Five Easy Steps to Create a Marketing Plan

by Joanna L. Krotz

 

Put yourself in the shoes of your customers. Do you know why they buy your products or services? Is your pricing appropriate? Do you simply knock off 20 to 30 percent whenever clients turn scarce or inventory creeps up? Have you set any marketing targets or sales goals for the next 12 months or so?

You don’t need elaborate charts or high-priced consultants to develop effective marketing. But you do need a plan. A marketing plan gives you a roadmap that can drive action and point the way. A marketing plan can help you:

• Identify which customers are your best prospects.

• Evaluate company data against your industry or market.

• Track results so you learn what works.

Without a plan, you may be moving fast, but you may not be moving in the right direction. Here are five steps to creating a strategic and practical marketing plan.

 Step 1: Position your product

Many business owners blur the lines among promotion, advertising, and public relations. Those are the channels of a message or campaign, not marketing itself. The four Ps of marketing are:

• Product: Having the right product or service for your market.

• Price: Selling your product or service for an amount that makes your target customer feel it’s a good deal.

• Promotion: Creating appropriate perceptions across multiple channels, including,  print – direct mail, flyers, brochures, and postcards, TV or radio spots, newspaper or magazine ads, online and more.

• Place: Distributing your product to locations where your target customers can readily find it.

If you can put the right product or service at the right price in front of the right customer, you're cooking. Keep in mind that a high volume of sales isn’t the key. Profit is. The goal of marketing is to generate the interest or recognition that will lead to the sales that will boost profits. That’s the reason to create a strategy. You want to craft persuasive messages for the customers you target. You also want messages that promise only what you actually deliver.

None of this requires break-the-bank production. For example, Publisher 2003 makes it easy to create consistent marketing collateral using one of the 45 Master Design Sets that carry the same consistent look across various media, or downloading a template from Office Online Template Gallery. A flexible Wizard model enables you to make quick modifications along the way to tailor the brand identity to your business, or use Publisher’s full range of design and layout tools to create a more custom look.

 Step 2. Tap your brain trust

To define appropriate marketing for your company, set up some brainstorming meetings with advisors you trust, such as family, friends, staff, or other professionals. Meetings can be brown-bag lunches or formal offsite meetings. Just stay away from ringing phones and don’t expect to get everything done in one meeting. At these sessions, explore answers to these questions:

• Who are you selling to?

• What do those customers need?

• What distinguishes your product or service from the competition?

• Which marketing tactics will make your products noticeable?

• When and how often should marketing efforts be used?

• Where do you want your company to be in a year?

You might consider taping these sessions and distilling the best ideas and suggestions. Start putting notes on paper. Describe the state and size of your marketplace, how sales and distribution will work, your target customer (age, income, locations, and purchase patterns) and how your products rate against competitors.

 

Step 3: Listen to customers

Next, you need to know how customers react to your quality and price, service and delivery, image and brand—everything, in short, that influences their purchasing decision.

To discover what customers think, just ask them. Survey some of your current customers as well as customers you want to reach. Make personal calls or send them surveys via e-mail or postcards. Include an incentive to boost participation, such as a discount or a free sample..

Business owners are often surprised by what customers say. For instance, one firm learned from a survey that its receptionist was surly on the phone to customers. How would you know that if you didn’t ask customers?

Based on what you learn, prepare a SWOT analysis that deconstructs your business in fresh ways:

• Strengths: What makes your business thrive?

• Weaknesses: What are your vulnerabilities?

• Opportunities: What market conditions or segments can lead to growth?

• Threats: How are competitors snapping at your heels?

Step 4: Draft the plan

Now that you have an overview of customers and market conditions, you can flesh out your plan. This plan needn’t be a formal document, but should at least consist of a written outline to share with staff or outside consultants and to refer to later. The plan should cover:

• A summary of your market position and goals.

• A definition of what you expect to accomplish in a specific time period (e.g: “We will sell 150 widgets by the fourth quarter.”)

• A list of target markets, including segmentation and niche areas.

• An appropriate strategy for each segment or market.

• Expenses and resources, and how they will be allocated.

• Marketing channels. This is where you choose the types of marketing materials and distribution vehicles that you will use to attract target customers, including flyers, postcards, email marketing, newsletters, Web site and more.

