The CRM & Marketing 101 WebLog

A document which is most important to your business or to your organization is the Marketing plan. This marketing or business plan is made after a lot of strategic consideration. Without strategy, a company will not move forward in an orderly manner. It will not know its own position in the market as compared to its competitor and hence, the firm will not be able to derive a competitive advantage. The importance of strategy is manifold but the most important aspect is competitive advantage. Because of marketing strategy, you are able to stay ahead of your competitors or at least you are able to beat the competitors who are below you in market standing. With good strategy, you might beat the top competitor as well.

This article mainly discusses the importance of Strategy with the following points.

1) Strategy helps long term planning

While you have to be prepared for the short term tactics, the main job of Strategy is to prepare you for a 3 year or 5 year or even a 10-20 year plan in some cases. When you plan for so many years down the line, you become creative and also you stand on the toes of your feet because your competitors don’t look so strong 10 years down the line nor will you be insecure about your business. You have a plan and you are now confident.

2) Strategy helps with sustainability and competitive advantage

I had written an excellent article on how to move up the competitive ladder.  It literally tells you how to rank your competitors one by one and then overtake them on your ladder to success. Strategy has exactly that role.

3) Strategy helps in collecting input

Naturally, when you want to forecast the future as it will be 10 years down the line, you have to collect a lot of input. This input might be from various internal customers like stockholders, distributors, dealers or others. It might be from employees and it might also be from end customers.

This input is crucial. While most companies should collect such inputs periodically, the input collected when your future is at stake has a very high value because you will ask the right questions and you will actually analyze the data in depth.

4) Strategy helps in preparation for different markets and products

Both, products and markets are dynamic in nature. A product might have a certain competitor pop up very quickly who is taking away market share. On the other hand, a new market which the company is entering, might be very different from the previous markets where the company has established its hold.

5) Strategy protects against a sudden change in environment

Let us assume that you are a person who is well planned and well documented. So this week you had planned on getting 7 tasks done and next week you had 10 tasks in your diary / planner. What happens if someone gets ill or if some family emergency crops up?

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Think of it as a whole body checkup. Wherever there is something wrong, the doctor will suggest the right medicine. The same goes for gap analysis. It analyses gaps in the company and fills up those gaps with the proper action plans in place.