How to Make a Marketing Action Plan Pay Off

By: Peter Longini

www.imakenews.com

You won’t get where you want to go if you don’t make plans for getting there – in life or in business, according to Discovery Strategies’ co-founder Robert Conway's view on a marketing action plan. Of course, having a plan – even a good one – won’t guarantee results by itself, but it will significantly increase your chance of success, Conway told an audience of 50 business professionals attending an April 30 meeting of the Strategic Leadership Forum Pittsburgh.

“It’s important that we have some kind of methodology, roadmap, or something in our head that tells us how to get to where we want to be,” he said. “If we look at strategic planning, we see a cycle. It starts off with some type of information. We get that from market research.”

Information is the foundation of the marketing process. The entire sequence of steps in developing a marketing action plan is predicated on having that information. That plan is closely coupled with a company’s operating plan, which details its implementation strategy. And both of those, in turn, feed into the company’s business plan. “It’s a cycle. You might start with the business plan first; somebody has an idea for a product or service that targets a need in the marketplace. Or somebody has an idea that a great market exists, but they don’t know exactly what it needs. However you start, the next step is usually going to be finding out some information.”

Why bother? There are plenty of alibis for not planning; what’s yours?

Although many successful people have formulated detailed plans for their lives and careers, most people wonder, at least from time to time, whether it’s really worth the bother. After all, Conway pointed out, there are plenty of reasons that people in business give for not planning: we don’t have time, we don’t have the money, we don’t have anybody who can do it for us, we’ll wing it, we’ll learn as we go, we don’t have a salary to pay that person. And if we had a salary, and hired someone to do the planning for us full time, what do we do when we’re done with our planning?

“They’re all bad reasons. In fact, the people who say they don’t have a budget for it and don’t have any time to plan, are actually going to spend the money and spend the time anyway. But where they’re going to spend it is in the implementation – by doing it wrong, by making mistakes, by spending that time and money later. But often times you’ll hear people who try to rationalize that they don’t need to do planning this way.

“If you plan, you’ll get better results. You’ll learn something about the process. You’ll learn what you can really expect. You’ll learn some of the downfalls, the barriers, things to avoid. You’ll gain some understanding of a process just by starting to map it out and plan it. There are some kind of counter-intuitive things you can learn as well. One is that you actually save time and save money, if you spend that time and money making a plan.

Studies have shown that there’s a factor of seven payoff – that is, additional hours spent in planning or days spent in planning can save you a factor of seven – seven hours, seven days in the actual implementation of something. That doesn’t apply to every single occurrence, but in general it’s true. That’s a compelling reason.

When do you do research? Periodically and episodically, depending on your circumstances.

“There are some specific times when you want to do market research. Usually they’re tied to a key event – whether you’re going to merge your business with another, you’re going to start a new service, a new set of customers have come to you with an idea or a need that you recognize. There are other times that are not particularly motivated when you want to do a little bit of research, too.

“Periodically, a lot of companies do customer satisfaction surveys. A lot of times they’ll do internal employee surveys. There are also periodic times when you want to do some market research: you’re considering a new partnership, you’re considering opening a new channel.

You may want to know some things about potential partners, what are your competitors up to? Those are all times to start using market research, which can be your most powerful tool. But market research is also a part of your planning process.”

What’s in a plan? A series of steps in sequence from research to results.

What is a marketing action plan? “A marketing action plan is actually a process,” according to Jeryl Rauluk, Discovery Strategies’ co-founder. “During this process, you’re getting to know your target market -- what they need, what they want, how they want things packaged, how they want things sold to them. And you’re taking all this information about your target market so you can deliver that product or service to that market better than any other company. That’s what a marketing plan is all about.”

Ms. Rauluk outlined a series of eight sequential steps in formulating a marketing plan. Each step builds on the ones before it.

