Marketing Strategy
A marketing strategy is a long-term plan that helps a business achieve its goals by understanding its customers and creating a competitive advantage. It’s a broad overview of how a business will communicate its value to its customers, and it often includes the following elements:
- Target market: Who the business is trying to reach
- Buyer personas: Profiles of the business’s target customers
- Competitors: Who the business is competing against
- Value proposition: What the business offers to customers
- Product types: What products the business will produce
- Strategic partners: Who the business will partner with
- Advertising and promotion: How the business will communicate with customers
A marketing strategy is a compass that guides a business’s overall marketing efforts, rather than describing specific actions for individual campaigns. It’s important to regularly revise a marketing strategy as market conditions change and as more is learned about customers’ needs.
A marketing strategy is often based on the four Ps of marketing: product, price, place, and promotion. Neil Borden popularized the concept of the four Ps in the 1950s.