Often times, the terms “marketing strategy” and “marketing plan” are used interchangeably, when in fact, they are totally different but not necessarily totally separate concepts.

In short, your strategy is the set of goals that you intend to achieve, which are in line with the overall goals of your business. Your marketing plan, on the other hand, is how you are going to achieve those goals.

The formulation of a marketing strategy is as important and should come before the formulation of your marketing plan. Without the strategy, how do you build a plan that will actually improve your business? No strategy means that your plan is directionless—and therefore essentially useless.

So, what is important to include in your marketing strategy to ensure that your plan and business are given the direction they need?

• An understanding of your customers and their needs. If you do not know who your customer is, there is no way to build an effective marketing program—you won’t even know who you’re marketing to. Instead, your strategy should include descriptions of your ideal customers, sectioning them by “needs” or “desires.”

• A discussion of what you want to achieve with your marketing efforts. Before you can start your planning, you need to know what you’re planning for. Do you want to reach a wider customer base? Do you want to improve brand loyalty? Capitalize on repeat customers? Knowing this will dictate which marketing avenues you use and which tactics you employ. Read more about how to do this in this Forbes article.

• A metric for success. How do you plan to measure your success (or failure)? This will be tightly linked to what your specific goals. For example, if one of your goals is to improve your Facebook following, set up a metric that tells you how successful you are in achieving that goal—i.e. how quickly you are gaining followers or which referral tactics are bringing more followers, etc.

• Assign responsibility. Unless you’re a one-person show (and there’s not anything wrong with that), part of your marketing strategy should be to assign responsibility for different tasks to different members of your team, depending on their personal strengths and weaknesses.

Once you have your marketing strategy ironed out, you’re ready to begin building that marketing plan. Keep in mind that long term strategies usually beget long term success, while short-term strategies usually only bring temporary improvements.