What’s Your Marketing Strategy?

Developing a Marketing Strategy & Plan

Perhaps the most vital aspect of any business is the marketing function. A marketing strategy provides a roadmap for running and coordinating marketing programs (aka campaigns) that help define the tactics, branding, people, entities, and assets involved in commercializing your products and services. A written marketing plan is the only way to document the planning process.

Serving many purposes, a marketing plan doesn’t have to be a long and formal document, even a simple one that answers these three questions will help you get started.

• where are we now?
• where are we going?
• how do we get there?

A marketing plan helps you develop a marketing strategy that captures all the things you and your team has learned about the market, the competition, and your customers. This information is critical because it becomes the supporting evidence for the marketing strategies that you and your team decide to pursue.

The marketing plan serves as a tool to help you align the organization. Marketing involves many people, so you’ll need to get everyone on board and going in the same direction. The written plan becomes a source document to create presentations, to conduct training, and to give directions to external partners.

Believe me, you’ll use it a lot.

Most importantly, the written marketing plan outlines a coherent and coordinated set of marketing programs with schedules and budgets so you can run a smooth operation.

Don’t wait until the very end of the planning process to write it all down. We like to start writing it from the very beginning.

Here’s a tip that makes it easy:

Create a blank Power-Point presentation with just the headings of each high-level concept each on a separate page and keep it with you during team meetings. You could also create a notebook with dividers as the main sections you have come up with, such as:

• Our mission & vision
• Our competitive advantages
• Online marketing channels
• Offline marketing channels
• Our customer profiles

As you collect information or make key decisions write or type it into the appropriate slide, page or section. That helps you keep the document up-to-date as you move to the process when you have enough written material to go ahead and create a first draft; But be sure to date the draft as you’ll be making regular updates and revisions.

A written marketing plan is a dynamic document and you should expect to make changes to it as conditions in the market change. If you create a great plan and update it regularly it will help you stay ahead of the competition.

HOW TO WRITE A MARKETING PLAN

There are 3 steps to writing a marketing plan:

1 – Step one is to analyze the market.

This is where you explore important issues about market conditions, your potential customers, and the competition. This part of your plan is called the situation analysis.

Once you’ve analyzed the market you need to describe your strategy for achieving success where you lay out the approach to segmenting a market targeting specific customers and how you will position your products and services in that marketplace.

2 – Next is the tactical section, which includes your product or service programs, your pricing approach, your promotion, and marketing communications programs, and your channel design.

These are often called the 4 P’s of your marketing plan.

• Pricing
• Product
• Promotion
• Place

A good marketing plan explains how you will implement the various tactics described in the last step, it’s here where you describe what steps you need to take, when those steps will happen, and who’s responsible for getting them done.

3 – Finally, the financial section of your plan needs to describe a budget that outlines the financial and other resources needed to implement your marketing plan. Here you also lay out your forecast of what you expect in terms of future revenues or other business goals.

This section of the plan may also describe how you will measure success. You can start the marketing planning process anytime but an important consideration is how and when your company does its annual business planning. That’s where the company develops financial forecasts, Investments, budgets, and so on, generally speaking, there are two ways to connect the marketing plan with business planning.

Some companies start the marketing planning process first, right around the beginning of the fiscal year. Each marketing team develops their own sales revenue forecast for their assigned products, and they also develop a budget to spend on marketing programs that they think are needed to achieve those revenue forecasts.

Those forecasts and budgets are combined into a company level revenue forecast and that’s fed directly into the annual business planning process, but some companies do just the opposite.

Other companies may start with the business planning process where they develop an overall revenue goal and spending target, and those are divided and given to the individual marketing teams. Those teams now have to take those targets and develop the best marketing plan they can to achieve those goals.

Another good idea is to create a calendar of each section of the plan. A good marketer is disciplined and doesn’t cut corners, and writing a marketing plan takes time and lots of work but in the end is worth the effort.

FORMING A MARKETING TEAM

Good marketers know the value of a diverse and talented team of colleagues to help write their marketing plan. You’ll need to draw on their expertise, their marketing knowledge, and possibly their resources and / or their network.

Your team will include colleagues inside the company as well as external partners like advertising, graphic design, web design, digital marketing specialists and promotional firms.

Let’s review the various roles of a cross-functional team providing input and feedback to the marketing plan.

Marketing research is a key role you’ll need on your team.

Your company might have a separate marketing research department, or it may outsource it; but either way you’ll need their help understanding customer needs, testing new product concepts, or perhaps testing a new advertising message.

Your marketing plan needs to explain what you know about the market, so make sure you involve your colleagues in marketing research.

