Marketing Strategy for 2012

But strategic thinking can not be replaced with tactics, and a high-level strategy that embraces and recognizes the "real time" nature of today's business environment, is still doable.

Simply put, a marketing strategy is the broad statement of how things will be conducted which provides direction for the activity defined in your marketing plan.

The key to a successful online marketing strategy today is to allow for it to be fluid; always testing its foundation and modifying as needed with always the overall goal in mind.

We should take a moment to check the definition of strategy and plan so we are on the same page with what they should be, not what they have been morphed into.

These definitions are from Longman Dictionary of American English:

STRATEGY: a planned series of actions for achieving something: a strategy for raising funds | the company's marketing/business/development strategy.

PLAN: 2. a set of actions for achieving something in the future: business plan (=what your business will do) for the 21st century

In the next section, I will introduce you to a model that I conceived, developed and tested over the last few years that allows "real time" strategies and plans to be created based on a product or service launch concept.

In fact, most of us now approach our marketing activities as product launches: we launch an advertising campaign, a branding initiative, a web refresh or social media programs. All of these if done successfully should be directly tied to the overall goal and as such, can be executed much in the same way that hard product launches have been done in the past.

I call this model "The Social System Marketing Model".

Read my real life case study of what the model is and how it works in the next section: Social System Marketing. Return to Home Page