Strategic Marketing in the Digital Age

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August 17, 2016

Strategic marketing is a methodical process of analyzing, planning, developing and executing marketing tactics to gain and maintain substantial competitive edge and customer loyalty. In digital age, consumers are living in a 24X7 media cycle with content overload and a business must have a solid content marketing strategy before it can execute its marketing strategy.

 

Strategic Marketing in Digital Age

While strategic marketing process remains unchanged, how you use the knowledge of marketing concepts and deploy them in real world is significantly different. For example, competition analysis is a very well-defined component of SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis, how you gather this information using the internet presents new challenges. Given the nature of digital information, there is no authentic method to verify the accuracy of the information you gather during competition analysis. However, a business must identify competition analysis objectives and develop a solid action plan to implement changes to achieve business objectives. Another challenges aspect is quantifying the information that may be subjective in nature.

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As Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, “plans are useless, but planning is indispensable."  The planning phase is the most important piece. When done right, planning phase should provide a clear roadmap to where your company is and where it wants to go. Extensive data gathering and analysis is needed to support some of the assumptions made during planning phase. This data must include operational, customer and business data to determine the needs of customers and how a company will position itself to satisfy those needs. A solid strategic marketing plan will also analyze 4Ps (product, price, place and promotion) of marketing.

 

How to Amplify Strategic Marketing?

In order to gain significant ROI, implementation is the key and successful implementation requires exceptional. Poor execution can ruin all the work done during planning phase.  However, if the planning was comprehensive and competently structured, then implementation becomes the easy part. A company must secure financial and technical resources needed to execute the marketing plan and must make sure these resources are trained to use vast amount of information available on the web.

 

New data analytics tools that are available as SaaS or stand alone units, can simplify monitoring and control to ensure that strategic marketing plan delivers results are business objectives are met. Due to the digital economy, Defining and measuring performance metrics to measure results and address any divergences is within the reach of every small business

 

Key Takeaway:

  • Identify business objectives with the help of diverse data collection including web.
  • Develop thorough understanding of competition and industry trends using the web
  • Develop actionable marketing tactics that can be executed and measured via internet
  • Integrate your online and offline business strategies
  • Validated assumptions in strategic marketing through online market research
  • Customizing your business plans and goals to match the needs of the online and offline customers

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