Marketing Plan
Let’s Create a Core Marketing Plan
While most businesses have a Business Plan, many lack a Marketing Plan. Within the Business Plan, assumptions are made regarding the market and sales. However, what is glaringly missing from this plan is how does the business plan on accomplishing the goals set forward. This is a much different question, but one that needs to be considered for that business to be successful.
There are many core components to a Marketing Plan, but at Operation Crusader, we focus on on some of the more prevalent ones such as:
Your Audience(s):
In our decade worth of work with small and mid size businesses, this is the one of the biggest areas that need focus. Most businesses either don’t know who they are talking to or they assume that they want to reach everyone. Both bring poor results. Without knowing exactly who your target audience is, there is not way that you can effectively market to that audience. The more you can narrow the scope the more focused your marketing becomes.
The Competition:
We all know there is competition . Sometimes we gloss over this fact thinking that our product or service is just better. However, we need to really dig in and define what makes your product or service better. The question here is why should someone choose you or change to you? Change is a big thing for many people. Once they are settled in on a specific product or service, getting them to change can be a challenge. This is where you need to really need to know your competition so you can accurately say why you are different.
Measurements:
When discussing success, most businesses focus in on the bottom line, profit and loss. However, when a company only uses this as their metrics, they miss so much. It seems everyone is familiar with the concept of the sales funnel. Utilizing different metrics allows you to focus on on each of those segments. This allows you to make the changes needed for growth. Small changes at the top of the sales funnel have a huge impact on the end results on the profit and loss statement.
Messaging:
Your core message must be simple and easy to understand. Because people are emotional beings and make choices on those emotions, all messaging must come from those same emotions. For instance, the emotion of an attorney’s office may be one of confidence and trust. Where a bakery may focus in on nostalgia. Once the core message is crafted, all other messaging stem from that core. This allows for a sense of consistency within your audience.
Marketing Tools:
There are a myriad of tools that can be used to reach specific audiences. The challenge for most businesses is narrowing the scope and purposely choosing the tools they want to use. It is really easy to get caught up in all of the new fads and communication channels. Since most business have never worked through why they are using specific channels, they never measure those channels for effectiveness. Once you have an understanding of the purpose and target audience of a specific channel, you can utilize that channel purposely and intentionally, focusing in your marketing efforts.