Posts Tagged ‘marketing plan’

A marketing plan is vital to achieving your financial objectives. Say for example that you want to increase your sales by 10%, how are you actually going to achieve this? By increasing the number of units sold, market share, new programs or services, or improving customer awareness?

You need to devise a plan to achieve your goals, based on your marketing objectives. Let’s start with your marketing strategies.

Marketing Strategies

There are a broad range of strategies that you can use to achieve your objectives. They include:

• Defining your target market
• Product positioning
• Pricing
• Promotion
• Distribution

Your target market needs to be defined so that you can tailor your message to the right market, otherwise your marketing will be a waste of time. You need to be crystal clear on WHO you want to target. A target market of “anyone who wants to pay me” will make your marketing results dismal, because it is too vague.

One of the best ways I have seen to really hone in on your target market is to analyse your demographics and psychographics and come up with an ‘avatar’, like a real person. Her name might be ‘Jane’, she’s over 35, married with two kids, running a business, time poor and constantly worried about how to manage her cashflow. When you’re crafting your marketing message, keep Jane in mind and anticipate what problems of hers you can solve.

From this perspective, you should be able to develop your Unique Selling Proposition (USP). Why would Jane hire you instead of someone else in your field? What makes you unique? You must convey the benefits derived from your product or service, because people buy based on ‘wants’ not ‘needs’. Put yourself in Jane’s shoes when tailoring your marketing message. What kind of ‘pain’ would she be feeling on a daily basis? How can you fix that pain with your product or service? Craft your marketing message by targeting the kind of emotions she would be experiencing.

In terms of product position, what are the features, names and packaging of your products? Are there any services involved? Do you provide guarantees?

What price will the market bear for your product/service? Make sure that your mark-ups cover all costs and leave you with a healthy profit margin. What about wholesale pricing? Will you give discounts for bulk purchases? How about credit costs?

How will you promote your products/services? How will you create customer awareness and promote the benefits of your products/services? Will you use advertising, sales promotions, direct mail or public relations (in the next section I go into more detail about the various marketing tools available).

What are your distribution methods for your products/services? Who are the distributors and/or retailers? Where are the physical stores? Are there fulfilment houses for online stores? What transportation methods are used and is any warehousing necessary?

Marketing Tools

Once you have determined your approach, it’s time to choose the marketing tools you will use to assist you in achieving your marketing and financial objectives.

All tools have monetary and/or time costs associated with them. Some will give you more ‘bang’ for your buck or leverage your time more efficiently.

Some tools include:

• Advertising
• Awards
• Direct mail
• Exhibitions
• Internet marketing
• Media relations/publicity
• Newsletters
• Articles
• Seminars
• Sponsorships
• Cold calling
• Joint ventures
• Blogging
• Social media

The trick to implementing tools is to concentrate on a few and give them your full attention. Pick the tools that resonate with you. For example, if you prefer talking to writing, create videos to convey your marketing message on your website. Use the tools you feel comfortable with, and you’ll be more likely to stick to your marketing schedule.

Marketing Calendar

The final step to your marketing plan is mapping out all your marketing tasks on a calendar. By mapping everything out on a large wall calendar, you’ll be able to see at a glance exactly what marketing task you should be working on. You can slot in specific promotions and work backwards to determine when each task is required in order to stay on track.

Have you linked your financial plan to your marketing plan? If your goal is a 10% increase in sales, you can sit back and hope that it just happens out of the blue, OR you can align your financial plan to your marketing plan and take specific actions to achieve your goal. Sure, some growth happens organically, but wouldn’t you rather have a plan in place to know exactly what you should be doing everyday to grow your business?

My best tip is to take action and loads of it! You’d be amazed at what you can achieve when you focus on your marketing every day! So, what marketing task will you work on today?

Organisational Chart based on current and future requirements

How do you know when it’s time to hire more people or outsource tasks? That’s where your resources plan comes into action.

For most start-ups, when you first begin business you have to wear many different hats. You are the sales person, chief marketer, bookkeeper and even the cleaner!

Of course your hope is not to continue with all of these roles in the future. If you determine your organisational chart, you can in fact see where your “many hats” exist and map them out for your business.

Task Analysis

One of the best things to do is look at the tasks you are handling now or are still on your to-do list. If you refer to your marketing plan and financial plan, what tasks are required to move your business forward, to reach your goals, to implement those plans and achieve your financial objectives?

There are probably tasks that you procrastinate on continually because you hate doing them! If there’s a way to plan for additional resources to complete those tasks, make it happen. You will be a much happier business owner.

Maybe your marketing plan is overly ambitious for your skill set? What skill set do you require to make it happen? Make sure it’s budgeted for in your financial plan and you’re partly on your way to achieving your marketing plan.

Once you’ve collated all necessary tasks, analyse them carefully and see if you can identify a batch of tasks that are similar and thus suited to a particular skill set. From those identified skills, what experience, qualifications, personality and attitude are required to fulfil the roles and responsibilities of that position?

