When conducting business strategy planning, many business executives limit their considerations to day-to-day operations or future projections. What they fail to consider is how beneficial incorporating a full marketing campaign can be to any strategic planning session. You can elevate your business strategy with the alignment of a marketing campaign from the beginning. These are the reasons why.
Applies Market Research
As you build your business strategy, there are a number of steps you should have already taken. Among them is conducting market research. You need a thorough understanding of your target audience if you hope to be successful with any strategy. Luckily, you can ensure that you apply any and all relevant market research to your overall strategy by incorporating a full marketing campaign into the planning process.
Business strategy planning entails all the considerations you should make when developing a marketing campaign. These considerations include:
- Industry analysis
- Core values
- Goals
- Operations plans
- Performance indicators
These are some of the same factors that you’ll use to find your ideal target audience, from the identification of industry and demographic traits to your means for evaluating the effectiveness of your strategies.
Aligns Overall Strategy with Marketing
You’ll enable yourself to more easily assess these details in the context of marketing to ensure that each decision supports your overall strategy. You can better apply this information and also make sure it aligns with what your company is and does best.
For example, business strategy planning requires you to identify the core values of your strategy. Company culture is an essential aspect of this. By building your marketing campaign in the context of this document, your values and executive summary are clearly laid out. From here, it’s easier to assess whether your marketing approach captures what makes your business unique.
Influences your Unique Selling Position
Similarly, your business strategy plan helps you define your Unique Selling Position (USP). This is a statement (no more than one or two sentences) that sums up the product or service you offer. While it may seem simple to create this position, the details of a larger strategic plan can be instrumental in helping you explore your uniqueness.
For instance, The Dollar Shave Club has had plenty of success with this simple USP: “Everything you need in the bathroom — from razor blades to grooming products — automatically delivered to your door. It doesn’t get any simpler than that.”
Contained within, you can see the executive summary, elevator pitch, mission statement, and operational needs that would be detailed within their larger business strategy. By using your strategy to influence your USP, you stand to improve your marketing. That’s because you have a better sense of what makes your business model stand out in a competitive economy.
Visualizes Your Strategy
Next, a marketing campaign built within a business strategy plan is a means of better visualizing your entire process and operational procedures. You can use the planning stage to detail the elements of your campaign aligned with your overall goals and where they interact.
A marketing campaign plan consists of a few key elements. These include:
- Advertising
- Distribution
- Positioning
- Pricing
- Promotion
- Sales
Within your business strategy plan, you can visualize the ways in which all these elements overlap with every other operational procedure. For instance, you can detail how you’ll use promotional blogger outreach to meet business goals while collaborating with people and organizations capable of representing your brand.
From here, your plan becomes a roadmap to success. However, you’ll need the means to determine the success of that plan.
Defines Measurable Success Metrics
Incorporating a full marketing campaign into your business strategy planning includes detailing how success will be measured. Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are best informed by the larger context of your business goals, which your strategy should lay out. Then, your marketing campaign section will explain measurable success thresholds.
All your business success should be tied to something measurable that you can use to evaluate the effectiveness of your strategy. Start by setting goals with these success metrics built in. For example, your goals section might include something like: increase digital sales conversion rates by 3%.
Your marketing campaign section then details the precise means you’ll use to achieve such a goal. By expounding on advertising, positioning, and pricing strategies the campaign will feature, you support a more comprehensive business strategy. That is a business strategy more about actionable means to achieve your goals and less about hoping you’ll achieve the outcomes you want.
Solidify Your Business Strategy Planning with Marketing
Should you incorporate a full marketing campaign into your business strategy planning? The short answer is yes. Doing so provides the alignment, context, and visualization needed for a thoroughly explored plan. Since marketing is an integral part of business success, use a full campaign as a means of marrying your marketing strategies with every other aspect of operational strategy. As a result, you can build authentic and meaningful campaigns more capable of hitting your goals.
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