Marketing Plan Factsheet

STRATEGIC MARKETING PLAN

Marketing is the activity and processes for creating, communi-cating, delivering and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners and society. In its simplest form, the marketing function serves to manage profitable customer relationships by targeting market segments and tailoring the 4Ps (i.e. product, price, place and promotion) to meet the needs of the identified target market

Your Marketing Plan is a key part of your business strategy/plan. It is a structured well defined set of actions that will develop and promote your brand whilst at the same time support your sales process.

Marketing is not an ad-hoc activity, but a well planned on-going, structured and focussed set of actions which continually places you in the forefront of your clients or potential clients minds.

The following should assist you to develop a marketing structure and plan for your business in your start-up phase.

1. Business Objectives
Simply put, business objectives are the quantifiable targets that the company wants to hit in the coming year.

For example, the goal may be to double revenue by the next fiscal year, or to maintain growth in the Mid-Market segment while expanding to Enterprise and achieving 15% growth.

These objectives relate to the company as a whole and are targets that marketing must keep in mind during all stages of planning and execution. If Marketing actions are not aligned to business objectives, then the team creates a lot of activity, with minimal impact.

2. Marketing Priorities
Once the business objectives are established, Marketing has to decide where and how it can make an impact.

In this section of planning, the marketing leadership team will outline which efforts to prioritize and which it cannot support.
The team must be in tune with its capabilities and not take on more than it can reliably handle.

If too many projects are taken on at once, resources will spread too thin and leave the team unable to make a measurable impact on any of the business objectives.

3. Marketing Goals
Marketing goals are an expansion of marketing priorities that quantifiably define what marketing will do to support the greater business objectives.

Goal Metrics, that should connect to business targets, will fall into four categories:
1.Impact,
2.Output,
3.Activity and
4.Readiness.

Impact is the effect on business goals, output is the result of actions, activity is the number of actions taken, and readiness is how prepared the team is to perform.
These should be expressed as Financial and Non Financial Goals on the Marketing Planner.

Financial goals and metrics relate to actions for for which there is a measureable return – for example;
Spending R200 on a promotional campaign on a specific event or product for which you would expect a 5 – 10x return.

There are a number of meaningful non-financial metrics.  We believe that four categories have significant impact on corporate performance:
1.Company reputation
2.Customer influence and value
3.Competitiveness
4.Innovation

Here are six key non-financial metrics that Marketing should own.
Brand Preference: This measure helps you understand the position of your company and your products and services in relation to competitors.
Take Rate: The next key non-financial metric is your take rate. This is how many customers/prospects act on your call to action, whether this is an offer to download a case study, sign up for a free trial, or schedule an appointment. Calculating take rate is relatively easy. Here’s a quick example. Let’s say you are a cyber security company and you create a campaign that offers a 20% discount on a risk assessment to anyone who signs up within the next 30 days. The campaign costs R10,000

Your email sends the offer to 1000 customers in your database and 100 register for the offer.

Divide the number of uptakes (100) by the number of customers you engaged (1000). In this case 10% is your take rate. The acquisition cost is 10,000/100 or R100 per registrant. Is this a good number?

Customer retention and churn: These metrics are different sides of the same coin.

While many marketing organizations focus on customer acquisition, adding .) customers while a significant number of existing customers are exiting out the back door is a sign of trouble.
Retention is how many customers continue to buy from you and churn is the number of existing customers who are no longer buying your products or services.

Obviously the goal is to increase the retention number and reduce the churn number.

Customer experience: Customer experience has direct impact on customer retention and churn.
To measure customer experience you need to take into account all of the major touch points where a customer interacts with your company.

Once you have these you will want to establish key criteria for what constitutes a superior vs. subpar experience.

Innovation: Innovation is your ability to bring new products/services to market successfully.

Both the number of new products in the pipeline and the adoption (direct and indirectrate of these new products reflect your company’s ability to bring value to your customers and the market.

Market share: Each of the prior metrics: preference, customer retention, take rate, customer experience, and innovation impact your company’s market share.

Note that a key word in this metric is market.
Market share is a primary measure for both the company and marketing’s success.

An increase in market share has a number of benefits, including better operating margins, one of those financial metrics company’s often track.
To measure your market share you will need to know how many customers and Rands are available in the market and then calculate how many of these customers and Rands are in your portfolio of products and services.

4. Marketing Strategy
Marketing strategy is the approach and continued efforts the marketing team will take to achieve its goals.

The strategy revolves around how the team is planning to hit its goals, while keeping marketing priorities in mind and remaining aligned to the business objectivesThere are strategic routes marketers can take to hit their goals. Innovate, grow, retain, harvest, pause, and exit; ranging on a scale from high, to low, risk and investment.

Strategy is an important part of the marketing planning process that often gets overlooked by marketers who are eager to take action.

However, actions without strategy creates an atmosphere where marketers are all working independently, segmented from each other and the greater business objectives.

5. Key Actions

Key actions refers to the specific efforts marketers will take to execute on strategy.

However, it cannot simply be a list of tactics, it must provide details on how each execution will impact the greater business objectives.

Additionally, marketing efforts from the past may no longer benefit the new strategy so in this section of planning, marketers must decide which actions to stop doing, which actions to expand on, and which new actions it should add to the plan.

6. Dependencies and Risks

Dependencies and risks are a part of every marketing plan.
However, outlining potential risks from the start allows marketers to better plan and adapt to changes or shortcomings that could happen throughout the year.

In every marketing planning strategy, dependencies and risks must be taken into account.

Obviously, marketing actions depend on receiving the funding to execute, so budget tends to be the biggest dependency, but there are many other risks and dependencies that need to be acknowledged within this section of planning.