
Use this process to help you develop your marketing strategy.
© iStockphoto/porcorex
If you've ever led a successful marketing team, you'll know that there's much more to marketing than "promoting the right product, in the right place, at the right time."
It takes a lot of thought and understanding to market a product or service successfully, and you do an important part of this thinking through the process of developing your marketing strategy.
This is where you ask questions like "Who are our customers, and our competitors?"; "What will make our product or service stand out in the market?"; "Which market trends can we take advantage of?"; and "How can we promote our product, so that we make best use of our company's opportunity?"
These are just a few of the questions that you need to answer, and this article looks at some of the tools, frameworks, and concepts that you can use to develop an effective marketing strategy.
Tip:
Talking about "products and services" is cumbersome - where we refer to "products" on their own below, these points are just as relevant to services!
There are many different approaches that you can use to develop your marketing strategy, and there is no one, single, authoritative process that you can follow. However, you'll need to consider the following four areas (at least) when you are thinking about how you'll market your product:
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