With this information, you have the making of job descriptions and then you can decide on employment type (i.e. subcontractor, full time or casual employee).

Organise departmentally

If you think about large organisations, they consist of many departments, but they all started off small at some stage. It may have been a long time ago, but many roles were conducted by just a few people. Rather than waiting until you are big enough to departmentalise, set the roles and departments in place now to clearly identify what positions you will require in the future.

Depending on the stage of your business there are a few departments you can start planning for:

• Operations
• Sales/marketing
• Finance
• Customer Service
• Product Development

As I mentioned earlier, you’re probably handling the above functions yourself, however sooner or later you’ll need to outsource if you want to achieve your goals and objectives.

Financial, marketing and resources plan intrinsically linked

It’s great to plan but if you don’t have the resources required to execute your plan, there’s not much point. So, based on your marketing plan and your financial objectives, what resources will you actually require to achieve your objectives?

It could be as simple as requiring some admin assistance to allow you to concentrate on money-making tasks.

Perhaps you’ll need some sales staff (or distributors depending on your model) or maybe it’s time to engage the services of a fulfilment house?

The beauty of resource planning is that it literally ties into your financial planning as well. If a new staff member is required, what will their salary be? Remember you need to budget for this. If you need a fulfilment house, what are your options? Even with commission-based sales staff or distributors, what will their rate be and how will that fit into your financial plan?

You can see how your financial plan, marketing plan and resources plan are all interrelated. You need the marketing and resources to achieve the financial plan, and vice versa.

Map your resources based on your marketing calendar

In my article about achieving goals with a marketing plan I showed you how to create a marketing calendar to schedule and keep track of your marketing activities. You can also use your marketing calendar to map out when you’ll require extra resources to achieve the goals set out in your marketing plan. Your marketing calendar will show you when major promotions are being held and what resources you will require to implement these promotions.

There are many things you should plan, but what should you plan for your business? Planning comes in many forms, and combined can provide you with a blueprint to keep your business moving forward.

I consider there to be a few areas within your business that can benefit greatly from planning including a financial plan, marketing plan and a resources plan.

Before you start creating these plans, whether you’re a new business or existing, it pays to revisit your vision, mission and values for your business. These can sometimes be tricky to define. My mentor gave the simplest definition I have ever come across:

• Vision - what are you and what are you becoming?
• Mission – what do you do? What business are you in?
• Values - what words encompass your business values?

If you haven’t worked this out yet, it can take time and a few attempts. Sometimes your business evolves in a different direction and when revisiting these, you find that they are not congruent with where you’re at now.

Therefore it’s a good idea to revisit your vision, mission and values at least once a year.

There are many and varied techniques for goal setting and planning for a new year. Let’s look at a few of my favourites:

The first method (I learnt this from Chris Brogan (http://www NULL.chrisbrogan NULL.com/)) relates to selecting three keywords that encompass what you want to achieve for the year. You then take your three words and map out how they can be achieved including strategies to achieve them, any distractions that may impede you, the projects to achieve the strategies, what the achieved goal (or partially achieved goal) looks like and the next step required to continue on the goals path. You can read more about this here (http://www NULL.chrisbrogan NULL.com/wiring-yourself-for-success).

The second method involves a one page document which includes summaries of your goals. You put this single page somewhere so you can see it every day, to make sure you are working on tasks that relate to achieving your goals. This will ensure you aren’t getting distracted and working on non-goal related items.

New opportunities can arise that perhaps don’t fit within your existing goals (otherwise known as bright shiny objects!) but could be awesome opportunities. So how do you determine whether they should be pursued?

Simply refer back to your mission and vision. Is the opportunity in line with these? Just by looking at this can take the shininess off an opportunity and put it back into perspective.

Once you have determined your three keywords or goals, what else needs to tie in with these?

A financial plan can entail:

• Budgets
• Forecast
• Cashflow forecasts

Depending on your needs (and what you’re actually going to use) will determine which reports you require. All of these reports can assist you in maintaining your goals and keeping yourself on track. You’ll also discover what other requirements you may need to achieve them.

A marketing plan can entail:

• Your target market
• Marketing strategies
• Marketing tools to utilise
• Marketing calendar to map out all promotions etc

A resources plan can entail:

• Business organisational chart (even if it’s just you in most positions)
• Resources required based on marketing plan
• Resources required to achieve your goals
• Resources calendar to map out when resources are required

Once you have these plans in place, you can map out the tasks that would be required on a monthly, weekly and daily basis. Your calendars will help to focus you on deadlines to achieve tasks by. If you start monthly and then break it down to weekly and then daily tasks, not only will your goals feel more achievable but you’ll actually be making daily progress. This will give you a big buzz enabling you to maintain your focus and momentum.

All three of the plans above require greater explanation. I will explain these in greater detail in further newsletters!

So start today, start planning, it can take some time if you really do get into the nitty gritty but if it gives you a year’s worth of focus, wouldn’t it be worth it?