A business without a marketing strategy operates blindly, losing money and time. A company may have a better product, but if it's not clear how to convey its value to consumers and convince them to buy, all efforts will be in vain. The strategy helps you understand who the company's customers are, how to reach them, and how to hook them.

What is a marketing strategy?
 
A marketing strategy is a document that describes what marketing efforts need to be made to help a business achieve its goals. It can include various tasks for marketers, from market analysis and determining the target audience to choosing promotion tools and methods of interacting with customers.
Without an understanding of what and how to promote, the company will experiment with channels and creatives until it runs out of budget. As a result, he will spend time, money and earn nothing.
What will change if the document is developed:
It will become clear who the target audience is. This will allow you to focus on consumers who are most likely to become customers. The children's toy store understands that its target audience is parents with young children, so it directs advertising to mothers on social networks.
Sales will increase. The café chain is launching a loyalty program that encourages customers to return more often and increases sales of coffee and pastries.
The company adapts faster to market changes. The electronics manufacturer sees an increase in demand for smartwatches and is quickly developing its own line to meet the needs of the market.
The effect of marketing will be noticeable and it will be possible to manage resources more flexibly. A small online clothing store analyzes and finds out that advertising from bloggers brings the most sales, and ads on social networks do not work. It increases the budget for blogger integrations and reduces the cost of less effective channels.

Strategies can vary in scale. For example, you can develop a global CRM strategy for the entire company with channel, segment, communication, cohort and RFM analysis, steps that will lead the company to the goal.
Or you can write a strategy only for launching email newsletters. It will be more like a plan where marketers will write down why the company needs mailings, what result they expect to get from this channel, how to organize mailings, what content to send and to whom.
A more detailed document will allow us to predict more accurately that if we do A, we will get the result B. And vice versa - less detailed ones are likely to have to be adjusted.

There are two main classifications of strategies: by goals and by levels. Let's take a closer look at them.
Classification by purpose
The type of strategy depends on the focus of the business:
A global strategy is chosen when they plan to develop a business in international markets — to expand geography and adapt to local requirements. For example, Coca-Cola sells its drinks around the world with minimal changes in recipes and packaging. McDonald's, on the contrary, offers different menus in different countries, taking into account the tastes and preferences of the local population.

Basic strategies were proposed by economist Michael Porter. They determine the ways to achieve competitive advantages:
Cost leadership strategy, when a company offers goods at lower prices. For example, Pyaterochka focuses on low prices and a wide range of products to attract more customers.
A differentiation strategy, where a company offers a product or service that sets it apart from the competition. For example, Italy Group has opened a restaurant with an immersive serving of dishes — video projections, music, and aromatic accompaniment.

Например, «Яндекс» когда-то был поисковой системой, а теперь у компании свой музыкальный стриминг-сервис, маркетплейс, сервис такси и даже производство умных гаджетов.

Companies often apply several marketing strategies at the same time. For example, to work with different audience segments. A growth strategy can be focused on one segment and a competitive one on another. But it is important to choose one main one. This will help focus resources on a key goal. For example, a marketplace can use three types of strategy:
1. Competitive. Conduct large-scale advertising campaigns and offer discounts to attract new customers, launch a loyalty program to increase the frequency of purchases.
2. Growth. For example, buy a grocery delivery service to increase market share.
3. Basic. Expand the range, update the functionality of the site and application to make it convenient to use, open new pick-up points. This strategy will be the main one, because without a convenient service with a wide selection of products, discounts and advertising will not bring results. But if customers are happy with the product, additional strategies will reinforce the main one.

Stages of developing a marketing strategy in CRM
A marketing strategy in CRM focuses on long-term relationships with customers. It includes personalized communications, loyalty programs, and customer data analysis to improve the customer experience. Let's take a step-by-step look at how to act:
Analyze the business - the level of elaboration of the document will depend on this.

