Strategic marketing: what it is, stages, tools and examples for your business

Strategic marketing decides where your business is heading: which customers it targets, with what offer and against which competitors.

It works on a long-term horizon, with analysis before action. Day-to-day campaigns come afterwards and make up operational marketing.

Put simply: strategic marketing chooses the destination and operational marketing drives the car.

Here are its characteristics, stages and tools, plus a complete example for a small business with a template you can copy.

What is strategic marketing?

A strategy is a plan with the actions needed to reach a goal.

Strategic marketing applies that idea to the relationship between your business and its market.

A practical definition:

Strategic marketing is the long-term planning that analyzes the market, the competition and the company to choose where to compete and with what advantage.

José Luis Munuera and Ana Isabel Rodríguez sum it up in four questions in their textbook “Marketing estratégico”:

1. What are my customers’ needs and wants?
2. How do my competitors do it?
3. What is my potential as a company?
4. How can I do it better than my competitors?

If you have a clear answer to all four, you already have the foundation of your strategy. If not, any campaign you launch will be partly a shot in the dark.

Strategic marketing doesn’t stay inside the marketing department.

It affects the product, the price, how you sell and how you look after your customers.

Characteristics of strategic marketing

These are the six characteristics that set it apart from other ways of doing marketing:

Of these six, the hardest one for a small business is the last.

The plan gets written once and forgotten in a folder.

Differences between strategic and operational marketing

Both are necessary and they complement each other. Strategic marketing decides what to do and for whom. Operational marketing carries it out with specific, measurable actions.

A common mistake is mixing them up. If an email campaign isn’t working, you change the campaign. There’s no need to change your target audience.

And the other way round: if nothing has worked for months, the problem may be strategic. More campaigns won’t fix it.

Benefits of strategic marketing for your company

Having a marketing strategy helps you:

• Set clear, measurable goals for the whole team.
• Get to know your target audience better and discover new opportunities.
• Know what your competitors are doing and how you can stand out.
• Make all your actions consistent: website, social media, email, ads and sales.
• Spend your budget on what fits your goal, not on the latest trend.
• Spot market changes in time.

Why strategic marketing matters for a small business

In a small business, budget and time are limited. That’s why strategy matters even more than in a large one.

Without a strategy, every action competes with the others for the same resources. With a strategy, you know what to say no to without hesitating.

You don’t need a department or an 80-page document. A well-thought-out single page and a review every few months are enough.

Elements of strategic marketing: development stages step by step

In their book “Strategic Marketing”, Graeme Drummond and John Ensor organize it into three stages: analysis, formulation and implementation. Each one answers a question.

Strategic marketing analysis

The first question is: where are we? To answer it, analyze four things:

• Your product or service: what sells most, what has the best margin and what doesn’t sell.
• Your customers: who they are, what they need and why they choose you. You can start with market research.
• Your market: whether it is growing or shrinking, and which trends drive it.
• Your competitors: who they are, what they offer, at what price and how they communicate.

The outcome of this stage is an honest diagnosis. If the analysis only confirms what you already thought, you probably haven’t looked hard enough.

Strategic marketing formulation

With the diagnosis in hand, you can now make decisions. In this stage you define four things:

1. Goals: measurable and with a deadline. “Grow” is not a goal. “Go from 2,000 to 2,600 customers in 12 months” is.
2. Target audience: who you are speaking to, described as a buyer persona.
3. Positioning and value proposition: the place you want to hold in the customer’s mind and why they should choose you.
4. Growth strategy: more sales to current customers, new products or new markets. The Ansoff matrix helps you choose.

This stage ends with the marketing plan: goals, actions, resources, budget and calendar.

Strategic marketing implementation

Going from plan to action is where most strategies fall by the wayside.

In “Principios de marketing estratégico”, Teresa Vallet-Bellmunt suggests answering four questions:

• Who? Who is responsible for each action.
• When? The schedule for each action.
• How? With which people, tools and budget.
• Where? On which channels and in which areas.

During implementation, measure each action against its KPIs. That way you’ll know in time whether you’re heading towards the goal or need to correct course.

And review the plan once or twice a year. The market, the competition and your customers change, and your strategy has to keep up with them.

Strategic marketing tools

Each stage has its own tools. These are the most useful ones and the ones that work best for small businesses.

