Marketing Strategy for Business:The Complete Master Guide

During the typical Five steps of a Marketing strategy:

1. Pre-planning

2. Audit

3. Formulate a Marketing Strategy

4. Write a Marketing Plan

5. Implement and Review

The SWOT sits before step 3 and helps you to avoid formulating a bad strategy.

In this module you will learn how to underpin boring, mostly useless profit and loss accounts with relevant market-based information that actually explains what caused the numbers to happen in the first place. Directors will then listen to you intently.

In this module you will learn how to kick start your strategic marketing planning process using this simple, step-by-step approach to mapping the future direction of your organisation. It has been tried and tested on hundreds of organisations around the world, big and small and it always works brilliantly

In this module you will be given a tried and tested questionnaire which establishes quantitatively whether you are in command of the principal ingredients of commercial success and what corrective action needs to be taken

In this module you will learn how to improve your productivity and profitability by leaps and bounds through a simple methodology explained here. It will also show you how to understand the REAL profitability of your customers.

In this module you will learn why short term planning in the absence of a winning marketing strategy will nearly always lead to failure. It also explains how success is measured financially in all commercial markets

In this module you will learn how cost of capital is calculated. Even more important, it explains its crucial role in enterprise value and profitable growth and what marketers must do to play their part in this.

In this module you will learn why correct market definition is crucial in marketing planning rather than the failed approach of defining markets in terms of products and services. It then goes on to explain a quantitative methodology for mapping the value of your market from end-to-end and establishing who the decision makers are.

In this module you will learn not to ask customers stupid questions about what they want. It goes on to explain what proper, needs-based segmentation is and sets out a quick, uncomplicated way of segmenting your market based on the theory of orthogonality--but please don't be concerned, as you do not have to understand this theory

This module starts by explaining why the time-wasting SWOT Analysis taught on many marketing education programmes are in the main useless. It goes on to explain a step-by-step quantitative methodology for completing SWOTs that lead to improved performance.

In this module you will learn how to array all your principal products/services for markets relative to each other according to the potential of each to grow your profits over the planning period and according to your relative competitive strengths in each. It then goes on to spell out how to set marketing objectives and strategies for creating shareholder value added

Effective Marketing Planning pulls together marketing thought, understanding and practice into two distinctive plans. As you work through this blog, you might find you have some gaps in your marketing knowledge; I have suggested other blogs to read to help you fill those gaps.