SPOTLIGHT BUSINESS Developing Your Marketing Plan Noel Flynn explains how to create a plan that will help grow your business effectively. you focused when trying to grow your business successfully. If you doubt the power of marketing, ask yourself how com- T panies could actually sell Pet Rocks, Cabbage Patch Dolls, new jeans with lots of holes/tears and innumerable variations of snake oil. All of these had a clearly defined target and market- ing foundation up front! With so much focus these days on social media, too many busi- ness managers and owners dive right into using various internet tools without first developing a solid strategic marketing founda- tion. Guess what? If your marketing foundation is shaky, then what you build on it will likely be unstable or less than optimum. The Difference Between Marketing and Sales Before we go too far, we probably should clear up some confusion caused by interchanging two terms: marketing and sales. Smaller companies tend to only have a sales department, and this adds to the confusion. So, what’s the difference? Although there can be some overlap, without getting technical or quoting from textbooks, following are some distinctions. Marketing is all the stuff that should be decided — and ide- ally developed — before you turn your salesperson loose. This includes tools to find prospects and help them find you, and also some tools that your salesperson will use to make the sale. Examples include advertising, promotions, websites, brochures, features and benefits tables, competitive advantages and other presentation materials oſten referred to as collateral. Certainly, this does not suggest that marketing is an upfront one-and- done event. Think of marketing as the foundation upon which you will build your business. We’ll drill down into this later. Perhaps a more interesting way to think of marketing is using 16 KEYNOTES MARCH 2020 his is the tenth article in the “Tools for Managing Your Business” series. Here, we’ll discuss and review the foundational elements of a marketing plan. Then we’ll look at how de- veloping each of these up front can help keep an ice hockey analogy where marketing is equivalent to setting up the shot by passing the puck to the shooter. It’s called an assist, and it can be almost as important as the actual shot itself. Sales includes activities where we apply the marketing foun- dational stuff to get the order and, ideally, develop the relation- ship with the customer. In our ice hockey analogy, sales would be equivalent to receiving the puck from marketing and then taking the shot and scoring the goal. Hint: When abbreviating these two terms, it’s highly recommended to list them in the order of marketing and then sales (M&S), rather than S&M. Just to be clear and get your mind back on track, there usually aren’t 50 shades, nor any mention of a dominatrix, in either traditional sales or marketing (although I can’t be sure what behavior occurs at your company!). Marketing 101 Although it’s been a very long time since I first studied mar- keting at the university level, the fundamentals have not really changed. Let’s take a quick refresher of what’s important and worth remembering in the real world. What probably matters most is the idea of the “marketing mix” that is the conceptual basis for all marketing. Back in the day, we learned that this marketing mix was essentially a series of strategic decisions that we need to make for our business. Unlike many of the things we learn in school, this actually turns out to be logical and useful for growing our business. The Four Ps (attributed to E. Jerome McCarthy, teacher and marketer) If we cut through all of the crap, an easy way to think about this is to look at the four marketing mix elements (in more recent years, a few more have been added), and they all begin with the letter “P.” Here’s an abbreviated version: Product: whatever we are selling, whether actual hard product and/or service WWW.ALOA.ORG
