What Is Strategic Marketing Management?

What Is Strategic Marketing Management?

Strategic marketing management is carrying out your overall mission through particular and strategic processes to maximize your present marketing strategy.

It is, in essence, the process of making strategic decisions inside a marketing plan to improve that plan.

Strategic management, marketing, and other functions were initially referred to as budgeting. As the name implies, the methodology primarily focused on budgeting and control methods. 

The approach employed the budget and various forms to manage marketing audits and strategies.

Around the 70s, strategic marketing management focused on forecasting, emphasizing business outcomes.

We are now living in the era of strategic management. Strategic marketing management incorporates all of its earlier versions into one. The objective is to use all of the techniques to manage the current strategy better.

It involves analyzing your target market. This form of management may aid in the discovery of additional marketing possibilities.

What Are the Principles of Strategic Marketing Management?

The principles of strategic marketing management are basic guidelines for your approach. 

There are four principles of strategic marketing management: 

1. Specialization 
2. Differentiation 
3. Segmentation
4. Conceptualization 

Let’s understand these principles in detail. 

Specialization 

The first principle to keep in mind is to decide where you want to specialize. 

What is the domain, product, service, client, or market on which you want to concentrate your efforts? 

Let’s understand with an example from Subway. 

A Subway consumer is someone who wants to eat healthily but quickly. He values hygiene, efficiency, and value for money. 

As a result, Subway is continually looking for things that will appeal to these people and continue to provide for them. They would never do anything outside of their area of expertise.

You can always experiment with offering variety. But specialization gives an identity to your brand and makes for a natural value proposition.

Differentiation

Second, it is vital to be different. 

What is your distinct competitive advantage? What makes you unique and superior to the competition? 

Customers need an incentive to buy from you rather than your competitors. 

Customers are constantly looking for the most fabulous offer; nothing personal about this. They simply want the most outstanding product at the best price. 

What is the unique selling point of a company? “Quality, quality, and quality!” will be heard nine times out of ten. 

But that’s only possible if your rival offers almost zero quality.

Whoever says “quality service” has no clue why anyone should buy from him and is possibly a liability to your organization if he is an employee.

Segmentation

Today’s strategic marketing management is all about marketing segmentation. 

Segmentation entails determining which customers in the market value my distinctiveness and are willing to pay more for your area of specialization. 

We need to segment and discover those clients who are most likely to buy from you.

Here are a few questions to consider: who are the clients who value your area? What is their demographic? What words would you use to define your ideal customer?

Concentration

A strategy is useless if you don’t focus on people. The final, most crucial principle of strategic marketing management is concentration. 

Once you’ve identified your most significant market segments where you do exceptionally well, you devote all of your efforts, resources, budgets, and time to obtaining and retaining customers in these areas.

Product management tools come in handy for team alignment and generating customer feedback. 

Why Is Strategic Marketing Management Important?

Strategic marketing management aims to respond to your market as it changes. The goal is constant, but the path to it can alter.

The advantages of adopting strategic marketing management are well known in the business sector.  

Here’s why strategic marketing management is essential: 

Understand your market better

The research required to apply strategic marketing management successfully will eventually result in a deeper grasp of your specific market. 

You will learn about domestic and international markets, competition, and market trends.

Identify Your Strategic Direction

Strategic marketing management helps you make more innovative judgments that link your strategy with the company’s mission.

Small Actions, Big Results

Strategic marketing management, when done right, may deliver some remarkable outcomes for a company. As a result, a company’s budget may be better managed, and its overall longevity may rise.

Overall, there are numerous advantages to this management approach. 

You are making strategic decisions to improve your business and grasp the industry as a whole by applying strategic marketing management.

What Does a Strategic Marketing Manager Do?

The primary goal of strategic marketing management is to identify the target market. 

They accomplish this by applying the company’s mission through strategic planning to maximize the effectiveness of the existing marketing plan.

Strategic marketing managers often run an organization’s marketing division. 

They are specialists at establishing objectives to create a seamless and viable marketing strategy for any business under the sun.

Strategic marketing managers are well-known for analyzing sales and marketing indicators and using them to foresee market trends. 

