In simple terms, a marketing strategy is the blueprint for achieving your marketing objectives, and it can benefit your company in many significant ways. An effective marketing strategy must include many facets of business at all times, which can complicate the process of developing a marketing strategy. But at its very core, a marketing strategy must align with your overall growth goals for the company, making it an incredibly important document for high-level decision making.

However, with a sound marketing strategy, your business may benefit in several different ways.

A marketing strategy forces you to clarify some key elements, such as who your target audience is going to be. This step is crucial in the development of audience segments and buyer personas, which is often based upon representations of your target customers based upon market research and existing customers. Without defining who you are going to target as your audience, your marketing efforts simply won’t have nearly as great a chance of reaching the consumers you need to reach.

The entire exercise of creating a marketing strategy is to move your company from its current level of success to greater success. It is driven by the need to improve continuously. But progress is generally only made when there are clear, measurable goals that can be tracked and measured. With these goals in place, everyone across the organisation has their eye on the target, allowing employees to coordinate their efforts more efficiently and effectively. With a defined goal, everyone knows what they are working towards.

While a marketing strategy is a high-level description of the goals and methods undertaken by the company, a marketing plan contains all of the details regarding how it will achieve those goals. Yet, effective marketing plans need the overall guidance provided by the marketing strategy to ensure that the details found in the plan align with the overall goals of the strategy. Organising the specifics of marketing activities, such as email campaigns, social media activity, and website design changes, can be incredibly complicated due to the many methods, channels, and platforms available to marketers. But by organising your media plan in a way that aligns with the marketing strategy ensures you won’t overlook opportunities to reach customers and that you have a clear path toward achieving your identified goals.