How To Easily And Cautiously Make Your Marketing Plan?

If you do not have lot of experience with marketing, I would advise someone to help you who has experience and he can write the marketing plan for you but there is a hitch in it, It will cost you money if you are just staring out. It’s always better to create your own marketing plan rather than tossing aside the idea of not creating at all.Marketing plan is the much needed oil for any organization. Making good marketing plan was considered to be a tough task, until fairly recently, what was the purview of just the bigger companies is now possible for most. Let me give you some insights into how a basic level marketing plan is developed.

7 Easy Steps For Making Effective Marketing Plan:-

1. Determine And Finalizing What You Going To Serve And To Whom – Determining Your Target Market
2. Determining Your Positioning For Your Product
3. Develop The Product Plan
4. Develop And Build Your Pricing Plan
5. Develop Your Distribution And Logistics Plan
6. Develop Your Offline & Online Promotional Plan
7. Determine And Chalk Out Budget For Your Marketing Ideas

Product Finalization And Identifying Target Market For Your Marketing Plan

Coming to specifies, on what you going to sell and push in the market – make sure whatever you wish or plan to sell actually solve a real and genuine problem for the audience you want to sell to. Talk, communicate and engage with your audiences to know their pain areas. When you embark on this journey, try to take feedback from with the whole, rather than the subset. Avoid relying just on samples to determine the shape and form of the final product, as, often, the really interesting things in market are found that samples fails to catch.

A small insight: – Do not treat difficulty of interacting with all your customers as an unfortunate reality, rather see it for what it is a “necessary evil”. It is the backbone of measurement of the target at scale.

Positioning 
For your positioning make sure you communicate the USP, the point of difference and ensure it is included in your positioning that will attracts customers/buyers to your product. Use effective and low cost marketingmethods like digital marketing and mass marketing with social media. Generate awareness through word–of–mouth and social interactions as part of “Connected Marketing” to reach to the desired target audience.

Product Plan
Third, for your product plan make sure you survey the customer prospects to see what they want. Do ensure the customer survey is comprehensive and sufficient. The golden rule while doing survey is even if you have too much data then also “good enough” is not good enough. Also study your competitors to see what they doing, what’s working and what may be the strength and weakness of their product and also why customers are frustrated with existing product in the market. It is also sometimes termed as gathering “Competitive Intelligence”.

Doing so, is feasible, because success in business and in the product is in working with customers and not against them.

Deducing Pricing
Fourth, when you put together your financial or pricing plan ensure you are again looking at what your competitors are doing and analyzing what opportunities are working best for them and also ensuring that you price your product on the value (value based pricing) and not just on cost. Set the price of your product or the service offered on the tangible and intangible benefits it provides to the end consumer rather than fixing the price on the amount of money it takes to produce the product.

Preparing Distribution Plan
Fifth, for the distribution plan again you may like to look at what’s making sense for similar products in the market, contact the competitors and find how are competitors are doing, find out the latest trend and you may also like to think about how your customers may like to buy for you, where do they want to buy and create a distribution plan around that in order to satisfy your customer wants.

Developing Promotional Plan
Sixth, in your promotional plan make sure you know whom you are trying to target and what content is the most effective and ultimate message to communicate to the target audience. Next do take a quick look what marketing tactics your competitors are using and what methods have worked best for them and take a look at what promotional activities you have used in the past that has worked best for you, then use this information to select which promotional methods are going to work best to communicate the message you want to the target that you are targeting. In addition you want to use specialized consulting services to create a plan specifically to maximize the amount of referral you going to get as referrals are the number one source of new customers for the business.

Determining ROI For Each Promotional Idea
Finally list down all the examples of marketing strategies, sales and marketing, promotional, advertising ideas and creative marketing ideas, for your consumer products that you had and take a look at some of the matrix to see which are going to be most profitable. To do this take a look at the impressions that the marketing strategies will deliver. The estimated conversion rate will able to give you estimated ROI and also they take a look at the time, how much time it’s going to take to implement these type of marketing strategies and see which one’s appear to be the best options for your business.

The above mentioned 7 best practices of integrated marketing can be your most valuable tools while preparing your powerful marketing plan and your marketing ideas for small business. Simply put, poorly – prepared guys always finish last. Do not fall trap of procrastination. Do IT NOW with best marketing mix. You need to escape from it and use the above tips to make an impact to your business. As you make your way to make a marketingplan, you may grope in dark and may stumble. Use the above tips as landmarks and make your way to great leadership.

By Tarun Gupta

Creating a Marketing Plan – How It Has Transformed And Evolved

What is a marketing plan? Through this brief article I would like to articulate in short on how the process of analyzing and building a marketing plan and the concept of marketing management has evolved over a period of time. From my own research and business, I can say that marketing is the job to plan, create, communicate and deliver value to a target market at a profit. It is a business law and objective for all the entrepreneurs and also for the small, medium, large organizations and corporate. This holds true both for online as well as offline businesses.

