Marketing Planning

Carry out your market research, including competitor activity.

Market information should include anything you need to know in order to formulate strategy and make business decisions. Information is available in the form of statistical economic and demographic data from libraries, research companies and professional associations (the Institute of Directors is excellent if you are a member). This is called secondary research and will require some interpretation or manipulation for your own purposes. Additionally you can carry out your own research through customer feed-back, surveys, questionnaires and focus groups (obtaining indicators to wider views through discussion among a few representative people in a controlled situation). This is called primary research, and is tailored to your precise needs. It requires less manipulation, but all types of research need careful analysis. Be careful when extrapolating or projecting. If the starting point is inaccurate the resulting analysis will not be reliable. The main elements you typically need to understand and quantify are:


customer profile and mix
product mix
demographic issues and trends
future regulatory and legal effects
prices and values, and customer perceptions in these areas
competitor activities
competitor strengths and weaknesses
customer service perceptions, priorities and needs
Primary research is recommended for local and niche services. Keep the subjects simple and the range narrow. Formulate questions that give clear yes or no indicators (ie avoid three and five options in multi-choices) always understand how you will analyse and measure the data produced. Try to convert data to numerical format and manipulate on a spreadsheet. Use focus groups for more detailed work. Be wary of using market research organisations as this can become extremely expensive. If you do the most important thing to do is get the brief right.

Establish your corporate aims.

Business strategy is partly dictated by what makes good business sense, and partly by the subjective, personal wishes of the owners. There is no point in developing and implementing a magnificent business growth plan if the owners wish the business to maintain its current scale.

State your business objectives – short, medium and long term.

Mindful of the trading environment (external factors) and the corporate aims (internal factors), there should be stated the business’s objectives. What is the business aiming to do over the next one, three and five years? These objectives must be quantified and prioritised wherever possible.

Define your ‘Mission Statement’.

All the best businesses have a ‘mission statement’. It announces clearly and succinctly to your staff, shareholders and customers what you are in business to do. Your mission statement may build upon a general ‘service charter’ relevant to your industry. The act of producing and announcing the Mission Statement is an excellent process for focusing attention on the business’s priorities, and particularly the emphasis on customer service. If your business is modern and good you will be able also to reference your organisational ‘Philosophy’ and set of organisational ‘Values’, both of which are really helpful in providing fundamental referencing or ‘anchoring’ points, by which to clarify aspects of what the organisation or business unit aims to do, what its purpose is, and how the organisation behaves and conducts itself.

Define your ‘Product/Service Offer(s)’.

You must define clearly what you are providing to your customers in terms of individual products, or more appropriately, services. You should have one for each main area of business activity, or sector that you serve. Under normal circumstances competitive advantage is increased the more you can offer things your competitors cannot. Develop your service offer to emphasise your strengths, which should normally relate to your business objectives, in turn being influenced by corporate aims and market research. The tricky bit is translating your view of these services into an offer that means something to your customer. The definition of your service offer must make sense to your customer in terms that are advantageous and beneficial to the customer, not what is technically good, or scientifically sound. Think about what your service, and the manner by which you deliver it, means to your customer. In the selling profession, this perspective is referred to as translating features into benefits. The easiest way to translate a feature into a benefit is to add the prompt ‘which means that…’. For example, if a strong feature of a business is that it has 24-hour opening , this feature would translate into something like:

“We’re open 24 hours (feature) which means that you can get what you need when you need it – day or night.”

Clearly this offers a significant benefit over competitors who only open 9 – 5.

Your service-offer should be an encapsulation of what you do best, that you want to do more of to meet your business objectives, stated in terms that will make your customers think ‘yes, that means something to me, and my life will be better if I have it.’

Write business plan – include costs, resources and ‘sales’ targets.

Your business plan, which deals with all aspects of the resource and management of the business, will include many decisions and factors fed in from the marketing process. It will state sales and profitability targets by activity. There may also be references to image and reputation, and to public relations. All of these issues require some investment and effort if they are to result in a desired effect, particularly any relating to increasing numbers of customers and revenue growth. You would normally describe and provide financial justification for the means of achieving these things, together with customer satisfaction improvement, in a marketing plan.

Quantify what you need from the market.

Before attending to the detail of how to achieve your marketing aims you need to quantify clearly what they are. How many new customers? Limit of customer losses? Sales values from each sector? Profit margins per service, product, sector? Percentage increase in total sales revenues? Market share required? Improvement in customer satisfaction? Reduction in customer complaints? Response times? Communication times?

Write your marketing plan.

Your marketing plan is actually a statement, supported by relevant financial data, of how you are going to develop your business.

“What you are going to sell to whom, when and how you are going to sell it, and how much you will sell it for.”

In most types of businesses it is also essential that you include measurable aims concerning customer service and satisfaction.

The marketing plan will have costs that relate to a marketing budget in the business plan. The marketing plan will also have revenue and gross margin/profitability targets that relate to the turnover and profitability in the business plan. The marketing plan will also detail quite specifically those activities, suppliers and staff issues critical to achieving the marketing aims.

