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A strategic marketing plan will make you money. No, you
can’t sell it, but a good marketing plan will ensure your
marketing resources are maximized and achieve your
objectives. A surprising number of businesses don’t
have a marketing plan or even a business plan. If they
are still in business in five years, I’ll bet you they’re
wasting money and missing plenty of growth opportunities.
The lack of a solid marketing plan can cause entrepreneurs
and even established marketing veterans to fly blindly
through the marketplace. This strategic planning process
doesn’t need to be expensive. However, it does require ample
time set aside to thoughtfully go through the planning steps (click here for an outline of a
strategic marketing plan). Additionally, your strategic plan is not a one-time project,
but should be reviewed and amended at least once a year.
TOP MARKETING MISTAKES
Are
you still on the fence about the need for strategic
marketing planning? Here are some of my favorite marketing
miscues that can be avoided by developing and regularly
updating a solid marketing plan:
1) Throw Money at the Problem
without a Marketing Strategy
We
all know this type of CEO or business owner. They come from
the same mold of business professionals that initiate the
spending of half their annual marketing budget on a
Superbowl TV commercial. Get a celebrity spokesman,
saturate the city with billboards, create a website with all the latest gizmos. The CEO may
be a great leader and very smart, but he needs to leave the
marketing decisions to his empowered marketing director or at
least accept unbiased guidance from a professional marketing
consultant.
Here are some reasons why MORE is not always the answer:
- Misdirected target
audience –
You need to evaluate which segment of all possible target
audiences will be most effectively help you achieve your
overall business goals. For example, maybe its not
prospective new customers, but rather your existing
customers within a particular market segment.
- Target every possible
customer –
My favorite miscue. You are not going to refuse a customer
from outside your primary target market. However, when it
comes to prioritizing how you spend your marketing budgets
and allocate your sales team, you need to target specific
segments. It enables you to design a marketing message that
will resonate specifically with your target audience.
- Message is not well
aligned to target audience – Your message, which includes language, keywords, images,
layout style, and other visual cues, needs to resonate with
your target audience. Remember, the objective of your
campaign is to cause a particular action from your target
audience. A misdirected message will not achieve this
objective.
- Product or company is
not differentiated from competition – What are your company’s “positioning values”? How is your
marketing campaign differentiating your product or service
from direct and indirect competitors? Is the promoted
differentiation enough to resonate with your target
audience? Can a competitor easily adjust their own
marketing to effectively counter and dilute the impact of
your campaign? The last thing you want is to get blindsided
by a savvy competitor.
- The marketing medium(s)
was not the best way to reach target audience – Your big-time radio ad was heard by millions in 20 major
markets. Unfortunately, your target customers are product
managers that constantly travel by plane. Chances are that
90% of those that heard the commercials were not your target
customers. Perhaps a better choice would have been placing
feature articles or print advertisements in select in-flight
magazines. The marketing medium, just like your marketing
message and target customer segment, needs to be well
aligned to your marketing objectives. These should all be
identified and detailed within your strategic marketing
plan.
2) Failure to Measure Success
of a Marketing Campaign
Too often, businesses spend
tireless energy and expense to develop a marketing campaign
without a true benchmark for measuring its effectiveness.
There must be a gauge to monitor the short-term and long-term
effectiveness of marketing programs. Most importantly, the
measuring stick should be directly influenced by marketing
activities. For example, sales volume may not be the best
measurement of an advertising program if those sales depend
heavily on sales representatives, product inventory, or retail
displays. A more effective measurement process may be to
publish an exclusive phone number in different ads and/or
advertising medium (i.e. newspaper, magazine, television).
Then, you can track phone volume on each number to monitor
response. For those with larger budgets, you can run the
caller phone numbers through a demographic profiling database
to measure response within your target demographic groups. Of
course, all of this depends on identifying the proper goals of
the marketing campaign.
Another important measurement
component is benchmarking performance to rapidly adjust
existing and future campaigns. Marketing, especially its
creative side, makes many assumptions about the target
audience. It is not an exact science. Campaigns frequently
need adjustment after the initial launch. However, without the
proper measurement mechanisms implemented, there is no
effective way to identify areas needing adjustment. Again, it
requires careful and thoughtful planning.
3) Inability to be Objective
Be honest about your
organization’s weaknesses, strengths, opportunities, and
threats. It is so important for your internal team to step
back and examine your company in the real-world context.
Pride, job security, and the daily routine can easily cloud a
company’s ability to do this effectively. That is why many
businesses tap an outside marketing consultant to objectively
analyze a business and support their marketing strategy
development.
Another way to ensure you are getting an unbiased perspective
is to regularly survey your customers. Go ahead and ask
the tough questions. Include your best customers as well
as past customers that switched to a competitor. Create
a survey campaign with a goal to get feedback that can be used
to create corporate action items.
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