Now let’s take this opportunity to discuss in detail, create, communicate and deliver. Creating value for the customers is called product management. Your product may be a service, tangible or intangible, but when you communicate value it’s called Branding and that’s brand management. There is a significant difference between product management and brand management. You could have five products, but what have you done to brand them, communicate excitement, differentiate them and lastly to deliver value. Thus is called customers management.

So according to the traditional business plans, the organizations used to run 3 businesses within one. They were:
A) Product Management
B) Brand Management
C) Customer Management

Progression Of Product Management In The New Marketing Plan

The business practice of product management was really like the independent business, it was like you have a company and from the inside you develop things and then ask your sales & marketing people to get rid of them. You do it internally, you do it with your own scientists and engineers, so what is strategically changing in product management today? Let’s take the example of Procter and Gamble (P&G), one of the largest FMCG company globally, the company not only has its own scientists and research team who are developing new products for them, but they have also connected with twenty times as many researches and scientists outside. Quite expectedly, the old idea was to do things secretly and protect the vital information. It was as if you were inventing something which the competitor with the likes of Unilever should not know about. it’s called the closed door policy. But now Procter & Gamble’s recent strategic and business planning is to tap resources and take service of scientists, researchers, analysts, anywhere in the world, at any price, who they believe have solutions to the problem that Procter & Gamble wants to solve.

Take a real time example, P & G makes a potato chips product called Pringles. They decided to print amusing and funny things on this popular product, but the big question the management faced was – how do you print this picture or a funny slogan on the product. Their in-house resources could not figure it out until they found and later took assistance from a cookie maker in Italy, who had been printing similar things in his hometown. This process is called open technology, open innovation. The key objective is to find the best ideas irrespective of where they come from. The new normal is to open product management.

Brand Management An Essential Ingredient For The Right Marketing Plan..

What is right brand management? Most of us believe that there are few functions within marketing which are sexy, such as branding focusing on flamboyance and exuberance, but in reality, it is anything but that. Earlier, brand building used to heavily revolve around packaging, a name or at the maximum was limited to a logo, but today as one can easily understand, marketing energy is spent mostly on “what you are all about”. Brand management today means to fulfill a promise, the brand inspires everything you do, the way you act when you approach and reach to the customers and the whole process is emotional, highly emotional, there is a new direction.

The traditional formula was, “I am going after your mind, I am going after your heart, I want mind share and I want heart share”. Nowadays marketers are saying that they also want spirit share. They care more for the soul than the bread. Share of something little more than narrow to your own financial and business interest. We might be affirmed that its civic, its caring and we want to be appreciated because we care about the shape of the world and that’s corporate social responsibility but in creating an emotional relationship its more than limited to the person’s own nurturing of his or her own ego.

Role Of Customer Management As A Powerful Marketing Plan
Nowadays, customer management has also changed, do you think you are doing customer management if you essentially have a database of customers and you are reaching them through direct means i.e. through online, email, phone calls and so on. Is that really customer relation management or dealing with a database? I think, plain enough, it requires an honest reflection. What is new about customer relationship management is that marketers want to meet the customers on a regular basis and know them really well beyond the database. Infact we want to get their help, to get the customers help for creating new refined products, we want to co-create with our customer, our products, we want their help in creating advertisements for us. It is but natural that the good thing about working with customers is that you have them on your side.

Be Prepared To Adopt The Change

So, all the future entrepreneurs, marketers, corporate managers, I rise to express on behalf of myself and other experiences marketers with whom I am associated with, that be prepared to embrace the change in the way newmarketing plans are written and execute to take best advantage of it. As famous saying goes “If you are prepared to welcome the unknown, you already know the secret of remaining victorious in all defeats and failures”. Be prepared to go that extra mile from where unsuccessful people chose to return. Be prepared for the radical change.

By Tarun Gupta

International Networking: Few Examples of Marketing Strategies

What about breaking into a new country without any marketing strategies? Would you not want to have a trip to a new country? Do you not wish to go to a new country earn dollars there and comeback richer? Won’t you like to be a called a rich international entrepreneur? If you ask me, I personally have a wish to be able to travel the world on company’s dollars and come back richer. But you would wonder – How would I do that? Well at the core of it lies your strategy. You need to have a strategy and a focused plan to make this happen.

So, when it’s decided that you want to do business somewhere in the other part of the world, everybody would start saying – I can’t help you, since I don’t know anyone there or have no examples of marketing strategies for there. But what will you do then. How will you go ahead with the entrepreneurial instinct inside you that just arose. Would you just let it burn off? I’ll take this up later. First, think about this. Have you ever noticed unemployed people saying “I will take any job” but just with this information you won’t be able to think anything about it. But, if he says that I am an electric engineer and I want work for a fortune 500 company like IBM. Hearing IBM all of a sudden, you would realize you probably know someone at IBM and you can put him in touch with that concerned person. Here, in this case you were able to help the person because he became very specific.

