CREATING YOUR MARKETING PLAN

 GETTING STARTED

One of the key aspects in becoming successful in business is being able to market your company to ensure that you get the most out of it. By being able to successfully get

your company’s name out to the masses, you will find that you will be able to control what your company stands for more easily and be able to easily maintain a positive brand image.

When you embark on coming up with a marketing plan there are certain areas and steps that you should follow in order to make the marketing campaign a success and making sure that your message is clearly represented and can be easily absorbed by your target audience.

Overview

First, take a good look at your business. You have to make sure that you understand your business clearly, what it is that you want your business to accomplish, more than just bring you profits. By ensuring that you completely understand what it is that you want to do you will be able to form a marketing database. The review of your company needs to be comprehensive to ensure that you get the data necessary to make your marketing campaign successful.

For the best results, make sure that you review your own company records. Bring together your potential customers, have focus groups, and conduct surveys. Make sure you stay up to date with any publications that might be relevant to you company’s industry. Get to know the marketplace for your product or service as well as you possibly can. Become informed about your competition and how they go about marketing and who they feel is their target demo-graphic. By doing this you will have the tools you need to make informed decisions about your marketing campaign.

Set Goals

When thinking about your marketing campaign it is imperative that you set sales goals. This is a critical step in your marketing campaign. Without setting a sales goal, you will be at a disadvantage when coming up with the rest of the marketing campaign. By setting a number as a goal it gives you and your team a focus point. If the number is not there, you will not know how much of a product you want manufactured, how to distribute the product in stores, what your budget needs to be, or how much or how little you need to advertise.

Once you have set the sales goal for the product you will need to identify who it is that you want to market your product to. The group of people that you will want to market your product to will most likely fall into the same age bracket, income level, and gender. This will help you to design your marketing campaign to your target demographic and will help you save money by not marketing to a wide audience and wasting your message on consumers who will not be interested in your product.

KNOW YOUR PRODUCT

After you have identified your target market, the next step is to come up with a marketing plan that will put your product in the best position to be successful. This step is known as brand positioning. When you position the product that you are trying to market, it means that you attempting to control how the public is going to perceive it. In effect, you are telling your target demographic how your product is going to enhance their life and why they should not be without it.

Knowing how your product is going to be positioned in the marketplace you can move forward and determine what kind of strategy you want to pursue when it comes to marketing the product. This is done by incorporating the sales goal numbers that have previously been set. The marketing strategy will put in plain words how these goals are going to be achieved.

When you finally get to implement your marketing campaign you want to stay on top of all the details that went into the plan. This is the most crucial point. If the plan is not executed correctly, all the time and effort that went into it will be for naught. Lastly, when all is said and done you should go back and examine the entire plan and see where things went according to plan and where things might have to be reevaluated or redone.

REVIEW THE BUSINESS

To make things easier when you start to review your business make your self an outline that includes all the areas that you want to study. By making an outline you will be able to make sure that your business review will remain focused on topics that you feel are important to the success of you company. Topics that you should include in the outline are a summery of what your company excels at and what it needs to improve on.

You should then follow with a complete look at what your company stands for, its goals and objectives. This section will also include topics such as the items that are similar to your product that are targeted to the same demographic that you are looking to market to. Make sure that you include a review of sales trends in different areas across the country. Are the sales seasonal? Are there different areas of the country where you product will be more in demand? How does your product stack up against your competitor’s product?

GETTING the Product to Market

Your outline must include a comprehensive study of how to get your product to consumers. Take a good look at different types of distribution methods, what it will take to get your product to different areas of the country. Packaging should also be reviewed. What type of packaging will make your product more appealing to your target demographic? How much space will your product take up on store selves? Is your product going to be marketed to consumers or to businesses? These are the type of questions that you need to be able to answer in order to make your outline complete.