• Competitive strategies. How will you respond to your competitors, for example, if a competitor lowers his price?

Step 5: Track results

Include benchmarks in your plan. Use these benchmarks to take stock of whether your marketing efforts are paying off or if you should rethink your approach. Calculate the category and cost of marketing communications and compare with set specific sales forecasts.

For direct mail efforts, check how the campaign is going by creating a spreadsheet in Excel 2003 that includes specifics of each order as well as a way to identify customers (like a customer identification number). Also make sure to include plans for implementation or a marketing calendar. Plans are great, but if you don’t also designate responsibility, set deadlines and hold people accountable, marketing efforts can’t succeed.

Finally, don’t rest on your laurels. Markets change all the time and you must be ready. Make sure to review the plan every year to see if you must revisit any goals.

For more marketing and management advice, visit Joanna’s Web site at Muse2Muse Productions:http://www.muse2muse.com/m2m.html.

 

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Is Your Marketing Working?

By Joanna L. Krotz

Smart marketing based on in depth research can generate leads, build brand awareness, and grow your business. But marketing that’s based on luck or raw instincts will only waste money, opportunities, or both.

You can’t afford to squander limited marketing resources on campaigns that are hit or miss. Instead, you need to plan, and track marketing efforts so you can learn what works and then jettison what doesn’t. That way, you concentrate efforts on tactics that generate real results.

Here are five steps to getting the maximum return on your marketing dollars.

1.     Identify targets.

First, evaluate your market to define the target customers you will benefit from reaching. Remember that target markets are not your core market. Targets shift depending on strategy and goals while the core customer typically remains stable.

For example, let’s say you sell kerosene camping stoves. Your core market is people who like to go camping. But your target might be the Boy Scout troop leaders in the Northwest.

Further, instead of one-size-fits-all marketing to every user of your product, consider targeting heavy, light and occasional users. That way, you can customize messages more likely to hit nerves and drive response.

2.     Research customers.

There’s little mileage in launching marketing efforts until you know the characteristics of your target customers. Find out what they think about your product, why they buy it, and how and when they use it. You especially want to know how customers want to hear from you—via direct mail, e-mail, phone, or online Web sites—as well as how often. Don’t overlook research into how you can meet their needs better.  

You can gain such insights in several ways. When talking to customers, ask them questions. You can also create simple surveys, questionnaires, and customer satisfaction queries with return mail postcards or online forms. Offer a gift or benefit for their participation, like a coupon for discounted services or a gift that participants can claim. You can also do phone research. You may be surprised by the results.

Collect the responses and keep track of interested customers using Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 with Business Contact Manager. As surveys are returned and orders come in, you can correlate the responses by exporting these reports to Microsoft Office Excel 2003 for further analysis.

To create a mailing list for the survey (and future marketing), export the contact information from Business Contact Manager. Or simply use the Mail Merge Wizard in either Microsoft Office Publisher 2003 or Microsoft Office Word 2003 to seamlessly incorporate contacts from Business Contact Manager or Excel 2003 directly into your publication or document.

 

3.      Quantify success.

Make sure you define the results you want and set expectations that are appropriate for the marketing you choose. To help set goals, you can get advice from industry groups, small business divisions at local colleges, or fee-based marketing agencies.

You might set the mark at certain sales revenue or a specified number of generated leads per month. Your goal could be a total number of acquired customers within a year or one new investor by the end of your fiscal. Success could mean a shift in consumer perceptions or deeper customer satisfaction. Whichever, you need to articulate the desired set of outcomes beforehand or you won’t know whether or not the marketing worked.

 

4.     Calculate your ROI.

Take the time to compare the cost of proposed marketing against the profit you expect from it—not sales, mind you, but actual profit.

Monitor the range of customer response throughout the sales process so you clearly understand what brought customers through your door or to your Web site. Once you acquired the lead, how much did it cost in time and money to nail the sale? Can you make that process more cost effective? Did customers return to buy additional products or services, or did they move on? What would help to make them more loyal?

By setting up a table or grid that captures information about the campaign—whether in Word 2003, Excel 2003, or Microsoft Office Publisher 2003—you can create a tool that lets you evaluate results. You want to know:

• The per piece cost of your marketing material and distribution.

• A score for the buying action respondents take, such as high, medium, or low.

• Some tracking code to categorize customer response via phone, direct mail, e-mail, Web-based, or in person.

