Strategic marketing or an equivalent course, required for many marketing certificate programs, covers the strategies used to market existing, as well as new, products. Specific topics include how to position a brand for the best results, how to link tactics to the strategic plan, how to thrive in competitive marketing, how to use relationship marketing, building strategy formulation, and more.
The main purpose of strategic marketing is to focus resources and energy on a course that will lead to dominance of a specific market. The basic theory behind strategic marketing is to determine the target audience, find the key marketing element or the proposition, and then implement that key element into marketing. You provide all the information the advertisers need to do their jobs.
The marketing essentials course provides the basics of marketing and the principles and practices used in the marketing field. At the completion of the course, students know how to create a marketing plan that can be successfully integrated into a company's business plan.
Many courses follow the four P's method: Place -- determining where to sell the product; Price -- determining whether to sell high for high profit in the short term or sell low to beat the competition and maintain presence for a long time; Product -- what does the product look like and can it be made more attractive; and Promotion -- how, when and where to promote the product.
Market research is one of the most important aspects of all marketing programs. Research collects as much information as possible about the competition, existing customers and prospective customers.
There are three main areas to market research; market information, market segmentation and market trends. Market information focuses on supply and demand and the price of different commodities. Market segmentation investigates the division of the market into different subgroups and looks at demographics. Market trends investigate the downward and upward movement of the market over a specific period of time.
To successfully use this market research, students learn how to analyze the data and to explore what factors affect customers' buying decisions.
Marketing communications are used to build brands, create new relationships, manage expectations and deliver value. This area is quite important to the promotion section of the four P's. Marketing communications students learn about integrated marketing communications and the different communications needed at each stage of a product's life.
On completion of this class, students know how to create a marketing communications plan from a business', advertising agency's and nonprofit organization's point of view.