Selecting your Marketing Strategies in 2 Steps

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There are so many marketing tactics to choose from today that it can difficult to know which ones are going to give you the best return on your money and time.

One way to make the marketing tactic choice easier is to select your marketing strategies first.

Your marketing strategy is your overall game plan and describes what your business intends to do to accomplish your financial, sales and marketing objectives.

The first step is to look at your marketing objectives, then select one or a combination of the following as your overall strategic direction:

• Retention - how can you protect your most profitable customer and keep them loyal?
• Expansion – how can you maximise your existing customer relationships through up sell (buying more of the same product or service) and cross-sell (buying other products or services in your range)?
• Attraction - how can you attract new profitable customers and get them to return?

The next step is to choose your key areas of focus, which include:

 Communication
Communication is usually always chosen as this relates to your positioning and how you will communicate your brand or business message to your customers. For example, your retention strategy may be to focus on personalised communication with your key customers.

Product or Service Offering
This relates to the actual product or service that you sell. For retention you may offer enhanced customer service, for attraction you may offer an extended range and for expansion you want to focus on offering additional service offerings.

 Service Delivery
This relates to the way your product or service is offered to customers. A strategy may be to introduce a new customer service policy to retain your most valuable customers.

Pricing
This is anything to do with the pricing of your product or service. For example, your strategy might be to offer value added pricing to attract new customers.

Distribution
This has to do with the distribution of your product or service or the locations you sell in. For example, your strategy may be to expand your store locations 

Selecting  marketing strategies is often overlooked; however it is one of the most important steps as it provides the link between marketing objectives and marketing tactics.