These professionals establish specific marketing objectives by developing and implementing marketing strategies that align with business objectives.

While kanban boards are usually a product management tool, more and more marketing managers find them helpful in tracking their goals.

Strategic marketing managers use customer feedback to improve customer satisfaction. They collaborate with internal teams to build a solid, long-term digital presence.

Following are some essential skills for all strategic marketing managers: 

• Business development
• Market research
• Market share
• Innovative product development

While a Bachelor’s may give you a good foundation in this area, a Master’s degree prepares you for the industry.

What Are the Steps Involved in the Strategic Marketing Management Process?

The strategic marketing process is a systematic set of steps that will assist you in identifying and achieving your objectives.

Here are the five critical steps involved in the strategic marketing management process: 

Creating A Mission 

First, define and comprehend the company’s mission. Perhaps it is documented and disseminated throughout the company. 

If not, speak with stakeholders to learn why your company exists. A mission statement outlines why a firm exists and how it can help customers. 

The mission statement can sometimes be aspirational, encouraging employees and engaging customers. Or it could simply be a statement about who you are. 

You can’t develop a marketing strategy unless you know exactly what business you’re in and why.

Analyze the situation

The second stage of your strategic marketing management process is to assess internal and external elements affecting your company and market. 

Your research will highlight your company’s strengths and the obstacles it faces, whether with internal resources or external competition in the marketplace. 

Situation analysis delivers a clear, objective picture of your company’s health, present and future consumers, industry trends, and market position.

There are multiple methods to do this. However, a SWOT Analysis might be the best way to get started.

Design Your Marketing Plan 

You should prioritize and plan out the opportunities you intend to pursue now that you’ve found them through your research. 

A marketing plan will detail your target clients and how you will approach them, and a projection of the expected results. 

These questions may be useful:

• What will be your customers’ response to your marketing efforts?
• What is the cost of the plan? 
• How will your competitors respond?

Your market and situation analysis data will support you in implementing these estimates into your plan.

Make Your Marketing Mix

It’s time to focus on the “how” of planning at this stage of the strategic marketing management process. 

Your marketing mix builds around the four Ps of marketing: product, price, promotion, and place.

The 4Ps will direct how you communicate the value of your product to your customers. You’re defining your product’s competitive advantage. 

You must be clear about what you want to sell: convenience or quality? And you must understand who is most likely to purchase your goods or service.

Implement and Control 

It’s now time to put your strategy into action. 

Determine how and when you will implement your strategy. You will contact clients at this step of the strategic marketing process to inform and educate them about your product or service. 

The steps are to get the resources (finance and personnel) to promote your product, position who will execute the work, develop schedules to keep the job on track, and manage all the specifics for each goal. 

Creating monthly benchmarks and initiatives, weekly action steps, and daily marketing appointments will help you stay focused and engaged.

Oh, don’t forget to track your competitor’s strategy. 

What Are the Examples of Strategic Marketing Management?

Here are some examples of successful strategic marketing management: 

Spotify 

Spotify’s strategic marketing management revolves around user experience. 

There are other streaming music services, but what distinguishes Spotify emphasizes consumers discovering new stuff. 

Spotify deviates from traditional music streaming platforms by providing listeners with an entirely different user experience. 

They are also pioneers in employing artificial intelligence to construct playlists based on their users’ preferences, such as Release Radar and Discover Weekly.

GoPro 

Spotify’s strategic marketing management revolves around FOMO. 

One of their most effective marketing strategies is making it simple for their users to share branded content. 

GoPro’s editing programs, for example, produce videos with immediately identifiable start and end frames that include GoPro’s logo and branding. 

GoPro then promotes these videos on social media, inspiring more users to make and share their videos. 

Nordstrom  

Nordstrom uses a proactive retargeting strategy that includes emails as well as retargeting ad campaigns on social networks that are activated by cookies and on event reactions. 

As a result, the user is bombarded with reminders, making it tough to forget about the purchase they left behind.

So, that’s all you need to begin your strategic marketing management journey. Surprisingly, product management tools like Chisel come in handy for such implementation.