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Marketing-Plan in 5 Steps
Systematc Marketing sets a requirement: A detailled and concrete
Marketing-Plan. To learn how to plan your Marketing in 5 Steps,
read on.
B efore beginning your plan, it's a good idea
to think through your goals and resources, preferably in a
written Marketing Plan format. So, where do you begin?
What should you include and outline in your plan? If you think
through these topics and questions clearly enough, your marketing plan could be
as brief as a couple of pages, even for the largest enterprises such as Boeing
or United Technologies.
What does the Marketing Plan contain?
A good plan should be based on a specific time frame, for
example, 6 months or one year, larger companies usually have several
versions, each one reaching further into the future, and contain at least
the following points:
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strategic components such as company mission and set of goals, and their
strengths,
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your exact objectives for the marketing operations,
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the resouces and measures Marketing should take,
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you budget for the plan's timeframe
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practical action plan
If you are developing this plan from scratch, you should also
include what offerings, products and services you deliver as well as
at what price and through which channels.
Many people focus their plan on the activities that marekting should carry out.
But without a reasonable strategic guideline behind these activities,
you might encounter the problem that your marketing activities bear
few results; for this reason, strategic guidelines are very useful and
practical.
Step 1: The Strategy
The Marketing-Strategy describes the fundamental goals, customers
characteristics and mission of your company; it is your response to anyone who
asks you what business your company is in, who your customers are and how you
add value.
In this first step, you should build a crystal clear strategy. In this way,
whenever anyone asks you what your company does, you have an easy, clear and
quick answer for at least these three items:
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how exactly your customers benefit from your company
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who exactly are your customers, their attributes
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why do your customers do business with you and not with your competitors
The questions that the strategy part of your marketing plan answer
In order to develop your Marketing-Strategy, you should be able
to answer easily these questions, preferably in writing :
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What practical use, what value do my customers find in my company? What
pratical benefit and advantage do my customer recieve from my company's
offerings?
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Who exactly are my customers, what are the details of their characteristics?
Assuming that your company focuses only on businesses as customers, some of
their attributes are: size, number of employees, industry, products
and services offered....
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Who are my competitors and how do I conduct business better than they do?
What are my biggest strengths? What does my company do well and not so
well? What is my company's unique selling factor?
Planning takes time
Give yourself enough time for this next set of questions. These are
fundamental questions that influence all your Marketing-Activities. The
Use-Questions define what you do to prospect for customers. The
questions about the sets of goals define where you prospect for
customers. The questions about your unique selling factors define what you
present to prospects in order to persuade them to do business with your
company. The answers to these questions have a continual influence over many of
your business decisions.
These are questions to discuss often with your colleagues and friends. You
cannot go through these questions enough.
Step 2: Define your Marketing-Goals
Next, plan your Marketing-Goals for a specific time frame, for 6 or 12
months. Define clearly what each marketing goal is and when you want to
accomplish it.
For a software products company, you might consider the following:
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By the end of the year, we should have at least 400 new customers representing
a product revenue of at least $200M.
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At least 200 of the new customers should buy our complete enterprise solution
with implementation services.
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At least 150 of the new customers should buy at least 2 of the 5 main
components of our enterprise solution.
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By year end, we should have at least 60% of our current customers repeating
purchases in the form of at least one upgrade or customization service.
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By year end, we should have a well developed pipeline of qualified prospects
for the next year.
What are the advantages of defining Marketing goals?
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Detailed marketing goals are a great guide in running daily business; it
keeps you focused on the overall company direction. Without planned goals, you
risk losing focus and direction.
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What is the Marketing-Budget in light of the goals you want to accomplish? Only
if you know exactly what you want to accomplish in the time frame can you
estimate how much money you will need for the budget.
Put this all down on a page or two. Then move on to step three.
Step 3: Describe your Marketing-Activities
Now, you can plan the practical part, your Marketing-Activities. What
activities you choose depend on the goals that you have set.
Your Marketing-activities depend on various criteria:
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What are your target markets, the niches of your prospects and what are the
best ways to contact them, to get their attention?
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How much does your product or service cost and what percentage of this price, a
percentage of your revenue, can you budget as an investment to attain your
profit goal.
Examples of Marketing-Activities or Campaigns
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Direct mailings via postage or E-Mail
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A professional edition of a customer newsletter via postage or E-Mail
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Large or small advertisements in magazines or newspapers
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Entry into conference address books
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Radio-advertisment
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Brochures, collateral etc.
