When developing your marketing plan you need to develop the right marketing strategy for your business or brand before you choose your marketing tactics, as this will save you valuable time and more importantly money in the year ahead. By developing your marketing strategy at the time of planning it allows you to really focus on what is most important to kick start or successfully grow your business.

What is a Marketing Strategy Versus a Marketing Tactic?
A marketing strategy is your overall game plan and outlines what your business intends to do to achieve your marketing objectives. Marketing tactics are the activities, tools and business decisions that you will need to implement to support your marketing strategy.

Developing your marketing strategy will come from knowing your key strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats as well as really understanding your target market's needs and desires. Your marketing strategy needs to be focused and prioritised and can only be decided after you have set out your key marketing objectives i.e. what you want to achieve for your brand or business.

To simplify the process, you can select your marketing strategy using 2 steps.

The first step is to decide the overall direction that is the most important for your business or brand and involves either one or a combination of the following:

• Retention i.e. protecting your most profitable customers and keeping them loyal
• Expansion i.e. maximising your existing customer relationships through up sell (selling more of the same product or service) or cross sell (getting them to buy other products or services in your range)
• Attraction i.e. attracting new customers that have similar characteristics to your existing profitable customers and getting them to return

Whilst it is very tempting to just focus your marketing on attracting new customers, protecting and developing your existing customer relationships is far more cost effective and will guarantee a successful business long term.

The second step in deciding your marketing strategy is to determine your key areas of focus. These may include:

• Product or Service Offering
  This relates to the actual product or service that you sell. If you have selected an overall expansion strategy you may offer additional products to your customers.
• Pricing
  This has anything to do with the pricing of your product or service. Your attraction strategy might be to offer value added pricing on selected services to attract new customers.
• Distribution
  This has to do with all the distribution channels you use to sell your product or service or the number of locations you sell in. For example, if you wish to attract new customers, your strategy for the year ahead may be to expand your store locations in one state.
• Service Delivery
  This relates to the way your product or service is offered to your customers. For example your retention strategy may be to introduce a new customer service policy for your most valuable customers.
• Communication
  This relates to how you will communicate your brand or business message to your customers. An example of a retention strategy may be to introduce an enhanced personalised communication program for your most profitable customers.

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