The Strategic Marketing Process: An Introduction

What is marketing? It’s a broad, challenging and often misunderstood function. Ask several people to define it and you’ll probably get very different answers:

It’s brochures and slogans and print ads in magazines
It’s websites and email campaigns
It’s communicating with customers
It’s an MBA crunching numbers on brand equity and market share

Yet marketing is much more than brochures and websites and numbers; it’s an investment that generates revenue, profit and opportunity for growth.

Marketing is the process of developing and communicating value to your prospects and customers. Think about every step you take to sell, service and manage your customers:

Your knowledge of the market and your strategy to penetrate it
The distribution channels you use to connect with your customers
Your pricing strategy
The messages you deliver to your market
The look and feel of your marketing materials
The experience you deliver to your market and customers
The actions of your sales and service reps
All of the planning, preparation, forecasting and measurement of your investments

Good marketing is essential for every company. It can make a company with a mediocre product successful, but poor marketing can send a good company out of business. Yet even business-to-business (B2B) marketing is often seen as a soft creative field instead of the engine that drives company revenue.

Key concepts & steps

This map shows how each sales & marketing subject fits into the strategic marketing process:

Download the map as a PDF.

In a perfect world, you would start at the beginning of this process – competitive positioning – and build your entire marketing program following the map. Unless you’re a startup company, you probably don’t have time to do so; you need to focus on the task at hand. That’s fine.

Ultimately, your goal is to make sure your organization understands how these subjects fit together. Each new sales tool, campaign and program should support your overarching strategies – the white boxes at the top of the map.

If you don’t have consistent, articulated strategies, you can improve your entire marketing program by focusing on them now. Those strategies should drive everything you do every day. They’re your compass and roadmap, and they’ll ensure that your entire organization is aligned and working as efficiently as possible toward a common goal.

If your existing marketing program is too reactive, haphazard, misaligned or “fluffy,” following this strategic marketing process can put your company on an entirely new path.

Learn about the subjects

This section of the marketing [m.o.] website provides a short, essential introduction to each subject in the process: What the subject is, why it’s important, hypothetical examples, and key steps in the process. The small maps on each page also show how each subject impacts (and is affected by) other subjects in the entire process.

Marketing is complex, but don’t shy away from subjects that could help you grow your business; implement new ideas as you can.

And most importantly, embrace marketing. It’s your process for developing and communicating value to your prospects and customers. It’s your lifeblood. Your M.O.

Good luck and enjoy the ride!

Next step

Read about the first subject in the process, competitive positioning, the foundation of your entire business. Or choose a different subject from the list on the left side of the page.

Notes

This strategic marketing process is designed for business-to-business (B2B) marketers. While business-to-consumer marketers (B2C) follow a similar process, the process includes the steps and challenges that business marketers face as they sell to (and through) other companies.
In addition, all of the concepts and instructions apply to both product marketing and service marketing. However, the phrase “product/service” is long and distracting, so we just use the term “product.”