What is the difference between a marketing strategy and a marketing plan?

Often, people get the two mixed up. While both concepts are interconnected, they offer different benefits. So what is their meaning, and what's the difference between them?

A marketing strategy is a set of actions you outline to achieve a specific objective in the business. Whether it's increasing the market share, changing the target audience, launching a new product, or any other matter, you will need a strategy to reach the goal. 

A marketing plan describes practical options for particular actions, typically expressing how to achieve the marketing strategy. This scheme divides the strategy points and makes detailed steps on how, when, and where to achieve them.

A marketing strategy responds to "how will you achieve your goals, whereas marketing plans find the answer to "what exactly needs to be achieved."

Let's compare what is included in the plan and strategy.

Target Audience 

The strategy shows the target audience, the product or service in demand, and who the competitors are.

Whereas the plan represents what will need to be done to achieve the strategy, the time of the offer, and how to measure the outcome's success.

In addition, plans can be changed from time to time, while we try our best not to change the strategy, as it will change the dynamic of the whole process. 

Demand

The need of the market, pain points, segmentation, and delivering - all of this is strategy.

Marketing plans show where to offer products differently, such as social media, websites, or other advertising channels. It also included planning all content plans and references, maintaining, following, and analyzing old and new campaigns.

Selling/Budget 

In the strategy, we want to see the steps of buying a specific product or service, understand the potential or existing consumer's criteria, and predict the behavior at each stage of the buying process.

In the plan, the task is to understand and divide the budget between all marketing tools used in amounts that will work best for each. 

Responsibilities

A strategy must allocate what needs to be done, when, and how - we are talking about the strategy. The business objective plays a crucial role here.

The plan is written to say who exactly will do what part of the process and at what stage. Also, what will be the metrics, and how to measure them? 

Let's quickly look at the advantages of creating a marketing strategy and plan.

Marketing is one of the most essential tools in business, but most of the time, it's underrated. Creating an excellent strategy for your business will bring you many benefits. Starting from the brand awareness, engagement of the clients, and their loyalty, and finishing with the thing, that you will always know where you are going, you can change the direction of need and make minor changes without losing the key points. You will know what works and what doesn't, and last but not least - you will know how to get the audience's trust.  

Along with this, preparing the plan will help you support the company's goals by knowing which points need to be met. Furthermore, it plays a tremendous role in acquiring new customers and increasing sales. It also allows you to divide the potential clients (target audience) according to your needs. 

Marketing strategy typically shows the bigger picture and takes longer than the plan, and consists of crucial business elements such as branding, how you speak to the customer, place on the market, and, of course, developing a unique offer. The marketing plan, on the contrary, contains the details of the individual campaigns that may last for a short period. In other words, a marketing plan is a way you will achieve your marketing strategy.

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