Adjusting the strategy for a large company will be much more expensive than for a small one. Such a business has a more complex organizational structure, more data in CRM, ERP, and marketing platforms. Changing the strategy will require the cost of analyzing data and adapting marketing campaigns. Therefore, you need to carefully plan and test new advertising strategies to avoid unnecessary expenses. For example, you can launch and analyze test campaigns for 10% of the audience.
Collect and analyze competitor data. This will help you understand what strategies they use and how to strengthen theirs. The easiest way to study a competitor is to go to the site, subscribe to the newsletter, register in the loyalty program, analyze what they write in the newsletters, what triggers they use, and how often they communicate. There are also special tools for competitive analysis that help save time. For example, the MailCharts service collects analytics on email newsletters and SMS. You can choose a niche and see how often companies in it communicate with customers, what is most often written in headlines.
Decide on the goal. Marketing efforts should increase the profits of the business. Therefore, most often, the expected result expressed in money is indicated in the goal. For example, income or revenue from the channel or a share in turnover. The goal can be broken down into sub-goals to make it easier for marketers to plan their tasks. For example, the conversion to an order via email newsletters and push notifications must be within a certain value.

In some businesses, the result of the channel's work cannot be shown through sales. For example, CRM communications will not bring sales to a developer and a car dealership. In this case, the goal is the number of requests for a call back from the manager or visits to the salon.

The service of one of our clients was earned by replenishing the client's account in the personal account. No replenishment — the product does not make money. Therefore, the strategic goal was to bring each client to replenishment of the account. The entire communication scheme in a marketing strategy works only for this purpose. As soon as the client registers, communications guide him through all stages of onboarding and check every action. If the client does not click a button, a communication chain is launched with screenshots that show how to proceed and explain why it is important to click it.

A strategic goal does not always correspond to reality, so you need to check it with market data. For example, it was decided that the channel's share in the profit should be 30%, but in the market this figure is no more than 10%. This means that you need to adjust the goal.
Form tactical steps. At this stage, they determine what to do to achieve the goal. They form customer segments, analyze their path to purchase, and make a communication map — automatic mailings to segments. Usually, they are the ones that bring the most conversions and affect the purpose of the business. The communication map prescribes what to offer customers in different segments so that they make an order, leave a request, come to the showroom and do not switch to competitors. Next, a media plan is formed from the communication map: indicators are determined by which the effectiveness of communications will be evaluated, compared with market benchmarks, and a rough understanding of how many orders the planned marketing efforts will bring.

Check if the steps are consistent with the goal. Let's say that to increase sales by 10%, you need to increase the customer base in e-commerce by 25%. To do this, you can increase traffic and conversions on the site, but this gives an increase in the base by only 15%. This means that additional steps need to be added to the strategy. For example, the launch of game mechanics, new subscription forms, or cross-promotion with partners.

Tips for novice strategists

Make sure there is enough data. Without them, the strategy will be more like a fantasy. For example, to conduct an RFM analysis and get meaningful results, you need data on the behavior of several thousand customers over the past year or more. Each record must contain information about the date, purchase amount, and customer ID.
Implement the strategy with the same team that developed it. Consultation from the agency will be useful, especially if the company is drawing up a document for the first time. But for a strategy to work for a specific company, it must be developed by a team that deals with CRM marketing. She knows all the specifics of the business and will be able to quickly adjust the entire document or individual communication if something goes wrong in the implementation.
Change the strategy only if it does not meet the goals. For example, a coffee chain decided to increase the number of purchases per year by 15% due to mechanics: for every seven cups of coffee, one as a gift. In the first year, regular customers came to the café once every two or three days to receive coffee as a gift. A year later, the strategy ceased to be effective: people came to the coffee shop less and less often. They began to perceive the loyalty program as a given, and not as a novelty and an incentive to buy. In such a situation, it is worth analyzing competitors, customer behavior, and planning new marketing efforts.

The first strategy won't be perfect — and that's okay. To develop something that will bring the expected result, you need experience. The only way to get it is to evaluate the result of your strategy. Compare the plan and the fact, regularly analyze what is not true in the plan and why
I have developed dozens of strategies, and still something can go wrong in each next one. For example, they took into account all the risks, and the world was suddenly covered by a pandemic, which changed customer behavior. It will not be possible to predict this, but in the document you can correct what does not work now.