Next is your technical team.

These are the people who develop your products and services they might be engineers, or scientists in an R&D department, or perhaps software developers; it depends on the nature of your business. You’ll need their input to your marketing plan so you can explain what new products might be coming down the pipeline.

Most companies have a sales function and you should enlist their help in developing a marketing plan, after all they’re on the front-line in direct connection with customers day to day and they have a lot of insights about your customers and your competition.

Your sales team may also have ideas about the selling tools they need to succeed. Be sure to get their input, depending on your business you may also want to involve colleagues from manufacturing or operations these are the people who make the products or deliver a service. A good customer support team, for example, might have great insights about customer complaints or service issues.

External partners might include your advertising agency, your branding company, a public relations firm, and perhaps a marketing consultant. They’re there to help you succeed, so make them a part of the team from the very start.

Once you’ve identified the key players on your team make sure they’re aware of the marketing schedule or business planning cycle you’ve created. If the team members know their role and understand your expectations and timelines you can count on them to help you write a great marketing plan before you venture out into the marketplace prematurely with your products and services.

MARKETING ANALYSIS, KNOWING WHERE YOU ARE NOW

You’ve got to have a realistic understanding of where you are today, after all, you don’t want to pick a fight with your competition until you know what they have & you’ve got to fight with.

This part of the plan is called the situation analysis, or marketing audit.

Analyzing a market means estimating how many potential customers you might be able to sell your products and services to. When analyzing any market, you want to group customers into three types:

1. First are the customers that already buy from you today.
2. Second are customers that buy the same products and services you offer but from someone else.
3. Third are potential customers that might be interested in your type of products and services but not buying from anybody.

Now, estimate the potential number of customers that you might be able to capture. For each of the three groups you do this, so you can decide where you want to concentrate your marketing strategy. It’s the old adage, fish where the fish are.

Next, you want to analyze how your company compares to your competition. A good tool for this is called the competitive matrix. To create a competitive marketing matrix, list your company and your competitors across the top. Then down the side, list the things that you want to compare.

Things like company size, market share, selling strengths, product & service weaknesses, and especially the key strategy elements like the value propositions and branding. You are looking for what companies have in terms of key resources and how do they use those resources to acquire and retain customers.

Customers buy things for a variety of reasons but some are more important than others. If you know what’s most important to them you can appeal to that need or desire when trying to get them to buy. You can try to raise the sense of importance they place on another factor.

• You also need to measure how they rate your product versus others and how it delivers each benefit. They may have misconceptions that you need to change.
• You may have key feature of your product that is better than your competition, this analysis will be critical later when you complete the situation analysis.
• You need to test the features of your product and services compared to the same features on your competitors.
• You need to determine which features perform better than the competition, which perform the same, and which perform not as well.
• When you complete the analysis, take a close look; are there features that need to be improved?
• Are there certain competitor or possibly go after based on product performance?

Keep in mind that the data and information you put into the situation analysis doesn’t have to be perfectly accurate, it just needs to be realistic. That allows you to step back and see what customers to go after, what to emphasize, when marketing to them, and what competitors to go after.

The marketing situation analysis is an important step so you want to take your time. Here a good technique is to leverage the team you created to write the plan:

I suggest you break the situation analysis into the various sections and assign the writing of each section to the team member most qualified to do it. Having a good understanding of your situation can go a long way to setting you up for success.

As you write your marketing plan the heart of any marketing plan is your strategy, this is where you describe how you plan to win in the marketplace. The strategy section has three parts vs.

Segmentation, where you break your customers into homogeneous groups this helps you be efficient with your marketing Resources by focusing only on the most relevant customers. There are four ways to segment customers:

Demographic is where you group customers buy their characteristics such as income level age gender or their height and weight. It’s useful for certain products or services that deliver a benefit specifically tied to that characteristic. If you’re marketing a shampoo for redheads for example, then you’d want a group customer hair-color.

Geographic segmentation groups customers by where they are physically. Knowing where your customers are helps you know where to place doors and where to communicate or sell to them.

Behavioral segmentation is grouping customers by the things they do. It can be things such as they purchased from. how frequently they purchase, or their price sensitivity.

Finally, is psycho-graphic segmentation, which is how customers think. Their attitudes about the benefits they seek in a product. An example of psycho-graphic benefit would be the need for Prestige or need for convenience.

Segmenting this way tends to be very powerful in targeting. You make decisions based on which specific segments to go after. It’s a process of narrowing down your audience to a selected group.

Let’s go back to the shampoo example. Using all four types of segmentation you might have a target audience like these women, over 40, with red hair, who live in certain metropolitan areas who buy shampoo once a month, and whom seek the benefit of natural looking hair color.