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PR-work
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Free seminars and conferences
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Networking
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Develop partnership channels
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Cooperative activities with partners
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Website development and maintenance
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Advertisement, promotion through Internet tools such as search
engines
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Participate in Online-Markting campaigns
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E-Mail and Newsletter or Banner on the Internet
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Develop attractive, noteworthy information or applications on your
website
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And more
Each of these activities has its advantages and disadvantages in light of their
costs and benefits returned. Your decision to allocate your resources to
one or another depends on the various aspects of your marketing plan such as
your strategy, your target marketing, your budget, and your time frame.
Step 4: Plan your Budget
How much are you willing to invest in your marketing operations? You might think
that your budget can hinge on daily need, but this is not a efficient
approach. So, how do you set a Marketing-Budget?
Budget according to Marketing-Goals - List your Marketing-Goals
and, in an adjacent column write their corrsponding costs. For
PR this year $200,000 for Ads $100,000, for Website
$80,000 and so forth. Add up your costs for your marketing activities list, and
voila, your budget.
Budget per Revenue- You can also base your marketing budget on your
revenue forecast. Last year your total revenue was $500M; this year you plan to
increase this by at least 20% growth, and from this you might take some
percentage, say 20 % for Marketing, also $10M. Use this sum to allocate
your budget down the list of the activities.
Budget per New Customers (specific goals) - another
possibility is to budget per your forecasted number of new customers. So,
based on the goals for new customers, $200M. If you sell products and the
average revenue per each new customer is $1M, then you might need 200 new
customers. In order to reach this goal, you might have to invest $50,000 per
each of the forecasted new customers or $10M in a marketing budget.
These methods have the advantage that your can derive your marketing budget
from your Marketing-Goals.
One disadvantage to this methods is that marketing activities, such as corporate
advertising, are often difficult to match to each new customer gained, but
the use of allocations can mitagate this. For example, take average cost
of all advertising and divide it by the number of the forecasted new
customers. You could then go one step further and, at the end of the
year, average the advertising costs across all of the actual new customers in
order to determine your variance between budget and actual.
Whatever budgeting method you use, depends mostly on your business environment.
Step 5: Establish your Action plan
At this point, you are ready to drill into the more detailed aspect of your
Marketing-activities plan. So far you have defined your strategy, and planned
your goals, activities, and time frame as well as a budget. Now you can apply
these plans into practical details of action.
Build your action plan by extending your goals into activities or
campaigns, like the examples listed above.
For example: one of your makreting goals is to have 15 prospects
participate at one of your seminars, to accmplish this one of
your many Marketing-activities, is to place an announcement of this
seminar in your Newsletter, another to make a high volume mailing and follow-up
calls campaign to all of your target prospects.
In this way, you elaborate your action plan by logical extensions
Below are examples of the action plan for the campaigns that target
particular customers and goals :
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Research and writing for the Online-Newsletter
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Sales staff send news letters with personalized contact.
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Develop rebates and other advantages for first time buyers.
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Survey the sales staff to learn about the offerings that are most attrative to
the targeted prospects.
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Have specialized brochures created for the targeted (vertical) market niche.
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Develop ways to measure the effectiveness of the campaign e.g. number of
prospects qualified into the pipeline, and number of resulting new customers.
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Send out the special brochures.
The devil hides in the details
You can discover that even when carrying out one simple activity, it
takes detailed planning and time and the possibility is always
present that you may be overlooking many more efficent ways to attract new
customers.
When you post an advertisement, often it has little immediate result. When you
invest in marketing activities, invest double so much in time to think through
all the best possible ways to execute on your plan. This is a key success
factor: detailed and concrete planning.
You should not and probably can not plan all the details of all of your
activities from the start. You could be occupied for several weeks in such a
task. However, incrementally, each time you consider to execute a new campaign,
first plan and think through all of its details before you carry it out.
Always measure the results of every campaign
There is no secret about marketing... 50 % of the money that you
spend on advertisment yeilds little or no return. Unfortunately,
no one can say in advance which 50 % is the wasted part and which 50%
accomplishes the goal.
The Marketing world is complex and not a science; there are few
quantifiable cause and effect relationships. This is one reason why your
more technical or engineering colleagues might look down upon marketing
investments.
In spite of the unpredictable aspect in marketing, measure every activity
because this is the best way to keep track of what works and what does not.
More to come....
Soon, to demonstrate more of our work and capabilities, we are
adding more information and presentations to this website.
Does this interest you? Then we should talk soon. Send me an email(mailto:mbiskeborn@hotmail.com)
or call me: 1-949-293-2016.
I look foward to your call soon...
Send me E-Mail (mbiskeborn@hotmail.com) or send comments or questions through
the Website:Input form
Thank you!
Software Solutions Design, Inc. Consulting in Marketing, Sales Processes, Product Management.
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