What is Strategic Marketing?

Strategic Marketing is the use of marketing disciplines to achieve

organizational goals by developing and maintaining a sustainable
competitive advantage. It addresses high-level considerations such as
what markets to target, which services to offer, and how to price and
promote them.

The strategy and its associated tactics are often documented in

a marketing plan. Marketing management is the process of
implementing that plan — delivering the strategy at the tactical level.

In my experience, most professional services firms focus on marketing

management and rarely engage in big-picture strategic marketing. The
results are predictable: their so-called “marketing strategy” is a series of
poorly planned, opportunistic activities that do little to establish a true
competitive advantage.

Strategic Marketing Examples

To help you understand how strategic marketing works, let’s take a look at
an example of non-strategic marketing and then compare it to a well-
executed example.

Strategic marketing, gone bad. Imagine a mid-sized accounting firm.

They are eager to grow but have no real plan for how to accomplish it.

Their “marketing plan” is little more than a list of activities and their
associated costs. There is no overall strategy that ties these activities to
their growth objectives. They have tried a variety of marketing ideas
drawn from conversations with peers and trendy techniques they have
read about. There is no systematic strategy or process that guides their
use of marketing resources.

The firm offers the services their clients routinely ask for, and they look to
competitors to gauge the effectiveness of their pricing and marketing
materials. They believe that superior client service is why clients choose
them, but they have never done any systematic research to verify this
assumption.

This follow-the-herd marketing mentality, of course, does nothing to

differentiate the firm from all the other mid-sized firms out there. Sadly,
this way of thinking is all too common.

Now, let’s contrast this approach against a similarly sized firm that has
taken a strategic approach to its marketing.

Strategic marketing done right. Now imagine another mid-sized

accounting firm. They also want to grow organically. But they have
decided to do that by differentiating themselves from other accounting
firms to gain a sustainable competitive advantage.

They start by conducting systematic research into their best clients. This

knowledge allows them to identify existing strengths they can build upon.
Based on this business analysis, they decide to specialize in the hospitality
sector — an industry where they have a solid track record of success and
a handful of high-profile clients.

As their understanding of the sector grows, they begin to offer specialized

bundled service/software packages to complement their full suite of
traditional audit, tax, and consulting. Their fastest-growing segment is
their new, high-value operational consulting practice for hospitality
businesses.

The firm identifies topics of intense interest to their target clients, and
they write and speak on these issues regularly at industry events. Their
superior knowledge of the industry and specialized services give them a
distinct advantage when they speak with prospects.

Today, the firm offers regular industry-focused webinars and has clients
all over the country. They command premium fees and are growing at
about 5X the industry average.

As these two examples show, strategic marketing can affect many aspects
of a firm’s policies, priorities, and operations. These changes can
transform a firm’s fortunes.