When you are thinking about how to get your product to market, one of the most important steps is to figure out what the price of the product is going to be. To make sure that your pricing is competitive you need to review what your competitors are charging for products. You need to know if your product is inelastic or elastic with the economy and all the production and administrative costs that go into making the product.

KNOW YOUR COMPETITION & Your Consumer

In addition to pricing and distribution, you need to have an in depth study of your competition included in your outline. You have to know what share of the market they have. How they are marketing their product. Do they advertise on television? On the radio? What about online? Are they known to have good or bad customer service? As well as knowing your company’s strengths and weaknesses, it is important to know the same things about all your competitors.

In order to have a successful marketing campaign you must be able to identify and market directly to your target demographic. Having an intricate knowledge of your product should allow you to identify your target demographic by certain factors. These factors should include their age, gender, education level, job, income level, the size of their household, and where they live in the country. You need to know if consumers of this type of product have loyalty to one brand or are they willing to try new brands that appear on the market.

DO COMPARATIVE STUDIES

To get an accurate idea of the competitive market that you want to enter it is important to have points of reference that you can examine. The best way to do this is to do some comparative studies about your industry as well as your competition. For the best results, it is useful to include five years of information because this will allow your study to be more accurate and give you a better understanding of recent trends in the industry.

LOOK at more than One Year

By including five years worth of data in your studies, you can avoid pitfalls in your review. This will exclude one-year trends that might show a high spike in sales of a product or that show a product that sales are somewhat stagnant. Five years worth of data will give you a better idea of the trends that are happening in your industry and give you a clear impression of where the industry is going in the years to come.

In addition to your industry, look at a five year trend of your target demographic. You need to know if the same demographic has been buying the product for the last five years or has it been changing. If it has been changing, why has it been changing? Have consumers purchased more than one of the product? If so, was it from the same manufacturer or have they decided on a different company? Was price a factor in the decision to purchase one product from another? It is important for you to know what is influencing your target demographic to purchase a like product so you can design your marketing campaign accordingly.

BE sure to include a study of your competition in the five-year study. By studying your competition you will have a better understanding of the industry. Is the department that makes the product that you will be competing against expanding or contracting? What percentage of the market do they have? Does your competitor market the product locally or across the country? Have their sales gone up, down, or remained consistent over the past five years? Knowing this informa-tion will give you a better idea of how to break into the market. Where the areas of the industry you can exploit are and if there has been any increase in the number of businesses trying to break into the industry. If the industry has become saturated with businesses trying to break into it, it is better to find out now than when you and your company have more time and money invested.

RESEARCH METHODS

When you are preparing your outline and doing a business review there are certain methodologies that you should use when doing your research in order get

to most important information and make your study more complete. The main types of research that will be done will be primary and secondary. Each method has its specific use and will contribute to the development of your marketing plan.

PRIMARY RESEARCH

One of the most important areas to gather information in primary research is through the use of surveys. When conducting a survey you want to make sure that the sample size is large enough that you will get results that will be statistically accurate. Surveys should be conducted on two levels. The first should focus on your customers, whether they have already purchased from your company or they are the target market that you want to break into. Second, you will want to conduct a market-based survey, which will give you good information about the industry and what consumers are looking for.

Another type of primary research that you should conduct is interviews with potential customers. These can be done in a variety of settings. You can conduct focus groups with varying sizes of consumers to gauge the public’s interest in your product. You can have more intimate interviews with a one-on-one setting, or you could try to talk to people on the street or shopping center.

Conducting these types of interviews or group sessions can give good feedback on what the perception of your company is or what the public is looking for in the industry that you are trying to break in to. However, when using this type of data, known as qualitative research, it is best used when you have other data to back up the information from a small group of individuals. This is because a small sampling of people could give you information that would be considered an outlier when combined with better statistical data.

