Planning
Marketing your business is an essential part in gaining customers First stage of market planning involves understanding what will constitute a successful marketing campaign. We will work with you to help define those elements and come up with the best approach to achieve them. With the initial planning phase done, we will continually review effectiveness in campaigns, market share, customer base and demographic. We understand with any business, things evolve and with continual planning we come up with a strategy to help you stay on target.
1. Business Objectives
Business objectives are defined with the core business product/service in mind. Understanding what type of milestone that a business wants to hit in a specified amount of time is important in setting the stage. For example, you may want your business to double your revenue in a year time frame.
These goals relate to the business as a whole and will be important in the entire process of planning and execution.
2. Marketing Priorities
Once the business objectives are established, we will help you to decide where and how O4S can make an impact. In this section of planning,we will work with key members from your business to outline which efforts to prioritize and which it cannot support.
As an extension of your own business, we will act as your marketing team. Our direction, pace and priorities must be in tune with your budget and timeline.
3. Marketing Goals
Marketing goals are an expansion of marketing priorities that quantifiably define what marketing will do to support the greater business objectives. Goal Metrics, that should connect to business targets, will fall into four categories: Impact, Output, Activity and Readiness. Impact is the effect on business goals, output is the result of actions, activity is the number of actions taken, and readiness is how prepared the team is to perform.
4. Marketing Strategy
Marketing strategy is the approach and continued efforts O4S team will take to achieve its goals. The strategy revolves around how our team is planning to hit these goals, while keeping marketing priorities in mind and remaining aligned to the business objectives.
Strategy is an important part of the marketing planning process that often gets overlooked by businesses who are eager to take action. However, actions without strategy creates an atmosphere where resources are all working independently, segmented from each other and the greater business objectives.
5. Milestones
Milestones refers to the specific efforts our team will take to execute on strategy. However, it cannot simply be a list of tactics, it must provide details on how each execution will impact the greater business objectives and provide a timeline.
Additionally, we will review marketing efforts from the past that may no longer benefit the new strategy so in this section of planning, we will work with you to decide which actions to stop doing, which actions to expand on, and which new actions it should add to the plan.
6. Dependencies and Risks
Dependencies and risks are a part of every marketing plan. However, outlining potential risks from the start allows us to better plan and adapt to changes or shortcomings that could happen throughout the campaign term. In every marketing planning strategy, dependencies and risks must be taken into account.
Obviously, marketing actions depend on the budget available to execute, so budget tends to be the biggest dependency, but there are many other risks and dependencies that need to be acknowledged within this section of planning and we will help you through it all.