course of a company’s marketing efforts.
We can see that “marketing” and “strategic marketing” are two different concepts. A comprehensive marketing plan should include both marketing and strategic marketing as key components.
In this piece we will take a detailed look at what distinguishes strategic marketing from marketing. We will also show you how businesses can use both of these to reach their target audience.
What is Marketing?
Marketing refers to all business endeavors aimed at promoting and converting target audiences into customers. The main aim of marketing is to match a business’s goods and services with potential clients. A successful marketing campaign, therefore, draws the customers in, eventually guaranteeing sales and profit for the business.
The marketing mix consists of four components: pricing, promotion, product, and place—also known as the four P’s of marketing. Here’s what you should know about the four P’s:
● A product refers to the goods or services that a business offers. Successful products typically meet an unmet need in the market or offer a fresh consumer experience that stimulates demand.
● Price is the monetary value of the offered products. Pricing can have a major impact on a product’s overall performance. It is therefore crucial to choose a price that is both affordable for the target market and aligned with business objectives.
● Place refers to the location where you sell your goods and the marketing channels that get them to your customers. Like product price, finding the perfect location to market your product is crucial for reaching your target market.
● Promotion is how you choose to promote your business’s offering. Through promotion, word about your product or services gets out to the public. This is important to consider as executing a digital marketing campaign can differ significantly to a video marketing campaign.
For a perfectly executed marketing campaign, a marketing team must strike a precise balance between the four P’s. At Senspoint, our team can help you optimize the four P’s, thus giving you a competitive advantage.
What is Strategic Marketing?
Strategic marketing ensures your marketing efforts all fall in line with an overarching plan. Whatever mediums you make use of should send a cohesive message out to its intended audience.
A thorough strategic marketing plan enables the marketing team to comprehend your marketing goals and your strategy for achieving them. A strategic marketing campaign needs both strategic planning and marketing management to be successful.
A strategic marketing plan requires deliberate market research, and will usually take three factors into consideration. Also known as the 3Cs of brand development, these are: customer, company, and competition. Here’s what they mean briefly:
● Customers are the individuals you hope your product or service will benefit from. A company should prioritize its customers’ interests above everything else. By identifying the target market and knowing what their unmet needs are, brands can increase the likelihood of their product’s success. This can be thought of in terms of keeping existing customers, or attracting new potential customers.
● Company. This looks inwards and is all about identifying your brand’s strengths and weaknesses. It also determines what type of competitive marketing strategy to use: cost leadership, differentiation leadership, etc. Once you’ve decided, you’ve got the basis for your brand positioning.
● Competitors are brands, in the same niche competing for market dominance. You must consider how your competitors present themselves. This includes thoroughly reviewing the strengths, competencies, product portfolios, and pricing models of your competitive group.
Differences Between Marketing and Strategic Marketing
As we mentioned, marketing alone differs from strategic marketing, although they both work together to achieve a company’s overall objectives. These two concepts are different from one another in the following ways:
Concept Description
Marketing refers to all the activities or efforts a company must undertake to build a strong relationship with its customers. Networking is also a part of marketing: it deals with grooming prospective and current customers. Marketing efforts include creating memorable slogans, eye-catching packaging, and general media exposure to attract customers to a brand’s offerings.
On the other hand, strategic marketing has to do with discovering or developing innovative, market dominating plans. In addition strategic marketing also enables businesses to become more inventive and successfully enter new markets.
To put it simply, marketing alone is an activity without a purpose. But a strategic marketing plan blends specific, focused marketing tactics with all of their associated objectives.
Techniques Used
Marketing campaigns can be carried out using a variety of marketing mixes and techniques. That being said, the 4Ps of marketing are the most popular mix known to marketing professionals. Professional marketers utilize the 4Ps of marketing to keep their marketing operations in line with company objectives.
Strategic marketing, on the other hand, uses the three C’s of strategic marketing: company, customer, and competition. [1] Top strategic marketers will spend the majority of their time devoted to analyzing the three C’s. This is important to effectively develop a market plan which falls in line with business goals.
Role in Corporate Success
Marketing helps companies advertise and sell goods and services to their target market, but strategic marketing goes beyond that. It aims to make the best use of all available resources to most effectively deliver a message to the target market.
Further, strategic marketing helps a marketing team to create goods and services with the highest likelihood of creating sales.
Objectives
The main objective of every marketing strategy is to promote and advertise a company’s goods and services to its target market. In other words, marketing tries to get the word out about a brand’s offering (also known as brand awareness). A successful marketing campaign aims to increase both the performance and profit margins of an organization.
Strategic marketing deals with finding the root causes of prior marketing failures and devising a business strategy to avoid them. A perfectly executed market strategy enhances business growth and performance.
As you can see there are several differences between how marketing and strategic marketing can be put into action. At Sensepoint, we enjoy learning about your needs and creating a unique marketing strategy that tells your story. Whether you’re a small business or a global brand, we have the skills to make sure everything falls in place. So if you want your marketing to cut through the noise; it all starts with a single conversation with us.