Now, you have a specific identifiable group of customers for the next step, called positioning. Positioning is determining by how you want your customers to think about your products versus the competition so they’re more likely to buy yours.

It may seem a little abstract, but positioning happens up in the mind of the consumer and in that space, they form beliefs about products and services in a particular category. You can change those beliefs so they have a favorable opinion of your product.

You do that by making a claim and by supporting that with credible reasons to believe or the four P’s as we call them. That claim becomes your positioning statement. What you’ll say to customers when you communicate to them about buying your product.

Let’s use our shampoo example. A positioning statement might look like this for women over 40 with red hair that want to look their best.

Our shampoo gives you a more natural looking color to your hair than our competitors shampoo.

Now, to support this position and claim, you might include photographs of customers who have used the product and perhaps some testimonials of how much they liked it. Notice how I included my target audience and the positioning statement as well as the primary benefit that they want and that our shampoo can the deliver so.

What benefits should you emphasize?

Go back to your situation analysis, this is where you compare your product to the competition to find out what benefit you deliver better than they do. When you position your offering around strengths, you’ll get an important edge of the competition and that’s what great marketing is all about.

A great marketing strategy only comes to life when you take action.

Now, it’s time to dive in and write the tactical section of your marketing plan. This is where you describe in detail your product or service programs, your pricing approach, your promotion, and marketing Communications programs and your channel design and marketing we call these the 4 P’s.

Product and service programs refer to all of the aspects of how products and services perform their job. Delivering benefits includes things like the design of the product, how it feels to use it, the packaging of the product, and the people and processes involved in dealing with customers. Be sure to describe the entire customer buying experience which typically includes the following steps:

The need recognition phase this is where customers realize they want something.

The next step is information search, where they gather information from a wide variety of sources. This is a critical step because this is when a customer is most receptive to your message.

Once a customer gathers information they evaluate the Alternatives based on what features are most important and which product does the best job in delivering those features.

Eventually they go to the purchase phase where they actually buy the product.

Now you might think that the buying process ends here, with the final purchase, but there’s one last step called the post-purchase behavior.

Your written plan should list the prices you intend to charge and why they’re set at that level. Describe where and when prices will be communicated to the customer. This might be a simple price sticker on your packaging or you might have prices on your website.

Promotion includes all the things you say outside of the company to the market. This is where you broadcast the value proposition and other information about the product. It includes advertising in-store promotions email campaigns or have social media and sales promotion.

Your marketing plan should outline the specific programs in terms of where and when you’ll promote your products and finally distribution. These are the programs that create an effective Pathway to get the product from the factory into the customer’s hands.

Somebody has to take the product, ship it, store it, place it on the shelves, and possibly service it. Once the sale is made, including your written plan, the specific details of where customers can buy your products which might include store locations, online Distributors, and so on.

To have an effective marketing plan all four P’s have to work together to convey the value proposition. No one of the four P’s, by itself, can carry the load a good marketer. Use all the Tactical tools available to make the biggest impact possible.

Once you’re confident you have a thorough comprehensive marketing plan for your business you need to take steps to implement the actions outlined in the plan. Here are the specific factors you should address vs. how and when you’ll communicate details about the plan.

List of specific audiences or individuals that need to hear about it. Then write in the schedule with exact dates and locations for these presentations. Next are the marketing programs that you created in your Tactical section.

For each program, I like to use a simple framework that describes who, what, when, where, and how. The section should describe who is responsible for the program. It should show the timeline they have to complete the program, including when implementation starts and when it finishes.

You should also explain where the implementation actions occur, and maybe some details on how your team will Implement that program.

Finally, you want to set up key performance indicators, or KPI for short. Key performance indicators help you keep track of your overall strategy and your individual marketing programs. They alert you when it’s time to intervene and take action to get things back on track. Without KPIs you are flying blind and your run the risk of falling short of your overall goal.

To be effective, each KPI should be quantifiable and measurable. You can have as many as you want but don’t measure a KPI just because you have the data. If you’re not going to use it don’t bother, it’s a waste of time.

Measure something only if you plan to take action from it. That’s why I like to set thresholds; I should have a target of what you expect to happen plus a high and low number around that Target

For those thresholds you and your planning team should agree in advance what action you’ll take if those thresholds are exceeded. Here’s an example, assume you create a KPI about the number of new customers acquired each month; you set your target at 500 and you also specify a high and low 605 respectively. If your actual customers per month is more than 600 you might consider taking an action, such as reducing advertising spending or in the low in if you were below 400 you could consider increasing sales incentives

Good marketers not only reach their marketing goals but they also know whether those goals were achieved the way they expected them to be. They also take a meted action when they detect something is going in the wrong direction. A well-written marketing plan will help your team do just that. Marketing takes time and money so it’s important that you develop a budget and a forecast of what you expect in terms of business results.

