What are Marketing Strategies?

Marketing strategies

Marketing today is involved at all levels of the value creation chain. Before production, to determine the target market; during production to decide the price and the product; and after production to communicate with customers.

It's clear that marketing is involved in this whole process of defining, creating, and communicating value. Your marketing strategy must be defined before creating your product. Your activities then take place within the context defined by this strategy.

The development of a strategy marketing includes 5 stages:

Market opportunity analysis and market segmentation
Define the target market (target customers)
Positioning your offer
Action plan determinations
Checking and reviewing your offer

Your strategy must therefore be a general orientation, not a series of isolated decisions. D.it should also be described in the clearest, most precise and concise as possible.

Here we see the first ones in detail three stages of the development of the marketing strategy:

Market Opportunities and Segmentation

Market opportunities are analyzed in various ways, especially using the 5 Porter's Forces and the PESTEL analysis. If you want, you can also do aSWOT analysis of the company, so external opportunities and threats are also considered.

There are many different types of customers, with completely different needs. A careful consumer analysis is necessary to understand their needs and desires and then satisfy them.

Consumers can be divided in several ways, considering the variables:

Geographic: nations, states, regions, cities, neighborhoods;
Demographic: age, gender, family size, income, profession, religion, nationality, education level;
Psychographic: social class, lifestyle, personality;
Behavioral: Product knowledge and usage, purchase occasion, benefits sought, type of user, intensity of use, level of loyalty.

Companies increasingly use more than one of these variables to segment the market. This is to try to identify smaller, more clearly defined groups.

Target market

There assessment of the segments is based on these factors:

Segment size and growth rate
Structural attractiveness of the segment (Porter's 5 Forces targeting the segment if it has not been done previously)
Company goals and resources

After this assessment, the company decides which and how many segments to serve most effectively (target marketing). The idea is to reach as many customers as possible, but this isn't the right approach; in fact, it's impossible, because it risks not satisfying any segment.

You have to select the customers you can best satisfy, gaining a profit and an advantage over the competition. Many companies prefer to target a small number of consumers, but let's see what definition strategies there are.

The target market definition strategies There are 4 (from the most general to the most specific):

Strategy of undifferentiated marketing: mass marketing, ignoring the differences of the various segments, the same offer
The differentiated marketing: segmented marketing, specific offers for certain segments
Concentrated marketing: niche marketing, conquering one or more segments (“niches”) with a large share
Micromarketing: meet the preferences of individuals or local groups

Which strategy is best to adopt depends on the company's resources, the homogeneity and stage of the product life cycle, the homogeneity of the market and the marketing strategies of competitors.

Value Proposition (Positioning)

At this point, the company must decide how to differentiate its offering for each target segment. In other words, it must define how it wants to position itself within the market.

One must reach one unique and original market position to give customers a different perception compared to those of competing products. Otherwise they will have no reason to buy our products.

Ideal positioning should be set on the competitive advantageTo acquire it, the company must offer customers greater value than the competition in two ways: by lowering the price or by offering greater benefits at a higher price.

More precisely, one of these can be selected general positioning strategies (value proposition):

Offer high benefits at high prices
Supply high benefits at medium prices
Aim on average benefits at low prices
To give scarce benefits at very low prices
Or the most successful but difficult one, which is to offer high benefits at low prices