A marketing strategy is a comprehensive overview of planned marketing activities, usually during an extended set period, such as a year or longer.  For shorter planned marketing activities, you can learn more about marketing campaign planning in Lesson 6.

Marketing strategies cover the wide range of marketing activities you will undertake, and requires extensive research and coordination.  Developing a marketing strategy relies on your ability to understand the planned operations of your business during a given year and how the various streams of marketing you want to undertake will interact with operations, the public, what’s going on in the world, and each other.

Within your marketing strategy you may decide to undertake a variety of marketing streams to help you meet the goals you have for your business, such as maintaining social media profiles, running TV commercials, and publishing a quarterly newsletter. 

Your marketing strategy can be as complex or as simple as what works for you and your business, you may decide to only undertake two streams of marketing, such as hosting a website and managing a social media account; but it must be detailed and measurable.

Regardless of the complexity of your marketing strategy, it will only be effective if you breakdown your larger vision into objectives, or what you hope to achieve with the marketing you have planned.  With a strong overall marketing strategy, and a good understanding of your marketing objectives and business goals, you can develop campaign plans to help you manage specific projects within your marketing strategy to help you turn your vision for your business into reality.