SECONDARY RESEARCH

Secondary research consists of information that is available in published sources. It is up to you to find this information and apply it to your company. To find relevant publications or sources all you will need to do is go to the local public library or if you are close to a college or university you will be able to find these sources in their libraries as well. Another good secondary source for information is the census or the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. These are great sources to use with a wealth of information and it is all available online, free of charge. Take advantage of these options, not only to save money, but everything that you could think of is broken down is easily obtainable data.

WRITING THE BUSINESS REVIEW

Now that you have done all the research or had a company do the research for you it is time to put all the information together in order to make sense of it so you can move

forward with your marketing plan.

WHAT IS GOOD? What is Bad?

The first thing that should be included in you business review is a breakdown of what your company is good at and where it needs help. With the information that you have gathered you should be able to identify the advantages that your company has in terms of your target market wants and needs. The advantages your company can take in terms of distributing the product. How efficient your company can be producing the product and how that can be applied to making pricing an advantage. You will also want to identify your products technical advantages over your competition.

IS YOUR COMPANY WORKING TOGETHER?

From the information that you have gathered you should also be able to determine how well your company works together. If your company is not working together for a common goal you will find the becoming successful is nearly impossible. To be a successful company all departments must be working in concert with each other for a common goal. Management and workers all must have a stake in what to final outcome of the product is. This is best accomplished by a consistent dialogue between both sides. Having a free flow of ideas between all sides will serve your company well and give you an advantage over your competition, and could even attract the best and brightest in your industry to come and work for you.

HOW WILL YOUR COMPANY MARKET?

The information that you have gleaned from several sources should also be able to help you identify how well your company markets itself. The answered surveys can be a key asset here. In the questionnaire there should have been questions asking consumers how they feel about your company and how effectively it gets its message across. Questions should have also included suggestions of how consumers want to be marketed to and what they are looking for in a company.

WHERE IS YOUR BUSINESS GOING?

With all the data you have collected the next step is to identify where you want to take your business. You should be able to deter-mine if there are areas or departments inside your business that you feel will benefit from expansion. You should also be able to identify if there other areas that you feel that your business can expand and gain a larger share of the market. The data could also point out that this is not the proper time to focus on expanding. From surveys, you should be able to garner if your target demographic is looking for your company to expand and if they want new products from your company.

CHECK YOUR PRODUCT AND THE MARKET

As you continue to prepare your business review there are more areas and steps that you will need to complete in order to make the most informed decisions for your

company.

IDENTIFY COMPANY GOALS

Each company is different and therefore, should have its own unique set of goals that it wants to accomplish. The information that you have gathered through primary and secondary research will help you set the long-term and short-term goals of the company. These goals should include the sales goals of the company, profit goals, and what you expect from marketing campaigns. The information will also help you understand where to apply the budget across the company. You will be able to set a standard mission statement for the company to focus their efforts and how to go about relating to customers, employees, and developing the product.

YOUR COMPANY

Put together a summery of your company’s history. Include how that company came to be, what it has accomplished to this point. How it has evolved over time. You will want to see if the company has changed its mission. How has expansion or contraction helped or hurt the business. However, it is not only the company history that you want to focus on. You will want to analyze the data you have collected to determine future trends in the industry in order to better position your company.

In order to get an unfettered view of your company the data that you have collected should be able to help you address what plans have been crucial to your company’s success, why consumers find your company worth purchasing from, and how your company is viewed by the public.

COMPANY ORGANIZATION

As well as looking at your company as a whole, you have to be able to look how your company is organized. If you have a marketing department, you must know how well that department works with the rest of your company. Make sure that the marketing department is sufficiently staffed and has the ability to come up with a professional marketing plan and that they have the means to implement the plan. The data that you have collected should also be able to show you how the marketing department has performed in previous campaigns. Responses from interviews will be key into providing information about the message that you have been trying to send about your company and products and if they have been resonating with your target demographic.

SALES DATA and Trends

Analyzing sales data will be a large part of the business review. Sales data might be the most important of the analysis that takes place because it will tell you more about consumers than any other information that you have collected. A proper analysis of sales data will show you a definitive picture of sales trends for the industry, your company, your competitor, and who has the greatest market share.