Now can figure out how much it costs to get a customer’s attention. You can also put a price tag on what it takes to drive a response and close the deal.

         5.      Track results and adjust efforts.

By capturing data, updating results, and tracking your progress, you create increasingly integrated sales reports, financial analysis, and customer databases. That will tell you what’s working – and what isn’t. With that knowledge, you can customize the key marketing templates you use in Publisher 2003.

Don’t test once and stop. Keep refining your tactics and messages. Build up to larger, more expensive and more proven marketing with low-cost, low-effort experiments. Some examples:

• Create special coupons. Use different codes for various messages or offers. That way, you’ll know what attracts business or response.

• Buy a group of toll free 800 numbers and use different numbers for varying promotions. Costs for 800 numbers are minimal these days.

• Get in touch with repeat customers. Find out what makes them come back.

• Send a postcard mailing to customers who haven’t bought anything for a while. Offer an incentive to buy and ask about the reason they haven’t been around.

• Print your e-mail and Web site address on every direct mail offer you send out and see if that pulls.

Besides the fine-tuning of research and analysis there’s a very simple rule about whether or not your marketing is effective. If you’re spending more on marketing than the business it generates, stop doing it and create a new campaign.

 

For more marketing and management advice, visit Joanna’s Web site at Muse2Muse Productions:http://www.muse2muse.com/m2m.html.

 

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Harness the Sales Power of E-mail – 4 Steps to Pressing Send

By Joanna L. Krotz

Got $25?

That’s about all you need to send 1,000 highly personalized e-mail messages to specially selected customers. And that’s both the good news and the bad. 

When done right, e-mail marketing is not only breathtakingly affordable but also extremely effective. Depending on your metrics (opened messages, clickthroughs or conversion rates) and your targets (new, existing or best customers), e-mail marketing can yield response rates that range from a satisfying 5 percent to a heady 50 percent or more.

On the other hand, the cheap cost of entry generates a sea of spam—that is, the tide of unsolicited bulk mail messages or e-mail marketing done wrong. Spam has obviously made consumers wary and annoyed.

Increasingly, you must make sure to gain opt-in—registration, prior contact or permission—from your recipient or customer before sending any e-mail marketing.

With that in mind, here’s how to launch an e-mail campaign.

1.     Define your goals.

No marketing can succeed with an unlimited or shifting horizon. You must set goals that will define your success. When it comes to e-mail marketing, campaigns tend to get better results when there’s a clear call to action, perhaps with the added urgency of a time-sensitive window. Typically, e-mail marketing can:

• Announce special deals, sales or discounts.

• Invite customers to events, VIP parties, or conferences.

• Offer news or information that drives performance or decisions.

At the outset, carefully define what you want from the campaign. Then focus on the messaging and distribution that will achieve it.

2.     Connect with customers.

Different designs and messages will yield different results. The idea is to customize batches of messages in order to emphasize benefits that speak to specific customer needs. Electronic tools make it much easier to segment customers and sales leads according to key characteristics.

You can quickly group customers into byte-size market chunks of similar demographics, purchasing history or other qualifiers by using Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 with Business Contact Manager. You’ll find seven pre-formatted Account reports, such as Accounts by Rating or Neglected Accounts.

Or you can customize reports, and then export those tailor-made reports into Microsoft Office Excel 2003 for further analysis.

Should you need additional, targeted e-mail addresses for your campaign, Business Contact Manager integrates with the fee-based Sales Leads service from Microsoft bCentral. This service lets you:

• Use a wizard to select the most appropriate sales leads from a database of more than 14 million businesses and over 250 millions consumers.

• Purchase and download the selected leads at a low cost (ranges from $.10 to $.50 per lead depending on how exotic the query is.

• Import the leads directly into BCM using the compatible BCM file format.

3.     Manage the list.

If you’re developing your own campaign, first create your mailing list. Then select the style of your e-mail publication.

You can avoid hassles by relying on the fee-based Microsoft bCentral List Builder service, which creates and sends out your e-mail campaign and then automatically tracks open and click-through rates, as well as opt-out information for you.

Forrester Research reports that companies that outsource both delivery and list management campaigns average a 6 percent conversation rate, compared to about 1.4 percent for internally developed solutions.

