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How much better would your business marketing strategy be if someone told you how to evaluate it? Marketing plans can fall below expectation for several reasons. One very common reason for missing the mark is the strategy and not the marketing plan or even the marketing tactics.

Here are five tests of a business marketing strategy that must be met if your marketing plan and your activities are expected to succeed.

1. Shared goals with business strategy. It is absolutely necessary that you align your business marketing strategy with your business strategy. The marketing strategy needs to emanate from the business strategy. For example, if your plan is to grow your legal practice by promoting a focus on estate planning, it does not make a great deal of sense to advertise a focus on legal defense for juvenile delinquents.

2. Respect the budget. The budget sets the limits for your business marketing strategy. No matter what audience you need to reach or what product or service you are marketing, budgets define reality. You must keep things in perspective within those limits if you expect to meet your marketing objectives.

3. Comprehensive. Your business marketing strategy should outline all of your marketing goals, as well as the tactics you will use to accomplish them. It needs to encompass all of your marketing activities – traditional, internet, mobile, point of sale, etc. But it also needs to allow just enough flexibility to permit you to make some changes in order to take advantage of an unanticipated opportunity with a very high chance of success.

4. Balanced. It is unlikely that you will be reaching out to a single, narrowly defined demographic within your target audience or that you will use a single marketing tactic. A successful business marketing strategy will include ways to reach several segments of your target audience and will speak to those people through more than one medium.

5. Customer centric. A good strategy will result from profound knowledge of your target market. It will use the tactics calculated to speak clearly to that audience. It will reflect your understanding of the information they need to hear and the method of communication they prefer.

If your business marketing strategy includes these five marks of a good strategy, you can rest assured that you are starting down the marketing path headed in the right direction and with the basic tools you need to reach your desired destination.

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