We find many companies that are expending resources trying to sell to the wrong markets against competitors who are way stronger than they are in the markets they are trying to sell into and lack of fundamental focus in this area as a result of not understanding their strategic marketing imperatives. We see companies that are selling the wrong products with the wrong people to the wrong customers and with strategic marketing planning work could fundamentally alter the odds and gain a much more solid footing in the markets where they have the best opportunity to compete to win. So strategic marking planning has a place in every company. Often times, business owners look at strategic marketing plans as documents that are put on the shelf and never actually put into practice but, if strategic marketing planning is done as an exercise and periodically updated as a part of your companys business planning process, youll have a much better chance of accelerating your companys growth, winning in sales, and improving your revenue and profitability. Lets talk about strategic marketing planning and why its so important to companies. Many companies lack a strategic marketing plan that becomes a guiding source for the focus of their business. A lot of business owners view strategic planning, in general, to be a real boring exercise, but without sound strategic planning a company may be expending resources to try to sell that it wouldnt have to with a more focused strategy. Strategic marketing planning has a number of different benefits including being a rallying point for all of your internal employees, for understanding and being on the same page regarding the focus of your business, understanding your market in a lot more detail than your competitors, understanding who your competition is, what their strengths and weaknesses are and how to compete with them and develop competitive strategies. Strategic marking planning also allows a company to define its fundamental focus in terms of target markets, target segments, customers and actual profiling of potential target clients that helps your sales force to be more effective when it comes to selling your products or services. Finally, strategic marketing planning is really the foundation for a successful sales acceleration program. Strategic marketing planning starts by defining which target markets you company is after and fundamentally requires research into how your markets are segmented and a breakdown of those segments, in terms of priorities for your company. If youre like most businesses, you cant afford to go after every market segment in your market. What you need to do is you need to focus on those segments that have the best opportunities for your company and align best with your companys core strengths and competencies and what makes you different. This is the key to building a sustainable competitive advantage. Many companies engage in whats called the red ocean strategy, whereby they focus on selling into markets that are highly competitive, where the water is a color of crimson as a result of all the blood that is being spilled amongst all the competitors fighting for the same valuable customers. Smart companies, on the other hand, focus on what we call the blue ocean strategy, which is finding stretches of water where the competition is less fierce and where the company has a better opportunity to win sales and increase its sales win ratio in relationship to a total number of prospects and deals that its looking at. This is one of the examples of how strategic marketing planning exercises can help a company define those markets that are less competitive and where the company can be more unique. Strategic marketing planning also focuses, in addition to targeting and segmentation, focuses on target customers and profiling those customers in terms of size, industry focus, what their pain is, what needs they have and how those needs align with the companys fundamental product offerings and strengths. So, a lot of time needs to be spent in the strategic marketing process really determining what the profiling is of the target customers. In addition, strategic marketing should focus on who the target buyers are inside those prospects in terms of title, in terms of job function, in terms of decision making authority, and seek to understand exactly who those different constituents are, who the champions are, who the decision makers are inside that audience. This works in terms of understanding that target audience inside that market ultimately leads to the companys ability to develop positioning statements and messaging. It really focuses on the pain and the needs of those specific buyers inside their target companies. Another important element of strategic marketing planning is doing competitive analysis. If your company doesnt have a strong understanding of what the competitive landscape is in its core markets, how can you possibly hope to win? Good competitive analysis means categorizing each of your competitors in your core segments, understanding their strengths and weaknesses and opportunities and threats from those competitors and developing a competitive matrix that lines up those competitors in a table and does a comparison analysis between your company and those competitors that are important, according to product, service, offerings, price, product features, service capabilities, geographic reach, all of those criteria you would use in order to see how well you stack up against the competition. If you do good competitive analysis, youll have a much stronger understanding of the details of who your competitors are, how to compete against them and that becomes the foundation for developing a good competitive strategy that you can roll out though your company. It has vast implications for the products that you produce, the kinds of services that you provide, and also, probably most important, it becomes a foundation for training your sales people on how to compete against the competition to win and build sustainable competitive advantage. Every company needs to define its unique selling proposition and build a sustainable competitive advantage and the foundation for this is knowing you competition, understanding where theyre strong, where youre strong against them and how to win. The next element of a strategic marketing plan is determining your companys overall position, what is your companys unique selling proposition, what are the aspects of your business that make you truly unique that you want your buyers and prospects to know first and foremost about your company? Most companies that are trying to rise above the competitive clutter in their market place today do a great job of articulating what their unique selling proposition is and what their value proposition is relative to their competitors. By whittling it down to a couple of words that can be easily created, a vision in the mind of their potential buyers in which is easily understandable positioning, is the process of defining how your company is going to position itself in its core market amongst its prospects and its buyers. The next step in the strategic marketing planning process, of course, is developing solid messaging - specific words that are crafted in order to provide an exact image of your companys capabilities and its unique selling proposition among its target audience of buyers and prospects. Messaging is an artful exercise that requires careful attention to the use of words in order to maximize the impact of the marketing message on your customers. Its not easy to get your messaging right. A lot of companies make mistakes by using the same sort of ho-hum words that all of their competitors are using and thereby lock themselves into a position of unsustainable noncompetitive disadvantage. So, developing solid messaging really resonates with your potential buyers and prospects in your target market is extremely important. Messaging, if done right, should be developed into a messaging guide as a part of your strategic marketing plan. And this messaging guide becomes a foundation for outputs into your sales materials, presentation, collateral, website, contents, data sheets, all of the proposals that you write for customers they should all be an output from your core messaging guide that is done in your strategic marketing planning process. So messaging guide really becomes the output. Also, to all of your marketing communication programs, whether it be advertising, direct mail and other forms of promotion to generate leads. So why is it important to do strategic marketing planning? Strategic marketing planning is the foundation for developing a successful, well focused sales program. Many companies miss this and go about deploying their sales resources without fundamentally having a sales strategy. A sales strategy comes from your strategic marking plan. Whats your company doing to develop its marketing strategy? How well do you understand your target customers, your markets, which segments youre competitive in? What is your unique selling proposition, have you done a thorough analysis of who your competition is and how you plan to win? Does your sales team understand all of these elements as it relates to executing their daily job successfully? If your company needs help with strategic marketing, our company can help. |
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