Focus on strategic marketing
re you
unintentionally limiting the amount of customers you attract?
The size of their orders? Or the number of times they visit
your store?
Most drycleaners do just that!
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After 23 years of research, the Golomb
Group has found that more wealth, success, and competitive
advantage can be created through strategic marketing than
through any other business building method.
Unfortunately, most businesses do not
understand how to market “strategically.”
They occasionally react to the current
business climate by doing “tactical” marketing.
That may produce some results. But they miss out on easily
making ten times greater profits by not marketing
strategically.
The difference between tactical marketing
and strategic marketing is like night and day. It’s the
difference between making a living and making millions.
If you keep using tactical marketing the
same way your competitors do, you’ll keep getting the
same, or worse, results that you’re experiencing now. But
if, instead, you use strategic marketing, it will change the
rules of the game to your distinct advantage.
Let me explain the difference between
“tactical” marketing and “strategic”
marketing. This one business secret can be more important to
your business success that anything else. It can determine how
much true wealth and success you eventually achieve through
your business.
Strategy is something you do carefully,
methodically and calculatingly to accomplish your precise,
well-defined goal. It is the master vision you create to meet
each business challenge under the most advantageous conditions
and emerge victorious. It lets you exercise complete control
over all competitive issues, threats and opportunities.
Basically, strategy is your detailed
master game plan and tactics are the individual means used to
successfully implement that plan. Your strategy is the most
important single business function you will ever develop.
Tactics are merely the steps and actions
you use to help achieve your strategic goal.
I consider your marketing strategy to be
the most important focus of any business. But most of you are
bombarded with so many different daily business demands,
there’s little time to work your businesses’s
master plan, let alone contemplating the difference strategy
has over pure tactics in marketing effectiveness.
Now, I hope to reshape your current
thinking on strategic marketing’s role in turning your
business into a systematic, money-making machine that brings
customers, sales and recurring income streams for years to
come.
Why should you make marketing more the
basis for all your business growth?
Because strategic marketing will then
become the driving force that propels your business to the
highest level your efforts and commitments deserve. It will
help you to redefine marketing’s role as the major
contributor to competitive and financial success. It is the key
to business positioning, business differentiation, competitive
advantage, value perception, building customers, selling and
reselling.
Most drycleaners see marketing’s
role as having only minimal impact on their achieving success.
They look more towards quality, management, and even,
technological improvements, as being the answer to poor cash
flow. Usually the reason for this is their lack of
understanding of how to fully utilize and harness
marketing’s awesome potential power. They resort to only
occasional and purely tactical marketing efforts that only
produce a static one time result. They never experience the
overwhelming cumulative effect that strategic marketing can
have.
You have to put strategic marketing at the
absolute center of every key business decision you make.
Without doing this, your business cannot gain sustainable
competitive leadership.
Formulating an effective breakthrough
marketing strategy requires an in-depth analysis of customers,
markets, competitors, pitfalls and opportunities available to
you.
To get started, answer the following
questions:
• How focused are you on your
business’s marketing strategy?
• Do you use innovative strategic
marketing or the same old tactical approach?
• Does your business and marketing
strategy specify exactly how your business intends to
successfully compete in the markets you serve?
• Your marketing strategy must be
straightforward in its intent and direction. How clear and
focused is yours?
Most drycleaners do not market
strategically. That fact can be costing you tens or, even,
hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in lost sales.
Don’t waste another day before formulating your own
strategic marketing plan.
Dennis McCrory is president of The Golomb
Group Inc., a firm that designs marketing programs for
drycleaners. Contact him at The Golomb Group Inc., 7664 Plaza
Ct., Willowbrook, IL 60527 Tele: (800) 679-5856
E-mail: dennismccrory@golombgroup.com
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