What Part Does Strategy Play in Choosing Your Marketing Tool?

PUB355: Mar 18, 2011Kevin Liao

What part does strategy play in a marketing plan?

- Sentence 1: What is the purpose of your marketing? – your Goal

- Sentence 2: How will you accomplish your purpose? – your Overall Plan

Your Goal + Your Overall Plan = Strategy of your marketing Plan

Goals Actions Tactics KPI

Goals

Overall plan

Your audience & niche in the marketplace

Marketing tools and tactics

Strategy determines the marketing tools you will be using in your marketing plan.

Your goals need to be specific and measurable, so that you can know if you have met them or not. KPI

Examples: If you are using Facebook and Twitter as marketing tools, you should measure the number of followers on your Facebook and Twitter page before and after, and you should also measure that if the increase in followers on the website has led to an increase of customers coming to the store. If you are sending out e-mail newsletters to your customers to promote your website, you should measure how many newsletters you have sent and how many visits to your website have been directed by the newsletters. (Measuring the statistics of unique visitors, direct traffic, referral traffic or keyword traffic).

Comparison between Urban Outfitters and Silvert’s:

Urban Outfitters has been described as selling hip and chic merchandise. And they seek to create a different shopping experience which creates an emotional bond with the 18 to 30 year old target customer. (Corporate Website, 2011).

Their marketing tools include Corporate Blog, Facebook,

Twitter, E-mail Newsletters and Flickr, etc. http://www.urbanoutfitters.com/urban/index.jsp

Silvert’s is a clothing company selling adaptive clothing and footwear for the seniors. Their merchandise includes disabled adaptive clothing, senior elderly care clothing, shoes and slippers. Their online marketing tools include their corporate website and a caregiver’s blog, while the blog was last updated on August 4th, 2009… http://www.silverts.com/

Conclusion:

Marketing strategy categorizes who the target audiences are, and it determines what marketing tools should be utilized in the whole marketing plan. Thus, marketing strategy is the starting point of a marketing plan and it determines the usage of different marketing tools.

Thank You ; )