Let’s look at each of these. A good budget helps you allocate the right amount of resources to the right marketing programs. To make the most impact another two ways to develop a budget you can decide on how much you have to spend in total and then allocate it. Some companies do this by taking a percentage of sales revenue as the total budget for marketing. That amount then is assigned to different teams and programs, I called this the top down approach.

The other approach is from the bottom up a marketing team develops a budget to spend on marketing programs that they think are needed to achieve a revenue forecast and then those budgets are combined into a company level budget. If you recruited a finance member to your marketing planning team, they’ll be able to tell you what approach your company uses.

Whichever approach you take you’ll still need to decide where to spend the money and how much to spend. How much you spend depends on a number of factors; look at each of your Tactical programs, the 4 P’s product, price, promotion, and place.

Estimate the required spending in each one; for example, do you need to spend money to upgrade your product or its packaging?

How much do you need to spend on marketing Communications to reach a sufficient number of people and still achieve the communications objective?

What do sales people and Distributors need to do their jobs effectively?

Next is your sales or revenue forecast, what you expect to achieve as a result of implementing your marketing plan. Now you can set any type of goal whether it be a revenue forecast, perhaps units sold, or maybe new customers Acquired and so on.

For a marketing goal to be the most effective it should meet the following criteria

Simply saying that your goal is to increase market share wouldn’t be specific. Planning to increase market share from 15% to 17% is much better goal because it’s specific.

A marketing or sales goal should be measurable. setting a goal that can’t be measured will become frustrating for you and especially when you try to gauge your progress of reaching it.

The goal must be attainable. setting an unrealistically high won’t do you any good in fact, it could hurt your campaign by causing you to spend more marketing dollars than is warranted.

The goal should be time-bound, meaning that the goal will be achieved during a specific time of year or perhaps a quarter or even monthly. Once you’ve estimated what each Bergen will cost, you’ll probably need to make some tough choices and this is a great time to use the talents of your marketing team to let them help you decide.

In our experience a team’s decisions end up being better than any single individual decision. After all, you’re in this together so put them to work in helping you develop the most effective budget and forecast possible.

An effective marketing plan is one that lays out a coordinated set of strategies and tactics to win in the marketplace. At some point in the process you’ll need to gain support for that plan and perhaps the most important audience is your management they’re the ones who allocate financial resources to the various projects in your company.

Without their full support you may end up not getting what you need. Here are some tips on how to make a big impact with company leaders when presenting your marketing plan.

Try to lead with the story, perhaps focus on a customer who had a great result using the product. This is a really good way to remind people how your products bring value to customers.

Share what has changed in the marketplace, what new threats or new products or perhaps Trends are out there that are creating a challenge for you. We call this creating the burning platform. You want people to understand the difficult situation you’re up against then share the process you went through to create the marketing plan. Give credit to your team members it builds your credibility when you collaborated with a cross-functional team.

Be as brief as possible because you probably won’t have a lot of time. You should be prepared with different length presentations; for example, you should have a 10-minute version a 30-minute version and a 1-hour version. Really Savvy marketers also know how to present their strategy in 30 seconds or less, the so-called elevator speech.

It’s all about getting people on board with your marketing plans.

Now you don’t have to share every detail about your plan, just the highlights. present the market conditions the competitive situation and your strategy in terms of who you’re targeting and how your positioning approach will convert customers. be completely upfront about the weaknesses or risks with your plan because you gain trust when you’re upfront and honest about potential issues. then share your forecasted revenue and budget needs make sure they completely understand your assumptions.

Take your time here if you see that someone has a different view around the assumptions then clarify it on the spot. not aligning around the assumptions can create real problems for you later so remind them that funding your marketing plan is an investment not a cost.

Assure them that you’re committed to getting them a good ROI (return-on-investment) given their experience. be sure to ask them for feedback on ways to improve your plan. finish the presentation by asking them for their support, it’s the old sales adage always ask for the order.

Great marketers show passion and enthusiasm for the products and services they manage.

FAQ ABOUT MARKETING STRATEGIES

• What is included in a marketing plan?
• How do you create a marketing plan?
• What is the purpose of a marketing plan?
• What are the marketing plan steps?

READ MORE ABOUT THE CONCEPTS WE TALK ABOUT

More on the 4 P’s of marketing here:
https://www.cleverism.com/understanding-marketing-mix-concept-4ps/