It is possible that at some point doubts have entered you and you ask yourself: do I follow a good marketing strategy? As a business consultant or marketing manager, this should be an easy answer for you. But in case you still do not have it clear, we are going to explain how to raise and give an answer to this very important question. This is something that you should be very clear about from the beginning. You cannot attend a team or client meeting without be sure that the strategy you are following is the correct one and the reasons why it is so.
Requirements of a good marketing strategy
When it comes to knowing if you follow a good marketing strategy, it is important to ask yourself some questions regarding the requirements that you should meet:
- Is it properly focused to achieve the desired objectives?
- Are we achieving the desired objectives?
- What is the ROI (Return on Investment)?
- Is there an adequate balance between the investment made to implement the strategy and the results that are being obtained?
- Are we adapting the strategy to changes in the environment?
- Is the growth of the KPIs still growing? Have we noticed any slowdown or downturn? What is the cause?
- Is the action plan properly aligned with the marketing strategy?
- Does the team that is in charge of the execution agree with the steps to follow and is it doing it correctly?
- Has the strategy encountered any problems when it comes to putting it into practice?
All these questions can help us detect problems in our marketing strategy, as well as confirm if it is being properly applied and is producing the expected results. We must not forget that there is a long way from theory to practice, and it is not always right the first time, no matter how analytical and experienced we are. It is also essential to create a flexible strategy that can be optimized over time to adapt to new challenges, objectives and perspectives.
How to make it work in the long term?
A good strategy, as I have told you in the previous paragraph, is flexible, that is, it is made with the possibility of being optimized. But… how do we optimize our strategy so that it can work in the long term? Well, to achieve this, every marketing consultant should keep track of the strategy with the following steps:
- Analyze: Analyzing the initial situation of the company, the competition, the public and the environment, will be the first step to create the strategy.
- Create the flexible strategy: often, you tend to create marketing strategies that consist of saying what to do, period! However, not everything must be so gridded, a strategy must be general and branched enough so that there are different application options. We must leave for the next step, the action plan, the specification of the actions, something that can be continuously modified to optimize the relationship between investment and results.
- Design the action plan: Once we know which are the possible paths to follow, we will choose the most appropriate one and we will specify what exactly needs to be done to materialize that strategy.
- Start up: This is the moment in which everything contemplated in the action plan is brought to reality.
- Analysis of results: the reversed results of the applied action plan must be analyzed and evaluated in search of improvements that can be applied.
- Strategic optimization: Based on the analysis of results and changes in the context (company, competition, public and environment), improvements will be applied at a strategic or tactical level that will increase the longevity of a good marketing strategy.
I hope that both the questions to strengthen your feeling of following a good marketing strategy or not, as well as the recommendations for a good strategy in the long term, will be of great help to you in your day-to-day life as marketing consultants or professionals in the sector. . With them you can evaluate and improve your digital marketing strategy! Do not hesitate to comment on this post with your ideas, proposals and doubts.