Marketing Management and 5 Tips to Make Up Strategy
The business works like a well-oiled machine only if every process is correctly calculated and organized. Marketing goal achievement depends on the company’s workflow. Use a complex of marketing management tasks to successfully implement your promotion strategy.
Why Do We Need Marketing Management
Marketing management helps to analyze, plan, organize, and control marketing tasks. Any daily company activity includes local launches, the implementation of various activities. To be successful, you need more than a team and resources. You must organize the workflow to move according to a plan and be able to realize everything within your strategy.
All these processes are united by three management systems: strategy, team, and resources. Each is responsible for the organization of specific tasks and workflows. I suggest considering them in more detail.
Strategic management
Strategic management implies strategies, channels, campaigns, and reports that help with hitting marketing and business goals. The strategic management system is developed considering the specification and pain points of an audience. The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is usually the one responsible for the results of marketing efforts.
Team management
Team management provides for the existence of roles in your marketing team and the way executors interact [their workspace, communication mechanisms, etc.].
Resource management
Resource management is about planning, calculating the budget, and distributing roles within the team for the efficient use of resources available.
Each point includes the range of coordinated tasks and actions that help to optimize work and business processes.
5 Strategic Management Tips
The first step is to make sure the current strategy reflects marketing plans, tasks, and goals.
A marketing strategy provides the team with a clear understanding of where to move and what to do. It prevents chaos and diffusion of focus on channels or tendencies that have nothing to do with your audience or marketing context. To be fair, even if a channel is relevant but used or tested inconsistently, it will not be truly efficient.
Let’s review five essential components of strategic management that can make processes even more efficient.
Goals
The strive for bigger website traffic or a larger audience on social media is good. However, without specific goals, it makes no sense. Moreover, all employees must be aware of the company’s intentions. In this case, everyone will be able to clearly and promptly formulate and carry out tasks, while you will monitor the workflow and get predictable results.
Swot analysis
SWOT is a required step to explore the internal and external company environment. This analytical document promotes the work on the company’s strengths and allows seeing possibilities, optimizing weaknesses, and preventing threats.
Strengths and weaknesses are the internal factors that can be outlined by answering the following questions:
Strengths
- What helps a company develop and grow today?
- What are the business strengths?
- What qualities of a company or product are essential?
- How do you stand out among competitors?
- What resources are available to you?
- What helps a business achieve its goals?
Weaknesses
- What usually prevents an organization from achieving the desired result?
- What resources are required, but are not currently available?
- What should be changed to move on to long-term goals?
Name all fields that need improvements, and make each more specific.
Besides, there are external elements that include opportunities and threats. Here’s the list of general questions that will help you outline them.
Opportunities
- What external resources can you engage to achieve your goals?
- What steps should a company make?
- Are there any tendencies that will help hit goals?
Threats
- What business risks can you outline at once?
- What strengths of your competitors help them grow faster?
- Is there any negative connotation connected with your company?
- Are there any negative reviews of your product on mass media?
SWOT analysis will get you a clear understanding of the current state of affairs. According to its results, you will see what to focus on when developing a business strategy, considering all factors that can influence its development.
Metrics and KPI
Desired metrics are the things you analyze the market for, improve your product, create campaigns, and develop strategies. Metrics and KPIs offer a chance to assess the result of work and monitor the effectiveness of processes at every stage. Every company has an individual set of metrics and KPIs depending on its goals.
The huge number of metrics includes the following:
- Average revenue per user (ARPU);
- Customer retention rate (CRR);
- Customer lifetime value (LTV);
- Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI);
- Cost Per Click (CPC);
- Cost Per Lead (CPL);
- Conversion Rate (CR);
- Click-Through Rate (CTR) and others.
KPI helps to control intermediate results. If they do not satisfy you, you can correct your actions and positively affect metrics in the future.
Metrics allow for assessing the end result. You can thus draw conclusions about the company’s efficiency and decide what works and what to change.
Channels and tactics
After collecting information about the market, outlining goals, and calculating metrics to estimate progress, it’s time to focus on channels and tactics you will use with your team.
The choice of traffic sources, mechanisms of audience interaction, and solutions depends on what you want, as well as your potential customers’ expectations.
Having decided on a tactic, you face a significant volume of routine work:
- Plan: make up a marketing calendar with deadlines and desired results.
- Execution: begin with collecting information and decomposing major tasks into smaller ones; then assign them to people responsible (team, contractors).
- Calculation: calculate existing marketing metrics for a project.
- Repetition: make your tactic a recurring process.
Planning
Planning is an inherent part of strategic management. It is required to group and structure received data. Outline current opportunities that will help your business hit the goals set, and decide on the fields that require additional resources.
Prioritize problems according to their importance. Now you can start making up a plan, complementing every point with the description of a task, assignee, deadline, and result expected.
Conclusion
Over time, you will optimize every process and decrease resource costs for the implementation of marketing activities. Do not forget that promotion is an endless workflow. Any company conducts the launches of new initiatives on a daily basis.
You will have to manage them all the time. It is in your power to simplify this process. A well-functioning management system will help you structure work and make results more predictable.