Marketing Plans

1
Marketing Plans

• A Strategic Approach to Growing Your Business

2
Effective Market Planning is Much Like a Good
Recipe

• It takes more than one ingredient to make the
  cake!
• A properly developed plan is a break down of your
  entire business recipe.

3
How are Your Ingredients?

• Is your product or service as good as it can be?
• Could you improve your customer experience?
• Are you truly maximizing core competencies?
• Do you need better synergy and consistency
  between sales, marketing and customer service?
• Are you efficiently investing in the right
  marketing communication tools to best impact your
  target market?

4
What Makes up a Typical Plan?

• See Table of Contents Handout
• Business Analysis (Situation Analysis)
• Marketing Plan and Strategies
• Budgets
• Time Lines and Implementation
• Continuous evaluation and adaptation

5
Use Our Workbook as Your Guide

• Workbook takes you through each step
• Explains each plan element and requirements
• Has worksheets for you to make notes
• Uses real life examples to help you relate
• Deviate where needed and adapt the process to fit
  your needs.

6
Plan Development-A Deductive Approach

• Think of the process as a funnel (page 4)
• Start broad and drill down to a final solution
• Each stage of the process links or builds onto
  the next stages to form a solid solution.

7
Business AnalysisThe Foundation that Drives Your
Plan

• Internal and external research on situation
• Every aspect of your planning will be based on
  your answers or conclusions from this stage of
  the plan process
• This is where most plans fail before they are
  developed.

8
Demographics, Psychographics, Geography

• Research resources (see pages 21,22)
• Many times your demographic findings will
  surprise you.
• Understanding a markets psychographics can make
  all of your marketing easier
• We can more easily create our message and select
  our marketing tools to reach our market

9
Target Market Needs / Core Competency Alignment

• The defining phase of Bus. Analysis
• Step 1 Identify market needs
• Step 2 Define your core competencies
• Step 3 Rank market needs
• Step 4 Match market needs
  competencies

10
Market Trends

• Good resources to identify trends are
• Your employees
• Current customers
• Trade associations
• Trade Journals
• The internet

11
S. W. O. T.Analysis

• A group effort is the best approach
• Facilitator of the S.W.O.T. meeting is key!
• Two step process
• Brainstorm
• Refine the list to become more relevant
• See list of S.W.O.T. questions on pgs 34,35

12
Competitive Analysis

• Objectivity is important
• What are their strengths weaknesses?
• What are their core competencies?

13
Product / Service Analysis

• Do an analysis of your product/service mix
• Where are you most profitable?
• What of total sales does each category make?
• Where are you not maximizing sales?
• Do you need better focus on a product/service?
• Are there any new products/services to add?
• Analyze key competitor product/services

14
Time to Celebrate!

• NOW WE CAN CREATE OUR PLAN STRATEGIES

15
We Know Our SituationLets Create Our Map to
Success

• If you are creating a map you usually need a
  destination..What will be yours?
• Your plan strategies should be focused on
  achieving sales objectives.
• See pg 41, and notice how sales objectives are at
  the top, and also the downward path of how
  everything rolls out on the chart.

16
Defining Sales Objectives

• Everything we strive for in planning centers on
  achieving sales objectives!
• Best way to set sales goals are from the bottom
  up
• Set product or category specific goals
• Breakdown goals by target group if it matters
• Have monthly objectives

17
Financial Objectives/Marketing Objectives

• Typical financial objectives to consider
• Increase gross profit for 2007 by x
• Increase net income for 2007 by x
• Reduce expenses for 2007 by x
• Typical marketing objectives to consider
• Building brand equity or enhancing identity
• Repositioning yourself in your market
• Referral development activity
• Loyalty programs

18
Creating Your Positioning

• What we really mean is market perception
• This is where all of our analysis on market needs
  / core competencies come into play

19
Creating the Actual Strategies

• Keep your strategies manageable
• Reference your business analysis results to
  define what is most important to address
• Keep other staff members involved to create
  buy-in to the process
• Types of strategies (see pages 52,53)

20
Types of Strategies to Consider

• Differentiation or positioning strategies
• Target or geography specific strategies
• Channel strategies (sales or distribution)
• Customer service strategies
• Sales or account strategies
• Branding strategies
• Advertising/market communication strategy
• Web strategies
• Product mix strategies

21
Best Structure to Build Your Strategies

• See page 57 for the best illustration
• Strategies focus on financial or marketing goals
  you defined earlier
• Be careful to keep your number of strategies
  manageable so that they can be executed

22
Strategy Architecture

• 4 to 8 strategies they are merely the focus
• Strategies are hot air without proper support
• Initiatives facilitate focus/strategy progress
• Activities are the initiative drivers
• Without this methodical strategically defined
  structure your strategies will sit!

23
Defining Your Budgets

• Why is setting budgets at the end instead of the
  beginning so important?
• Create accountability in the budgeting process
• Dont just look at the expenses, analyze the
  return short and long term for future years!
• Link sales budgets, expense budgets, and any
  breakeven analysis into your financials

24
Setting Execution Time LinesAssigning
Responsibilities/Implementing

• Your ability to effectively assign tasks to
  others will determine your plans success.
• Create reasonable timelines
• Get buy-in from all employees who this plan
  involves.

25
Evaluate and Adapt

• Planning is not an exact science
• Market conditions change
• Turnover occurs
• Products mature and sales decline
• Competition is also ever-changing
• Have monthly variance meetings (key)