What is Marketing Strategy?
Marketing strategy is essentially a pattern or
plan that integrates your organization's major goals, policies, and action
sequences in a cohesive whole.
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Great Slogan:
WOW Principle and 7 Features
Marketing strategies are generally concerned
with
four Ps:
product strategies,
pricing strategies, promotional
strategies, and placement strategies.
The focus of marketing strategies must the
objectives to be achieved – not the process of planning itself.
Online Marketing Strategies
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The Tree of
Online
Success
Internet marketing refers
to the strategies that are used to market a company,
product or service online. Internet marketing strategies
are aimed at enhancing your
brand power,
attracting more
website visitors and increasing customers for
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your business
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More
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Social Media Marketing:
10 Tips
Market
Dominance Strategies
Market dominance strategies are marketing
strategies which classify your business by reference to your market share or
dominance of an industry. In defining market dominance, you must see
to what extent your offerings control a product category in a given
geographic area...
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Question and Test Everything
Before you
make decisions,
ask questions. Assumptions are often dangerous. Don't be afraid of
offending experts – including yourself – by questioning their logic. The
true experts will appreciate your questions. A
marketing strategy that you tested and
proved to work a while ago may be a complete failure today. The competitive
environment and customer
perceptions and
needs change very fast today. So,
question everything,
reassess your
past decisions.
Modern
Customer-based Relationship Approach
In
today's
customer-driven economy, corporations must move from product-based
campaign marketing to a customer-based relationship approach. Customer
relationship management is the management of customer communication over a
relationship continuum. It includes relationship strategy and multi-channel
relationship programs that produce both business value and customer
experiences on a scale not seen in traditional marketing.7...
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Right Timing
One often-overlooked aspect of marketing
strategy is timing. Choosing the best time each element of your strategy is
often critical. Taking the right action in the wrong time can as bad as
taking the wrong action in the right time. Therefore, being an essential
part of any plan, timing should normally appear as a schedule of planned
activities.5
Competitive Strategy
To be successful today, your company must
become competitor-oriented. You must pursue the right
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competitive strategy
– avoid strengths of your competitors and look for weak points in their
positions and then launch marketing attacks against those weak points.3...
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Differentiation Strategy
The key to successful marketing is
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differentiation. "If consumers don't perceive your brand(s) as being
different from those offered by the competition, you won't win the marketing
war. The battle for consumer minds is a
battle of
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perceptions
not products."2 Thus, "differentiation is one of the most
important strategic and tactical activities in which companies must
constantly engage. It is not discretionary."1...
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Buzz
Marketing
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Buzz marketing
is a word-of-mouth about your brand. Buzz travels in invisible networks.
It's the aggregate of all informal communication about your particular product,
service, or company at any point of time.
To benefit from buzz marketing, design your
product and marketing activities in such a way that it will give people an
opportunity to talk about your product or service. They don't necessarily
need to recommend your business – they just need to mention it in their
conversations...
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Understand What Makes
People Buy
Understanding
what motivates people in real-life situations is the key to designing
successful marketing strategies and
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selling
skills. You have to find out what turns consumers on and makes them buy...
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Spotting Trends versus Traditional Market
Research
As product life-cycles are shortening at an
immense rate, traditional
market research – both quantitative and qualitative – can
sometimes be more of a hindrance than a help. It is good at measuring the
past and present. Besides, "traditional research has the drawback of relying
on what consumers say, which is sometimes different from what they actually
do in real life. People don't know what they will do until they face an
actual decision," says
Jack Trout.
The
most profitable thing to ride in marketing
is a long-term trend. The ability to
spot trends before
others is vital if you want to
think faster and thus
be
ahead of your competition. It can be a very useful tool in dealing with
unpredictable future.
Sustaining Market Demand for Your Product
One way to maintain a long-term demand for your
product or service is never totally satisfy the demand. People love and
desire authenticity and scarcity, because there are too many products and
services that are similar. But
dampening the fad, you can stretch the fad out and it may become more
like a trend. Remaining relevant to the customers is the key.
The Tao of
Distribution Management
As a supplier, you
should not try to force your distributor into the pre-specified modes of
operation that you deem as most appropriate. Rather, you should
facilitate the desired activities of your distributor, in a high-trust
atmosphere. This is the most effective and most efficient way of
achieving the absolute requirements of the today's global economy:
customer intimacy and
"quality at low cost".
Jacuzzi
"In the 1950s the Jacuzzi brothers invented a
whirlpool bath to treat people with arthritis. Although the product worked,
it was a sales flop. Very few people in the target market, sufferers from
arthritis, could afford the expensive bath. So the idea languished until
they tried relaunching the same product for a different market – as a luxury
item for the wealthy. It became a big success."6
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