When you are analyzing the sales data, it is important that you have at least five years worth of information to ensure an accurate sampling. By having five years worth of sales data you will be able to identify if sales of like products are increasing, decreasing, or stagnant. The analysis of sales data should also provide information about market share. It will show how much of the market share that you currently have along with if your company’s market share has been increasing, decreasing, or stagnant over the last five years.

The analysis of sales data can also be broken down further by analyzing sales data by individual stores. This will help you deter-mine which stores are important to the future of your company and where you might want to think about trying different outlets. When braking down individual store sales your data will be able to show what stores outperformed others and which were below average in terms of sales and profitability.

Sales should also be analyzed by season. This will be able to tell you if the product is more desired at different times of the year. If that is the case, then it will give you a better idea of how and when your product will need help from the marketing department.

Moreover, the five years worth of sales data that you have collected should also be analyzed based on geographic region. This will better ensure that your product is readily available in stores where there is a greater demand for your product, and you will be better able to make sure that the product gets to the regions where you will be better able to make a profit.

CONSUMER TRENDS

Consumer Activity

Having five years worth of data to analyze is a crucial tool to shed light on the trends of consumers. Once you analyze the data, you will be sure to see that consumers act in certain ways that are affected by region, social, economic, and personal. By being able to analyze these trends with consumers you and your marketing team will have the tools necessary to predict these trends giving your company the ability to better market itself and the product.

Population Factors

When analyzing population factors that affect marketing one of the best tools you can use is the US Census and the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. These web sites have all the information that you need and are free to use online. From these websites you will be able to find the median age of a city, state or region, the education level, and if the population in a given area has increased or decreased in recent years. You will also be able to see what types of households there are in certain areas. When marketing it is important to know if a house-hold is headed by a male or female, are the occupants married, if there are children, if so, how many, along with the income level of the occupants.

REGIONAL FACTORS

Another great use for the US Census and the Bureau of Labor and Statistics is gleaning information about different areas of the country. By using this data properly, you will be able to see the differ-ences across the country in education levels, income levels, the make up of families, the rate of unemployment, and where different ethnicities are located. All this information will better prepare you to develop a marketing plan that will more easily reach your target demographic and making the marketing campaign a success.

If you analyze the data well it will be able to show you trends in population growth across the country. If your target demographic is moving to certain areas of the country, then it behooves you to market to the areas that they are relocating. This may also affect how you get your product to market so all of this data has to be taken into account when it comes to pricing and business expansion.

TECHNOLOGICAL FACTORS

Technology is playing a larger role in everyday life than it ever has before. This is not an area that you can overlook. You should be able to determine if technology is something that you can take advantage of to better help your marketing ability. You will need to know if there have been any advances in technology in your industry and if it can add value to your product. Even advances in technology that are in the area of logistics can greatly help your product if you can more easily keep track of shipments.

Media Factors

Media no longer means the evening news or newspapers. Nowadays, with the explosion of social media consumers can be reached in many ways. Make sure that your marketing team takes a close look how it can boost your company’s presence online. Today, almost all companies have a presence on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. This makes it easier for companies to stay connected to consumers who like their products and it is an inexpensive way for companies to let consumers know about a new product that is coming to market or an upcoming sale on already existing merchandise.

Along with social media, it is important for you to know the percentage of your target demographic that uses traditional types of media. You will need to compare data to see what types of television programs that your target demographic watches and at what times. The same goes for radio stations, newspapers, and magazines. Knowing all this information will help to streamline your marketing campaign to the consumers that you want to influence.

DISTRIBUTION

When putting together your business review, it is important to go over your distribution methods to see if they are the most cost effective and successful. To do

this do not only look at your own company but look at how your competitors are getting their products to market.