Here is the answer of the question I had left unanswered. Always be specific, even if anybody seeks help form you then specifically ask about the areas in which he/she needs your help like in the above case the engineer did and also vice versa. Always have a pertinent, specific, to the point answer. This is the most important part to be kept in your mind while framing a international networking and marketing strategy and organization’s marketing strategies.

Deploy Social Media Extensively In Your Marketing Strategies

Your marketing strategies may consist of A) List of companies B) List of decision makers and many such things. What is most important here is, you should be able to find a common means of communication between you and the other person because this would make things a lot easier for you and your marketing plan. Social media, for instance is great for this, specially “Linked-in”. Linked-in helps you know the professional profile of the person really well. On the other hand, you also have sites like Facebook, Twitter where you can have informal communication with the person as well. Thus, social media can help a lot in knowing the person.

Besides these, you can always Google the person, send mail to the person, send message to the person or even call the person say through Skype or VOIP. In short, this would enable you with all the information you wanted to always know. Sometimes companies invest heavily in their internet marketing, internet advertising strategies, online marketing or online marketing tactics to be present actively across all the social media forums to promote reverse/pull marketing strategies.

Creating Local Partner Model As One Of Your Key Marketing Strategies

Now, you know about the customer well, say through some of the social media means, but one question that still remains unanswered in your marketing strategies is – how to reach out to the customer? Answer is simple, instead of you yourself trying to reach out to the customer, you look for a liaising partner in between. You may try to find out a guy who has a good network and can help you to reach out to your customers. This is same as this situation, say I am selling a product for an education institution, so I have 2 options with me; either I can go to each institute on my own or else I can sell to the “X” guy who sells to these institutes. I would approach “X” and ask him whether he would like to sell my services as well, and will offer him good commission. These Intermediaries are generally known as Local Partners.

Thus knowing local partners and establishing connect with them in the specific region you wish to go would help you in 2 ways; first it would give you a good understanding of the region, second it will obviously help you in your business expansion. Apart from all this, one thing that is irreplaceable is you yourself. Before doing any kind of business in the new country, you first need to go there, meet people, get acquainted with their culture etc. Also, sometimes in some cultures people prefer to see you face-to-face before they actually do any kind of business with you. In this case, a local partnering model proves to be very helpful creating a win-win situation for both.

I will like to give you a small tip which someone had given me sometime back and it is a brilliant one. When one of my closest friend who had never been to Singapore before, landed at the airport he just called up the top 10 hotels of Singapore saying that he is a sales trainer by profession, and he will do sales training of their sales staff in the evening for free, if they could allow him to stay for two weeks in their hotel. Isn’t is something very creative and interesting to hear. I guess it’s certainly is. And guess what, his communication with those 10 hotels made him win a complimentary room in all those 10 hotels for 2 weeks. Since he had a pool of choices, he could choose the best among them.

But aren’t you thinking how was he able to get a free accommodation? All this happened because he asked himself a question “How can I go to Singapore on a budget?” And while thinking for an answer to this question he realized he could use his training capabilities in order to stay in a hotel. So, aren’t you asking this question to yourself – how can you make it happen instead of just relying on the normal belief that you cannot afford it since it’s too far or since you don’t know anybody there.

My same Singapore friend just called the place, offered his services and was there for good 2 weeks, and he just networked, networked and networked, probably didn’t get too much out of it in the first time. But he did the same thing again two months later and now Singapore has become one of the hub for his business operations. And now he is doing the same with Indonesia, Malaysia, China and other countries around Singapore. Now, he is even developing a hub in Dubai as well. Thus, the bottom line is “You have to go there, no matter how far is it, whether you know somebody there or not and that is the only marketing strategy one can deploy at that point in time”.

Just couple of quick tips on marketing strategies – as takeaways to expand your business internationally:
1. Give yourself a local phone number.
2. Get a local virtual office address.

They will facilitate your liaising with a local partner and will give a boost to your newly set business in the new country.

Here’s another very simple idea, just to show that you have an international mindset, add ‘+’ in front of telephone number, as all international numbers have. Start with a ‘+’ in front of the telephone number, then add the country code. This will help your local partners to know that you have an international mindset in type of marketing strategies you do and you can think on their lines as well.

Re-Validate Your Marketing Material And Marketing Strategies
Last tip, have a look at the marketing material created by your senior management or public relations cell, check if your marketing strategies cater to the international audience or does it only use lot of local lingos that might not be understood by even an English speaking people in the foreign country. This kind of research and planning is important because if they cannot understand your marketing material then whole idea behind creating that material and allocating huge finances towards them goes completely in vain.

Hence, all these points and marketing strategies are needed to be kept in mind in order to inculcate in your business DNA an international mindset.

By Tarun Gupta