Don’t forget to keep updating customer information. When a new customer contacts you, create an entry for them in Outlook 2003 with Business Contact Manager. Business Contact Manager enables you to consolidate all interactions with a given customer in the Contact History section, including e-mails, tasks, appointments, notes, and documents. If you send out your e-mail campaign to your Business Contacts in Business Contact Manager, this activity will be captured automatically in each recipient’s Contact History.

4.     Personalize. Personalize. Personalize.

Recent surveys indicate that recipients more readily sign up for e-mail marketing when offered a prize, entry in a sweepstakes or the like. They’re also more inclined to register and input personal data when they’re already customers of the sponsoring company.

So the more you reward customers for giving you access to personal information and the more familiar they are with your products or brand, the better your responses tend to be.

To get customer buy in, try using name-personalization messages. Make sure you test several subject lines, message copy and landing pages before the launch.

That $25 budget, of course, only covers the most basic campaigns. If you want to use attention-grabbers like video or animation or audio, costs will rise. But you can still do quite a lot with text and links to a Web site or special landing pages.

Some message dos and don’ts:

• Make it short and compelling. Don’t include detailed product descriptions or windy stories about the company’s history.

• Use lots of short titles and bulleted points or highlights, so customers can take in information at a glance. You may want to set up a summary at the top and jump-link to information that follows, so users can quickly access what interests them.

• Always set up a way for customers to easily update their information or unsubscribe.

• Check messages from time to time to make see that the information is still timely and up-to-date. (Need we mention proofreading?)

• Never spam—not anyone for any reason.

•  Match your format and message to your customers. Try to include some point of difference or attitude or special service that makes you stand out.

Finally, support your campaign. Don’t simply send out your messages and sit back. Plan specific follow up, say, by sending automated bounce-back replies or by integrating the e-mail campaign with other channels, such as phone calls or direct mail. The last thing you want to do generate customer interest and then be unprepared to act on it.

For more marketing and management advice, visit Joanna’s Web site at Muse2Muse Productions:http://www.muse2muse.com/m2m.html.

 

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10 tips for acquiring new customers

By Joanna L. Krotz

More often than not, marketing managers and sales directors just don't get along. When revenues drop or targets fall short, they start blaming each other.  Typically, tempers really flare over who drops the ball on sales leads, which in time get more and more expensive.  Here's how to get marketing and sales to speak each other's language and a list of 10 practical ideas to find qualified leads in today's market.

What's a lead?

It's the job of marketing, of course, to evoke the interest that will transform cold clients into warm prospects. It's the sales team's responsibility to put the fire under those warm prospects that will nail the deal.

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When things go awry, marketing shows the impressive number of customer phone calls, e-mail queries, Web page click-throughs or Web impressions that were forwarded to sales and ignored. Salespeople then shake their heads about the effort they waste in following up on marketing's trivial and tenuous queries. "All we get are window shoppers," say resentful sales directors.  The reason neither side wins is because both are right.

Weak follow-up wastes marketing money

The pipeline that fuels a sale typically begins with a query. It's a process that unfolds over time.  Recent surveys by Warne, a Toronto marketing company, tracked more than 3,500 people who inquired to blue-chip advertisers. Here is what the surveys found: 19% of the inquirers made purchases within six months (whether from the advertiser or a competitor) and 29% purchased within a year. By 16 months, 43%, and by 25 months, 57% had made purchases. That translates into two in 10 that want to buy "now" and four others that want to buy "later" — or about six prospects for every 10 queries.

The problem here? The surveys found that sales reps followed up on less than 17% of all inquiries. Clearly, inquiries are a key to sales. Just as clearly, most businesses are wasting marketing dollars by weak follow-up.  That's because all queries look alike at the outset. You can't tell which will fade and which will turn into prospects. Since good follow-up requires three or four subsequent contacts, companies cannot afford to respond to every request for information or pricing with such attention. So the good gets tossed with the bad.  The solution is to set up a cost-efficient system that triggers appropriate responses at various points along the timeline.

Measured responses

Depending on your industry and sales cycle, this could mean an automated e-mail program with pre-selected messages that respond to keywords in an electronic query. It could be a mailed media kit or annual report to respond to phone call inquiries. 

