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Business Operations: Components Of a Marketing Strategy

There are 10 components of marketing strategy
by Eileen Ashmore, MBA

1. Ongoing review & augmentation of business & marketing strategies - Are you continuing to assess the strengths and weakness of your business and its marketing strategies? Are you continuously improving your strategies?
2. Conducting Market Research: Have you estimated the size & potential of your customer market? Do you understand the industry and economic drivers in your customer markets? What are the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors?
3. Customer Perspective: Do you clearly understand the customer perspective? Very often, this is where the seed of innovation begins as we learn more about the customer perspective, we start to be able to identify new & emerging customer needs.
4. Differentiating: Will you stand out from your competitors based on price or value or developing a niche market where you are the dominant player? For example, TacoTime is differentiating itself from all other Mexican food outlets as serving 'authentic' Mexican food - food that Mexicans actually eat. They've done taste tests in Mexico to prove it!
5. Creating Visibility: Is your business clearly visible to your target customer groups? If not, what do you need to do to become more visible to each of the customer groups that you serve? (Developing a marketing communications strategy and branding strategies will help you do this. A recent survey of 1,830 adults in 19 world markets for technology products - 20% relied heavily on word of mouth, 20% from websites, 13% from advertising and only 1% from stores.)
6. Developing Channels to Distribute Product/Service: Do you have deep and wide channels for distributing your product and/or services?
7. Establishing a Marketing Budget: Have you realistically budgeted for the cost of all promotional activity - salaries/commissions of sales people, advertising, sales promotions, trade show promotions, print/media packages, etc.
8. Trial & Error - Do you have a willingness to finance trial & error with your marketing activities to determine what works best?
9. Tracking Results - Do you track your marketing results to determine what's working the best?
10. Following Through: Are you keeping your promises to your customers? Are your customer service and operations providing on-time, quality product?

Eileen M. Ashmore has 18 years management consulting experience and a MBA degree specializing in Marketing. Over 135 projects have been completed primarily for manufacturing companies, professional services, technology and e-commerce companies. Prior to starting the consulting practice 17 years ago, Eileen Ashmore worked as a stock broker and as a financial planner for eight years.

Contact her at her at her web site: http://www.Ashmore-Assoc.com by e-mail or by phone at (403) 252-0799.