Effective marketing rarely happens accidentally. Successful campaigns are most often the result of good planning and execution.
Planning a marketing campaign can provide an excellent opportunity to
focus on a business's unique marketing problems or challenges and the
proper actions required to address those very problems or challenges.
Regarding Marketing Planning
Unfortunately, some entrepreneurs simply don't know what a marketing
plan is or how it should look. Is there a form one can download and fill
out to ensure complete success? Not really. Are there marketing recipes
to follow that include search engine marketing combined with
pay-per-click ads and a blog post or two? Not exactly.
Instead marketing planning varies greatly from organization to
organization or even campaign to campaign. What follows are seven steps
that may help ecommerce merchants make better marketing plans. Apply
these steps as they make sense in the context of a particular campaign.
1. Know Where the Business Is
Marketing is frequently thought of as "those activities involved in
the process of selling products or services to customers." But another
possible definition — or perhaps restatement of the definition — might
be "those actions required to move a business from its current state to a
desired state."
For example, imagine an online store that sells $10,000 worth of
digital widgets each month. That store would, however like to sell
$20,000 worth of widgets. The store's current state is "sales of
$10,000," and its desired state is "sales of $20,000."
Marketing represents those actions required to move a business from its current state to a desired state.
In the example, it is marketing that moves the retailer from its current state to its desired state — i.e., to double sales.
In application, a good marketing plan should begin with a thorough
understanding of the business's current state. What are current sales
and inventory levels? Are new products available? What is the business's
cash flow or available marketing budget?
2. Know What the Opportunity Is
In marketing textbooks, one will often find the term "total available
market" or "TAM." The TAM references the revenue opportunity for a
particular product or service. It describes the value of the entire
market.
It is unlikely that a single business will have the ability to sell
to the entire market. That business will, instead, have some share of
the available market. An increase in revenue or sales frequently
represents an increase in that market share.
When developing a marketing plan, consider what kind of opportunity
may exist. Is the TAM for a particular product or segment growing? Are
there opportunities to gain market share.
Knowing how large or small an opportunity is will help with goal setting later.
3. Know Who the Customer Is
Recently, a major clothing manufacturer specializing in work wear and
outerwear profiled its typical customers. This manufacturer aggregated
information about the customers' ages, occupations, locations, hobbies,
and favorite places to shop. Similar customers were grouped together and
represented by personas with names like Mike, Matt, and Mary.
The manufacturer then shared this data with many of its retailers,
including brick-and-mortar stores, pure-play ecommerce merchants, and
multi-channel retailers. This kind of customer information can be very
useful.
The Mike persona, which was a 40-year-old, blue collar worker earning
around $65,000, was the only customer type shopping at relatively small
specialty stores. This fact helped the marketers at those specialty
stores do two very different things with their marketing plans. First,
they aimed at strengthening relationships with Mike persona customers.
Second, they looked at other similar personas, which were not currently
shopping at specialty retailers and sought ways to win them over.
4. Have S.M.A.R.T. Goals
Once a marketer has taken stock of a business's current state,
studied the market to understand the available opportunity, and
researched customers, it is time to define the desired state or the
goals that marketing is supposed to achieve.
There is an acronym, S.M.A.R.T., that can help a marketer set good marketing goals. I've addressed S.M.A.R.T. previously, in
"Setting SMART Goals and Measuring Success."
Put simply, marketing goals should be:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Realistic
- Time-bound
5. Choose Reasonable Tactics
Once a S.M.A.R.T. goal has been created, it is time to select the
specific tactics or actions that will move a business from its current
state to its goal or desired state. These tactics will be things like
creating a special landing page, sending emails, posting on Facebook,
Google+, and Twitter, publishing content, or purchasing pay-per-click
ads on Google, Bing, or similar networks.
Each tactic selected should be responsible for achieving some part of
the goal. As an example, if the goal is to get $10,000 in new monthly
revenue, pay-per-click ads might be made responsible for producing
$2,000 in new sales while a multi-part email tactic might be responsible
for another $2,000. Other tactics would need to make up the remaining
$6,000 in new sales to meet the goal.
Reasonable tactics are those actions or advertisements that help
achieve the goal while remaining within budget or time constraints.
6. Create a Schedule or Calendar
Every tactic in the marketing plan and every goal milestone should be
laid out on a schedule or calendar. This schedule will first help to
coordinate tactics avoiding overlap or other potential issues.
Second, the schedule will help with execution and measurement, since
the marketer will know ahead of time which tactics are coming up and,
presumably, what must be done to execute those tactics.
7. Build in Room for Change
A good marketing plan also should assume that some tactics will
change during the course of execution and accommodate those likely
changes.
This does not mean that the planner should seek to figure out
possible changes in advance or be unwilling to commit to some tactics.
It suggests, instead, having some margin or room in the plan for change.
The plan should spread marketing investments out so that there will
still be room in the budget — in terms of money and time — if new
opportunities arise or if some tactics underperform.