You could create a series of increasingly detailed brochures that satisfy intensifying query interest — until you reach the moment for face-to-face sales. Other notions: qualified invitations to events or webcasts, white papers or free samples sent to anyone who stops by a trade show booth, and so on. You must also decide whether marketing or sales will manage each response, and at what point sales takes over.

There are many affordable options. You just need to think ahead.  Do the math. Then, to get marketing and sales to cooperate, make sure each side understands the costs that count.  Marketing: You must figure out how many customer contacts are needed, on average, to lead to a sale — and how much each one costs. The total number of click-throughs or queries isn't particularly meaningful.

Sales: You must calculate how many deals are needed to hit company revenue targets or profitability. Setting a sales goal of a number of deals per month or quarter doesn't seriously matter. Each side must be clear about what's needed to drive inquiries into sales.

Marketing aimed at generating sales (in contrast to branding efforts or campaigns that build customer loyalty), usually relies on the following channels, says Mac McIntosh, a business-to-business sales consultant based in North Kingstown, R.I.:

• Relationship marketing that nurtures and qualifies prospects.

• An effective marketing database.

• Direct marketing that generates queries.

• Online and search engine marketing that bridges the gap between marketing and sales.

• Events or promotions that move prospects to purchase.

 Multiple tactics should be tried

"A company needs to be doing a number of lead-generation things," advises Jerry Rackley, a marketing consultant based in Stillwater, Okla. "Generally, using just one approach will not adequately fill the lead pipeline and keep prospects flowing through it."  You likely need a blend of traditional techniques, such as mass mailers, along with electronic tactics, such as search-engine marketing.  Remember this as you consider these 10 lead-generating ideas:

1.	Buy qualified leads. Scrubbed, reliable prospect lists can be rented from various sources, including trade groups, professional organizations, alumni associations or list brokers. Such lists let you tailor e-mail messages to different customer segments. For instance, you can select highly qualified leads to receive discounted offers or re-jigger your messages to appeal to different age groups.
2.	Become the authority. Commission a survey or poll that offers proprietary market intelligence and then publicize the results through the media or a Web site. "The key is to create pull demand by building credibility and recognition," says Jim DeSena, author of "The 10 Immutable Laws of Power Selling." If you can turn the survey into an annual event, you become an ongoing industry expert.
3.	Find a partner. "When two business professionals complement each other, they can influence their contacts to open doors for the other," says Maura Schreier-Fleming, author of "Real World Selling for Out-of-This-World Results."
4.	Create an industry profile. Develop expertise or an informative speech that's in demand for your industry. With a professionally produced media kit and a few mailings, you can get on the lecture or seminar circuit. "Everyone is always looking for good speakers [who can] sell on stage," suggests Julie Isphording, a publicist based in Cincinnati. You'll also then be able to leverage media contacts to be quoted in news articles or broadcast features.
5.	Buy ads in electronic newsletters. Ads in vertical, targeted e-mail newsletters can really grab attention. "Buying an ad in these is a great lead-generation technique because you have the ability to direct the prospect to your Web site and track the response," Rackley says.
6.	Read the newspaper. "The local daily paper is chock full of prospects who have a specific need for your product or service," says Heath Shackleford, director of client services at Seigenthaler Public Relations in Nashville, Tenn. A human resources consultancy, for example, can note mergers or expansions in the news.
7.	Check your database. Inactive customers who haven't bought anything for a while or infrequent buyers are ripe for sales pitches, advises Dianna Booher, author of "From Contact to Contract."
8.	Find a specialized show. Attendance has dropped at many major trade shows in recent years because of cost-cutting efforts and travel jitters. But leads can be found at affordable regional or vertical shows — and the leads will be better qualified, too.
9.	Join a networking organization. For small businesses, these groups, found around the country, do indeed work. The idea is to share leads with member businesses that don't directly compete with yours. Annual dues vary, from a few hundred to several thousand dollars. Just make sure the group has a track record and that you can live with its rules about sharing contact information.
10.	Finally, don't forget the power of positive buzz. When the CEO is accessible to the staff or when she hangs around to answer questions after industry events, word-of-mouth builds and people get to hear. That kind of lead isn't for sale. You simply earn it.

 Joanna L. Krotz writes about small-business marketing and management issues. She is the co-author of the "Microsoft Small Business Kit" and runs Muse2Muse Productions, a New York City-based custom publisher. Additional articles by Joanna can be found on www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness

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