Marketing Plan vs. Marketing Strategy
Strategy is not planning
It’s about the principles that guide your decisions, not the decisions themselves.
There is a lot of confusion in the marketing world about what it means to have a marketing strategy.
You can read article after article about how important it is to have a strategy, but very few marketers talk about what strategy is, how to develop it and how to use it to win.
Having a marketing plan does not mean you have a strategy.
Coordinating your marketing activities is not the same as developing a strategy.
Assigning tasks is not “doing strategy”.
Strategy is the step before decision making and tactical plans and it should outline the framework and principles that will guide your decision making process as an organisation.
This should be based on a thorough understanding of:
Where you’re going (what does success look like)
How you’re going to get these (how you will win within your constraints and against the competition)
Why are you setting off in the first place (why bother going to all of this effort - what’s the point?)
“Imagine you decide you want to go for a run. You head out the front door, find a good rhythm and before you know it, put several miles between your feet and the house.
Only thing is you didn’t really have a destination in mind, so you have no idea where you are. It’s also dark and you left the torch at home. And you forgot to put shoes on, so now your feet are blistered.
That’s how you should think about strategy. You need to know where it is you want to go, create the guiding policy that will help you get there, and equip your company with the tools to execute."
What is a marketing strategy
Your marketing strategy has to fit with your overarching business strategy. In fact, before you even get to the point of “doing” marketing strategy work, you need to ensure that you have a solid business strategy in place.
After all, if you build a marketing strategy around a product or service that customers don’t want, or at a price point that doesn’t generate sufficient profile, you won’t have a business for very long.
Your business strategy should provide direction on the following points, at a minimum:
(Remember strategy is about developing a decision making framework and a guiding set of principles.)
Your mission and vision - what does an ideal present future look like? Will you be global or local, mass market or niche? Where is the destination?
Your goals and objectives - what metrics are you pursuing at the expense of other avenues? Are you focused on EBITDA over net profit, utilisation over headcount?
Your values - what are your dealbreakers? What won’t you do in pursuit of your company objectives?
The products/services you plan to sell - strip it back to your core offerings, not “we might do this in the future”. It has to be realistic, achievable and capable of supporting your objectives.
Your competitive advantages - what attributes and capabilities will you nurture across your organisation to ensure you win. E.g. better customer service, ability to reach to market changes, willingness to invest in talent.
Building on the above, your marketing strategy should outline the following
Customer segmentation and targeting - our of every type of customer you could market to, who should you focus on?
Pricing - are you going to be premium or budget? Will you discount for volume or longer contracts?
Positioning - this is tied into everything above, but is also about perception and messaging. As positioning expert April Dunford puts it - “Positioning defines how our product is different and better than alternatives for a particular set of customers”
Opportunities and threats - this is systematic identification of existing and emerging opportunities and threats that may influence your market and organisation over the next few years. You then need to decide how you’ll hedge against them and what ground you are willing to give up in pursuit of your objectives (most organisations skip the threats part and ignore them until it’s too late)
As a marketing consultant working with companies to develop their marketing strategies, I typically like to run a comprehensive exercise that explores all of the areas above.
From this exploration, I then help organisations define a broad list of strategic principles. Short and sweet, these points distill the marketing strategy into clearly defined principles that can broadly guide decision making.
For example, one of my own strategic marketing principles for my marketing consultancy is:
Aligning myself with the industries, companies and people who challenging the status quo to be be the go-to consultant for high-tech companies building a better future
In terms of how this guides decision making, I ask myself “does this activity/tactic/channel align with this strategic principle?”
If yes, I go ahead. If no, I should reconsider.
What is a marketing plan
Have you noticed we haven’t talked about channels, tactics, metrics or content calendars yet?
That’s because all of these elements should all go into your marketing plan, not your marketing strategy.
A marketing plan is a tactical or operational plan that covers in detail the actions to be taken within a short term planning period, how these actions will be measured for effectiveness and who will be responsible for ensuring that they take place.
What’s the difference between a marketing plan and marketing strategy?
Your marketing strategy defines the “why”, “what” and “who” behind your marketing.
What winning looks like
Why you’re going to win
Who are you winning for and with
Your marketing plan should outline the “how,” “when,” “where,” and “who”
How you will measure subset indicators of success (marketing KPIs) that lead to macro indicators of success (business KPIs = winning) - e.g. we need 112 MQLs in Q1 to reach our £20m turnover target
How you will convey your winning proposition to customers (messaging)
Where you plan to reach your best fit customers (channels & positioning)
How you plan organise your marketing activities (campaigns & themes)
When plan to run marketing campaigns, tactics and activities (time boundaries, cadence & calendar)
Who will be responsible for each activity and who (the resources - an awful name for people) will be required to ensure the marketing plan is implemented.
How, where and when budget will be allocated across your chosen channels, tactics and activities
Why you need both a marketing strategy and a marketing plan
Your marketing strategy is focused on being effective - it’s about identifying where you need to focus your efforts and deciding what’s out of scope based on your organisational goals.
Your marketing plan is at its heart a resource allocation plan - it’s focused on conveying your strategy into action in the most efficient way possible.
Companies with an effective strategy but inefficient tactics may not do astoundingly well, but they will survive.
Those with an ineffective strategy will eventually fail, the question of how quickly will be determined by how efficient their tactics are.
(Counterintuitively, efficient tactics will often drive faster failure in companies barking up the wrong strategic tree.)
Using Your Marketing Strategy and Plan
Both your marketing strategy and marketing plan should exist as living written documents.
The living aspect is important, as we must recognise marketing strategies and plans are constantly changing along with the wider market and business contexts.
We shouldn’t be afraid to change our strategy or plan if new information becomes available, or if our assumptions (strategy is after all a well reasoned set of assumptions about the reality in which an organisation operates) are proven incorrect.
As to exactly how often you should be reviewing your strategy and plan, to use a well worn cliche, it really does depend.
However at a minimum I would advise you review your marketing strategy on a yearly basis and your marketing plan every three months. Typically with clients I work on a quarterly basis when it comes to planning, as this keeps things nimble and adaptive. However we are still grounded by the longer term strategy, so that future focus is not lost.
Using a regularly reviewed and updated marketing strategy and plan, your organisation should:
Achieve better coordination of marketing activities
Identify expected developments or changes to the cadence, timing or purpose of your marketing activities
Increase your organisation’s ability to change with a process that anticipates it
Reduce conflicts about “where the company is going” and which department is responsible for what
Improve wider organisational communication about what marketing is working on and why
Ensure available resources can be better matched to growth opportunities
Develop a framework for continuous improvement and review of marketing operations and efficiency
Take a systematic approach to developing strategy that does not rely on best guesses or the highest paid person’s opinion
Looking for external support to develop or scale your marketing strategy and plan?
Get in touch today for a high level chat about how I could support your organisation in finding its winning formula.