Being able to refer to aspects of organisational Philosophy and Values is very helpful in formulating the detail of a marketing plan.

marketing is more than selling and advertising
Marketing provides the means by which the organisation or business projects itself to its audience, and also how it behaves and interacts in its market. It is essential therefore that the organisation’s philosophy and values are referenced and reinforced by every aspect of marketing. In practical terms here are some of the areas and implications:

There are staffing and training implications especially in selling and marketing, because people are such a crucial aspect.

Your people are unlikely to have all the skills they need to help you implement a marketing plan. You may not have all the people that you need so you have to consider justifying and obtaining extra. Customer service is acutely sensitive to staffing and training. Are all your people aware of what your aims are? Do they know what their responsibilities are? How will you measure their performance? Many of these issues feed back into the business plan under human resources and training, where budgets need to be available to support the investment in these areas. People are the most important part of your organisation, and the success of your marketing activity will stand or fall dependent on how committed and capable your people are in performing their responsibilities. Invest in your people’s development, and ensure that they understand and agree with where the organisation is aiming to go. If they do not, then you might want to reconsider where you are going.

Create a Customer Service Charter.

You should formulate a detailed Customer Service Charter, extending both your mission statement and your service offer, so as to inform staff and customers what your standards are. These standards can cover quite detailed aspects of your service, such as how many times the telephone will be permitted to ring until the caller is gets an answer. Other issues might include for example: How many days between receipt and response for written correspondence. These expectations must also be developed into agreed standards of performance for certain customers or customer groups – often called Service Level Agreements (SLA’s). Increasingly, customers are interested to know more about the organisations’ values and philosophy, which until recent times never featured in customer service charters or customer decision-making criteria. They do now.

Establish a complaints procedure and timescales for each stage.

This charter sets customer expectations, so be sure you can meet them. Customers get disappointed particularly when their expectations are not met, and when so many standards can be set at arbitrary levels, think of each one as a promise that you should keep.

Remember an important rule about customer service: It’s not so much the failure to meet standards that causes major dissatisfaction among customers – everyone can make a mistake – the most upset is due to not being told in advance, not receiving any apology, not getting any explanation why, and not hearing what’s going to be done to put things right.

Establish systems to measure customer service and staff performance.

These standards need to be absolutely measurable. You must keep measuring your performance against them, and preferably publishing the results, internally and externally.

Customer complaints handling is a key element.

Measuring customer complaints is crucial because they are a service provider’s barometer. You need to have a scheme which encourages, not discourages, customers to complain. Some surveys have found that nine out of ten people do not complain to the provider when they feel dissatisfied. But every one of them will tell at least a couple of their friends or relations. It is imperative that you capture these complaints in order to:

Put at ease and give explanation or reassurance to the person complaining.
Reduce the chances of them complaining to someone else.
Monitor exactly how many dissatisfied customers you have and what the causes are, and that’s even more important if you’re failing to deliver your mission statement or service offer!
Take appropriate corrective action to prevent a recurrence.
Most organisations now have complaints ‘escalation’ procedures, whereby very dissatisfied customers can be handled by more senior staff. This principle needs extending as far as possible, especially to ensure that strategic intelligent complaints and constructive feedback (all immensely useful) are handled by someone in the organisation who has suitable strategic appreciation and authority to recognise and act appropriately.

Many organisations waste their most useful complaints and feedback by killing it dead at the initial customer service outer wall. Complaints and feedback are gold-dust. Encourage it and use it wisely.

There are implications for ICT, premises, and reporting systems.

Also relating to your business plan are the issues of Information and Communications Technology – are your computers and communications systems capable of giving you the information and analysis you need? What type of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is most appropriate for your needs?

Premises – Have you got too little or too much space? Is it all being used to its best effect? Is the reception area designed well? What do your customers and personal callers think of the decor and the layout? If car-parking is difficult do you make any effort to warn people coming for the first time? Who needs to be based in an office and who is best based at home? These are complex issues which need addressing – don’t just assume that things are okay as they are.

Reporting systems – It is said that if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it, and where finance and business performance is concerned that’s certainly true. If there’s an aspect of your service or performance that is important can you measure it?

How do you report on it and interpret the results? Who needs to know? Who needs to capture the data? When you get a new customer (for an ongoing transaction) do you ask how they heard of you and why they chose to give you a try?

Communications and ongoing customer feedback are essential.

Having an open dialogue with your customers is vital. There’s a double benefit to your business in ensuring this happens:

You nip problems in the bud and stay aware of how you’re performing.
Your customers feel better about the service you provide as a result of the communications, or from the fact that the channel is open even if they don’t use it – it’s human nature.
Try to devise a standard feedback form. It can double as a promotional tool as well if it’s made available on a wider scale. The form can carry details of your mission statement, service offer and your customer service charter.