Marketing strategies are a primary key to business success. The No. 1 reason businesses fail is that they don’t make enough money. And the No. 1 reason they don’t make enough money is that they don’t adequately understand and practice effective marketing strategies. You can learn all about marketing strategy in our new “The 5 Key Success Factors of Business: A Powerful System for Total Business Success” on amazon in all formats at this link.
Marketing strategies offer these powerful benefits:
- Concentrating your resources and efforts on your greatest opportunities for success
- Sharpening your competitive advantage so that your business is superior to your competitors’ in ways that matter to customers
- Increasing the income of the firm more effectively than any other way
- Uniting the leadership team to all pull in the same direction, maximizing positive results
- Giving your brand a clearer focus so that it will be better known in the marketplace
- Stimulating demand for your products and services
- Improving the effectiveness of messages you send to customers and prospects
- Strengthening your ability to understand and meet the needs of customers
- Ensuring that your business will survive and thrive far into the future
What are marketing strategies?
“Marketing” comes from the Latin word merx or mercis meaning merchandise. Originally a market was a large open space where merchandise was displayed for sale. Think about pictures you’ve seen of large open marketplaces in Third World countries, or today’s farmer’s market. Originally “marketing” involved selling products in a marketplace. And that’s still the core meaning. But professional marketing has evolved to such a high degree of sophistication, like computer science and medicine, that it involves much more than just selling in a marketplace. The so-called marketing orientation means the business as a whole is oriented to understanding and meeting the needs of customers. And realistically, few businesses are.
“Strategy” comes from the Greek word strategos meaning general. Strategy is what good generals use to win battles. There are two aspects or connotations to this idea of strategy. The first is, it’s big picture. It involves consideration of all your available resources – people, money, time, physical resources etc. The second is, it involves winning some form of competition. Your opponent may be an enemy who is trying to defeat you, or a business competitor who is trying to get your customers to buy from them instead of from you, or an opposing athletic team in a sports event. In all these situations as well as your own real world, there is one key to all effective strategy. This is one of the most important things for you to learn in business:
The key to all effective strategy is:
Concentrating your resources on your greatest opportunities, where your competition is weak.
So then, effective marketing strategies could be summed up this way:
“Concentrating the organization’s resources on its greatest opportunities to better meet customer needs, outperform competitors, increase sales, and achieve enduring success.”