RETAIL TRENDS

The data that you have collected should help you determine what the top methods of distribution are. This will take some dedication on your part when you are analyzing the data for there are many ways of distributing a product. Products can be distributed by depart-ment stores, catalogs, direct mail, online, specialty stores, and discount outlets just to name some of the ways. It is up to you to figure out the best way to distribute your product. This is where the five years worth of data can be of help. Having that much data will show you what the current trends of distribution are in your industry.

DISTRIBUTION AND GEOGRAPHY

When determining what distribution methods are the best for your company it is important for you to take geography into account. You research should be able to show you if stores that sell your product are accessible, if they are close to main roads making them easier to get to for consumers. The research should also show if the stores are in areas that do well and turn a profit. You will also be able to see how your competition stacks up to you in the same geographical regions.

Your research will be able to show if you have reached the best possible position for your product. This means have you reached your saturation point with the current levels of outlets that sell your product and should you start looking for other alternatives to get your product to consumers. It will also be able to tell if your current level of market saturation is your optimum level.

The five years worth of research, you will be able to tell where your product is most in demand. What types of stores consumers shop at to purchase your product. If there are any new methods of distribution that are emerging in your industry. Should you start looking to expand to new regions and what type of distribution best fits your company.

MARKETING AND PRICING

Determining a price for your product is an important step when coming up with a marketing plan. If the price is set too low your company will have a hard time making a profit. A price that is set to high could encourage competition, which could hinder the success of your company.

PRICING the Product

To get an idea of how you should price your product there needs to be frequent checks made of your competition and how they are pricing their product. By doing this you will be able to create a history of pricing so you can determine if there are any trends. Having a good history of your competitors pricing will let you know if they change the price at certain times of the year in an effort to boost their sales. This will let you counter their pricing with your own prices keeping you competitive at all times. By looking at your competition, it will help you see supply and demand trends that will help you set a competitive price that will ensure your company the best chance to turn a profit.

IS YOUR PRODUCT ELASTIC?

Having a good history of pricing will let you know if your product is price elastic. Your product is considered price elastic if the price of the product is raised and the demand for the product decreases. The same is true if the price of the product is lowered and demand for the product goes up. A good source for this information is the surveys that you have completed or from focus groups that you have had done to gauge consumer opinion. Your research should let you know how elastic your product is, and the elasticity of your industry.

KNOW YOUR COMPETITION

Doing a complete analysis of your completion is a crucial step in determining how to proceed in your marketing campaign. By analyzing your competition, you will have to look at the differences between your company and others. The analysis should also include how your competition markets their product and will give you insight on how you should respond with your marketing campaign. By analyzing your competitions marketing campaigns and strategies you will be able to see where they succeeded and where they failed giving your company an advantage when you implement your marketing campaign.

KEY INFORMATION

When you are doing a comparative review of your company against your competitors there are certain elements of information that you want to look at. From the information that you have already gathered you will want to compare target markets, sales, pricing, packaging, customer service, marketing objectives, and publicity. The secondary research that you have already done will be the best sources of information when it comes to checking out your competition.

After you have done a complete analysis on your company and your competition you will be able to know the market share of your competitors in relation to your company. How your competitors distribute their product. Their marketing strategies, and where they were successful and where they were not. You will be able to deter-mine if they have a loyal customer base or whether consumers of their products have looked elsewhere.

MARKETING ANALYSIS

Your comparative analysis should include an in depth look at your company and competitors marketing campaigns. After you have completed the review of your company and your competitors you will be able to get a clear understanding of your products strengths and weaknesses in comparison to the competition. You will also be able to see any trends in market share and sales. What percentage of the target demographic account for sales and is this the same target demographic as your competition. You will get a better under-standing of your company’s marketing strategies and how they are like or different from your competitors.

In addition, you will be able to compare your products pricing to that of your competitors. You will also be able to know how your customer service stacks up against your rivals. You will see if your company relies on marketing more or less than the competition and you will see if your marketing campaigns were successful to driving business away from your competitors to your company.