Strategic Marketing Masterclass

Overview

The main challenge facing many organisations today is how to ensure their activities are customer focused and their strategy externally driven. Today’s business environment drives the continual search for competitive advantage and this masterclass is designed to provide delegates with the knowledge, tools and techniques to achieve this. The programme includes mentoring and clinic sessions ensuring delegates have the confidence and support to instigate changes in their own business context.

Benefits to you and your organisation

This masterclass provides you with an opportunity to review your current approaches and compare these with good practice and other sectors. The process will help you build your confidence and provide the evidence needed to make a business case in order to support stronger external orientation and customer led planning.

This masterclass will provide your manager with the time and catalysts to help them identify opportunities that could directly improve your competitive advantage and your planning process.

The programme is split (3 +  2 days), allowing participants to reflect on experiences and learning from the first module, before returning to address the specific strategic marketing challenges facing their own organisation.

Who this course is for

Delegates need to be experienced managers, from a marketing or non marketing background, involved with their business planning and strategy development and/or who have the authority to develop and implement marketing plans and strategy. Marketers with strategic responsibility and those developing into senior organisational roles will find this programme valuable, as will marketing practitioners responsible for operational marketing plans and ROI.

Organisations wanting to improve their external focus or the effectiveness of their marketing activity – whether public or private sectors – will benefit from this programme.

What you will learn

• Structure and write strategic and operational marketing plans.
• Assess your organisation’s use of strategic marketing and make constructive recommendations to maximise ‘business’ benefits from a customer orientated perspective.
• Appreciate the customer-focused planning process and be able to map your organisation’s decision-making against it.
• Use tools and techniques that ensure planning is externally focused.
• Manage segmentation analysis and decision making.
• Recognise barriers to achieving high performance organisations and teams, and be able to recommend practical steps to overcome these.
• Be able to recommend a range of control metrics in financial and marketing terms.

Course content

• Marketing’s role in organisations today.
• The challenge of establishing a market orientation.
• Structure of a customer-focused business plan.
• The tools of internal and external analysis.
• Using the SOSTAC framework for planning.
• Aligning strategic, operational and tactical level plans.
• The challenges of segmentation in both B2B and B2C organisations.
• How the marketing mix creates competitive advantage.
• Metrics to improve future performance.

Learning approach

The non-competitive environment is a balance of traditional delivery from a highly experienced consultant practitioner, with clinic sessions, group activities and social learning amongst peers.  

Your course director

Richard Mayer is actively involved in marketing training for a range of clients. His main interest lies in improving professional marketing standards, with a particular focus on business to business marketing and strategic marketing planning in both the private and public sector. He has worked on marketing training projects for several prominent blue-chip companies, including O2, HSBC, Pfizer, Microsoft and BP.