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

Should Marketing Tactics Drive Strategies For The Company?

Marketing tactics versus strategy: Role of tactics in making the overall strategy of the organization. After learning by spending good number of years in a product based Indian startup company as an entrepreneur and also learning from my experience of actively servicing large global companies, I have come to a radical conclusion. Sales, operational and marketing tactics should play a seminal role while formulating the overall strategy of the business. Strategy of a company should always be formed and developed by adopting a bottom-up approach and not the traditional top-down. To explain the above point more elaborately, the driving strategy of the organization should be developed by thoroughly understanding tactics of the business through involvement and deep knowledge.

I believe tactics should always guide strategy rather than the other way round. For example, the communication tactic should drive and govern the strategy to be adopted by marketing through the means of direct marketing, online marketing or digital marketing. Unfortunately, out of many marketers and senior people I got an opportunity to interact with, many of them believe in the reverse. The thought process which is accepted as a standard norm is that the overall strategy of the business should always be set first: and then it can followed by the tactics.

Changing The Traditional Mindset: Tactics Is The Subset Of Strategy

Strategy will always guide and direct tactics, is a golden rule which is deeply rooted in our system. We take it for granted and never ever question this obvious. The one of the best practices followed at most of the companies is to first decide the overall high level strategy and then slowly move down on to the tactics.

Authentic researches and real-life case studies have often tested and proved that businesses or brands that had set their strategies first adamantly refuse to accept defeat or nonperformance because they had figured out that all that was required to turn their assignment into a success was a minor modification in tactics.

In most of the business be it small, local or global business, leaders have the strong tendency to view things as they expect to see. This is tendency of a reacting social behavior. This is why I feel the approach of top down is littered with minefields and is dangerous. Adopting this approach they ignore the factors that aren’t linked to the accomplishment of the strategy.

So, when the process is upside down, you have strong possibility to make startling discoveries. For example an Indian major generic drug company had launched a product few years back which apart from curing headache and running nose also put users to sleep. This turned out to be grave problem if people wanted to go to important activities like driving or go to work. But instead of giving up on the product they positioned the product as the pain relief medicine for nighttime. It was a master advertisement tactic and marketing strategy and it worked brilliantly. It became a big marketing news in print as well as social media. It was for the first time that people had known a nighttime remedy and it created a nice in people’s mind leading to roaring success of the product. The marketing plan or rather I shall say marketing tactic adroitly adopted by the management surprisingly worked very well and It went on to become the most successful drug in the company’s history.

Here in the above example tactic to position the relief product uniquely and differently guided and ruled the strategy for the company which was to introduce a new major pain relief drug. A Master stroke indeed. Highly appreciable.

How to be different from the competition?

Competitive Angle in Marketing Tactics

I would like to highlight another useful tip; a tactic should have a competitive bend or angle in order to have a chance to succeed. This can be done by creating an element of uniqueness and differentiation. How to be different from the competition? It could be cheaper, more expensive, smaller, bigger, lighter and heavier. Furthermore, the tactic should be competitive in the complete marketing ring and not just in relation to two or three services or products.

For example, the brilliant business marketing tactic of Volkswagen to introduce the “The first” small car was a stunning marketing and media tactic and it created a competitive edge. At the same time in late fifties other competitors in the industry including General Motors were manufacturing BIG cars. The Volkswagen beetle was a huge success. The Volkswagen was not the small car in the US market but also through right advertising and marketing mix it gradually enjoyed the advantage of occupying the “small position” in the minds of the consumers across the world.

“Think small” was the popular advertisement run by Volkswagen. A highly popular ad.

Easily Identifying Strategic Thinker And Tactical Thinkers In Your Organization

• Leaders and thinkers in the organization who conceive things strategically always try to force things to happen. While the people who follow and adopt the tactical approach always look for things to explore and exploit.
• Strategic thinkers adopters will farm in the already existent market and tactical adopters will try to look for new markets at the first available opportunity.
• Strategic thinkers are internally driven and while the tactical leaders are externally driven.
• Strategic thinkers will have their eyes set on long – term success and then second priority on short term success whereas tactical leaders first aim at short-term success with long term success in mind.

Go Get Attached With Marketing Tactics
With the courage of stating my conviction openly, I strongly feel any attachment with strategy and strategic thinking is quite dangerous. Do you ever feel like you’re struggling to find more time to implement the long term strategies, but even though you’re working harder, you’re not content with the result and it is no where closer to what you’ve always desired?

Here’s why … building long term strategies are simply worthless. “Strategy” – a lot of corporate managers use it to superfluously describe their thoughts and ideas about what should be done, as opposed to spending time on developing executable tactics be it sales tactics to get more business or be marketing tactics with the aim to promote brand. To put it simply, It is all about doing actual work.

By Tarun Gupta