	Step One is a business review. Examine your company and benchmark it against the competition. Start by examining your company’s strengths and weaknesses in relation to your competitive market; what gives you an edge in that market? What has an adverse effect on your competitive position? Inventory your core competencies – the things that are difficult for competitors to imitate. For instance, a strong brand in the market for your company, high brand recognition, good rapport with client, competency in engineering. Look at strengths and weaknesses of your products in relationship to alternative products that competitors offer. Look at the last 3 to 5 years of sales trends, look at customer behavior trends, at competitive pricing, at distribution channels, at companies that directly compete with, and other companies positioned to move into their space sometime soon. How you can segment your target market. Does it makes sense to segment the market by SIC code? By geographic region? By other means?
	Step Two is identifying problems and opportunities. Problems need to be addressed. Opportunities need to be exploited to build market share, to build revenue. Maybe your pricing is out of line with the market and no longer competitive. Determine whether there is a dominant player in your space. There may be a lot of players, but no dominant player. That could present an opportunity for the company to capture mind share and hopefully market share.
	Step Three is setting sales objectives for the coming year. Look at your company’s current market share now, where you want it to be a year from now, and quantify that. Or look at your sales trends for the past 3-5 years, see what’s going on in each one of those lines, and extrapolate that out to see if it leads to the market share you want. Another approach is to examine your expense structure and see how much you would have to spend to capture the sales goal you want and decide whether it makes good business sense.
	Step Four is setting target markets and marketing objectives. Divide your customer base into different groups based on product usage, geographic location, and business sector. Set sales objectives for each segment. Then identify the marketing objective for each target market segment – the customer behavior needed to make your sales objective attainable. Your marketing objectives for each target market segment will measure the success of your plan. So the more detailed you get, the easier it will be to measure your plan’s success later.
	Step five is to plan a strategy that will accomplish the marketing objectives you’ve set. Positioning your company concerns the image you want your target market to have when they hear your company name in relation to the competition. A positioning statement can differentiate you from the competition. Your position helps guide your message to the market because you need to send a consistent message. Set communication goals to create awareness, create a positive attitude, and prompt action by your target customers.
	Step six is choosing a tactical mix of tools to support your marketing strategy. It might be to use an advertising message that delivers a positioning statement. It might include advertising in trade journals or trade shows. Repackaging and repositioning a mature product can sometimes give it renewed life and expand its customer base. Your tactical mix can be extremely powerful, and it should be chosen wisely.
	Step Seven is budgeting and schedule. Once you pick the tactical tools, find out what they’re going to cost and when you’re going to use them so you can coordinate and avoid sending mixed messages. Make sure your company is ready to fund this endeavor. If not, you end up wasting your money. For example, ads can be costly and repetition is critical. If you can’t afford to be in a publication for long enough to create recognition, don’t spend your money – it’s not worth it. Develop a payback analysis to make sure that what you’re spending and what you anticipate receiving in line with the financials of the company.
	Step eight is execution. Stay committed to the plan. A plan is a working document, it’s going to change. But when marketing decisions come up, you need to go back and ask whether this supports your market strategy. Is it going to help achieve a target segment objective? Always refer back to your market plan.
	Step nine is evaluating the results. Did you meet your marketing objectives or not? If your objective was new customer acquisition, you need to go back and measure that and evaluate it and then make adjustments to your plan.

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The ongoing cycle. A marketing action plan is iterative; it is never really done.
This whole process is six months or a year’s worth of work, depending on the resources available internally. This kind of planning should involve the whole company. It requires buy-in from every department. Everyone needs to understand the position of the company and to deliver that message consistently.

Once you have the marketing plan, get the rest of the organization involved; link its goals to the operating plan so that everybody knows what their responsibility is. That operating plan gets evaluated on an annual basis, or whatever your sales cycle is, and links back to the business plan. The business plan then gets updated and starts the cycle over again. So it really is a continuing process. So when is a marketing action plan outdated? Probably the day it’s written.

Why outsource? For the same reasons you might outsource other services.

“Why should you think about having some of this marketing process outsourced to somebody else?” Robert Conway asked. “You may want to outsource pieces of it like the research, parts of the plan, help with financials, and things like that. Or you may want to have a majority of it outsourced and just have your key staff work with the people who are going to help you.

“Ninety-five percent of the parts that go into a car are made by other companies. Ford, GM, Chrysler, and the other large automobile manufacturers around the world just do the assembly. So you have to ask yourself: is your company the best resource to put onto a task like this? Do you have the resources available? Do they have the right experience? Do they have the time? Can they research other markets? Is this the most productive thing for you to be having somebody do? Do you want to build an organization that can do this kind of planning for you or do you want to buy that? Maybe you want to have someone do it for you the first time and then take over from there and every five years have someone revisit it heavily. Is this going to be a repeatable need? Or is this a unique case – some type of event that doesn’t come up very often.”

Picking a supplier. Do your homework, follow your gut.

“Any marketing company you work with ought to be able to connect you with more people, to become an extension of your organization. How do you choose that right company to help you in your particular situation? Are they a full-service company? Or are they more specialized? What do you need right now and long term? Do you want two or three different companies doing individual things for you? Or do you want somebody who can project manage everything for you.

“Flexibility is key. Are you going to want them to suddenly ramp up and support you when you have a big emergent need and then take things back when you don’t need them all the time? Or do you need somebody who’s going to be supporting you around the clock? Price always plays into every decision. Get two or three quotes, shop around, talk to your friends. Those are good ways of finding out who you might want to use. And being guided by your gut is a good thing when you’re dealing with a professional service like marketing.”