Abstract:

The purpose of the research is to study practical application of the strategic marketing system by the companies of the machinery-producing industry and to develop recommendations on its enhancement, to study specifics and effectiveness of strategic marketing on the example of companies in Belarus and Portugal and to determine their differences. All in all, the researchers agree that the elements playing critical role in managing marketing performance are data, analytics and metrics (Patterson, 2015). Required data has been obtained via the questionnaire; 13 Belarusian and 23 Portuguese companies were interviewed. The survey determined that companies in the industry apply marketing only on a basic level, missing benefits from elements such as performance metrics, customer orientation, benchmarking, etc. As a result of this work, the following research hypotheses were confirmed: There is a positive association between return on sales and marketing strategy; return on sales and degree of flexibility of marketing strategy; return on sales and degree of business collaboration in marketing. In addition, it was determined that number of monitored metrics has a statistically significant impact on return on sales, and there is a statistically significant difference in marketing system depth between the countries. This data provides ground to help the management in creating marketing strategies, which will help establish a definitive vision of what should be done to save current market share, to find new markets for development, to plan more effective internal work.