Strategic Marketing Masterclass

Delivering organisational success by putting the customer at the heart of planning

The purpose of this course

The main challenge facing many organisations today is how to ensure their activities are customer focused and their strategy externally driven. Today’s changing 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.

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 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 their return on investment.

Benefits for your organisation

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 processes. The programme is pragmatic, delivered in a way that allows the benefits of fresh thinking to be applied directly to your business. The programme is split (3 days and 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. In addition participants have the opportunity of calling on two hours of individual mentoring which will provide additional support to ensure the effective transfer of learning, ensuring the business gets full benefit from the ideas gained.

Benefits for you as an individual

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. You will extend your range of planning tools and techniques, and come away with ideas and tips that will help you achieve your personal performance goals.
The non-competitive, shared-learning environment is a balance of traditional ‘delivery’ from a highly-experienced consultant practitioner, with ‘clinic’ sessions, group activities and social learning amongst peers.

You will learn how to

• 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 in a variety of scenarios
• Appreciate the critical importance of control and 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

To take away from the course

• A toolbox of models and techniques for internal and external analysis
• SOSTAC planning framework
• Multifactor matrix as a decision tool
• A template for undertaking a market audit (CD)
• Two hours one-to-one telephone based consultancy or mentoring

Professional Standards

CIM’s Professional Marketing Standards have been developed through extensive research with employers and leading academics. All of our marketing qualifications and training courses are based on this framework ensuring that marketers at all levels of seniority gain the practical skills that employers require to improve business performance.