Many businesses do not seem to understand the difference between is marketing strategy and marketing tactics and believe it or not it’s a really important thing to understand.
Marketing strategies in a nutshell are objectives a road map of where you are and where you want to be in the marketplace. What do you want to be known for in your industry? It could be premium customer service serving clients on a 121 basis and charging top dollar or are you selling a product at a very low price and looking to sell millions of them in other words it could also be interpreted as how do you want to brand your business.
Tactics on the other hand are what marketing techniques are you going to employ to achieve your goal.
Strategy is something that rarely changes over the years, the same strategies that were used by the advertising industry in the 1960s are still being used today, but many of the tactics have drastically changed and are far more complicated in technical application if you want maximum gain from what you are spending.
One thing is for sure, you need to decide as soon as possible what marketing strategies you are going to be implementing to drive your business forward in the direction you want it to go.
If you want to outsell/beat the competition and come out on top you need to do what the other guy isn’t. So many businesses play it safe when it comes to advertising and marketing strategies, the simple truth is this, if you are not marketing and advertising your business in a completely different way to your competitors there is nothing to separate you from them.
Companies that have forged ahead of their competitors and carved out a premium fan base followers/buyers, have had the courage to act and sell differently to their competitors and perfect example of this is Apple, when it came to advertising their first computers anyone who watched them fell in love with the way they sold their product and what the products looked like visually, the simple fact was they sold an idea that if you bought an apple you were different to other people who just bought a computer, and most people were happy to pay high premium prices to be different and stand out from their friends and family.
Another example of taking a risk and being totally different was a campaign by Ogilvy & Mather for Hathaway shirts in the 1970s, simply by getting all the models to wear an eyepatch while they were placed in different setting wearing a Hathaway shirt Ogilvy created an ingenious marketing campaign. The images became so well-known and iconic that everyone knew the man with the eyepatch was wearing a Hathaway shirt, they could have probably run the ads without mentioning the company name, people just knew what the product was and who made it. Pure genius.
Many businesses large and small fall into the trap of believing they have to be sensibly priced or cheap to sell products and make good profits well nothing could be further from the truth. Discounting and price reductions can be the quickest way of destroying what could have been a successful business.
Never forget the more expensive your product the more desirable it becomes; men don’t want to drive Porsches because they are cheap, and I don’t know of many women who enjoy wearing cheap dresses or jewellery.