SWOT analysis

A SWOT analysis sorts your situation into four boxes: strengths and weaknesses (internal), opportunities and threats (external).

It is the simplest tool to start with. With an hour and an honest team, you can have a first diagnosis.

PESTEL analysis and Porter’s 5 forces

A PESTEL analysis reviews the environment: political, economic, social, technological, environmental and legal factors.

Porter’s 5 forces analyze your industry: competitors, new entrants, substitutes, suppliers and customers.

Positioning map

A positioning map places your brand and your competitors on two axes, for example price and quality, or price and specialization.

It helps you spot gaps in the market. If all your competitors are “cheap and generalist”, your place may be “specialist”.

Ansoff matrix, BCG matrix and Business Model Canvas

• The Ansoff matrix helps you choose how to grow: market penetration, new product, new market or diversification.
• The BCG matrix classifies your products by growth and market share, so you can decide where to invest.
• The Business Model Canvas sums up your business model on a single page with 9 blocks.

Marketing mix

The marketing mix turns strategy into decisions about the 4Ps: product, price, place and promotion.

It is where strategic and operational marketing meet. Promotion is handled through the communication mix.

KPIs and ROI

KPIs are the indicators you use to measure whether you are moving towards your goals. For example, cost per customer or conversion rate.

ROI (return on investment) tells you whether what you earn makes up for what you spend. Calculate it by channel to know where to put more budget.

Examples of strategic marketing

These cases are well known because a strategic decision, not a specific campaign, changed the company’s course.

Reebok and aerobics shoes

In the early 1980s, Reebok saw that many women were taking up aerobics and there were no shoes designed for them.

In 1982 it launched the Freestyle, an aerobics shoe for women.

It was a hit, and by 1987 Reebok was outselling Nike in the United States.

The lesson: Reebok found an audience nobody was serving instead of competing head-on for the same customer.

Apple and the four-product grid

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company had dozens of computer models and was losing money.

Jobs cut the range down to a grid of four: laptop and desktop, for consumers and for professionals. Apple was back in profit the following year.

The lesson: choosing also means giving things up. Fewer products, well positioned, can sell more than lots of similar products.

Netflix and the move to streaming

Netflix started out renting DVDs by mail. In 2007 it launched its streaming service, while the DVD business was still doing well.

It analyzed where technology was heading and got ahead of it, even though that competed with its own business.

The lesson: strategic marketing looks several years ahead, even when the current business is still working.

Strategic and operational marketing example: a small business step by step

Imagine an online language school with 2,000 students a year that wants to grow without lowering its prices.

This is how the strategic side (what it decides) is separated from the operational side (what it does next):

The strategic plan is reviewed once or twice a year.

Operational actions change every month based on the results.

If a campaign doesn’t work, you change the campaign, not the strategy.

Strategic marketing template to copy

Copy this template into a document and fill it in with your team. If it fits on one page, that’s a good sign.

If you want to turn this sheet into a full plan, there’s a marketing plan template in PDF you can fill in.

How Mailrelay helps you put your strategy into practice

Email is one of the channels where strategy turns into measurable actions, with your own list that doesn’t depend on any algorithm.

With Mailrelay you can:

• Segment your list according to the audience you defined in your strategy.
• Automate sequences for welcome, acquisition or loyalty.
• Measure every campaign with opens, clicks and conversions, to feed your KPIs.
• Grow your subscribers with forms and landing pages.

The free account lets you send up to 80,000 emails a month to 20,000 contacts, with no credit card required.

Frequently asked questions about strategic marketing

What is strategic marketing in a nutshell?

It is the part of marketing that decides, for the long term, which customers you target, with what offer and how you stand out from the competition.

What are the stages of strategic marketing?

Three: analysis (where we are), formulation (where we want to go) and implementation (how we get there and how we measure it).

What is the difference between a marketing strategy and a marketing plan?

The strategy is the underlying decision: audience, positioning and goals. The marketing plan breaks it down into actions, budget and calendar.

How often should you review your strategic marketing?

Usually once or twice a year, or sooner if something important changes in your market. Operational actions are reviewed every month.

Can a small business do strategic marketing without a marketing team?

Yes. A SWOT analysis, a measurable goal, a well-defined ideal customer and a template like the one in this article are enough. What matters is reviewing it.

Jose Argudo

CMO at Mailrelay. Writes about email marketing, copywriting and conversion for small businesses and entrepreneurs.

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