Welcome to the second post in our weekly industrial marketing series to help you prepare an actionable, effective, and measurable marketing plan for 2023–24.
If you’ve just entered the room and missed last week, you can catch up here on the Week 1 article.
For those who got through last week’s tasks, you’ll have gathered whatever information you had available on your:
All this information will help you to conclude the diagnosis part of your planning process.
Remember this model?
Since you already worked on your business goals last week, in this post we’ll be taking a look at the other three items under “Diagnosis”. But first...
We don’t want you to get stuck on diagnosis. You might think you have a lot of questions that need answering and research to conduct, but with such a short time before the new financial year, we are focusing on a rapid diagnosis method. As well as speeding up your marketing plan for 1 July, it will help you determine what research you might do in the future, when you have the time and resources. Don’t forget to put that into your plan.
As we go through the following questions and resources, you should gradually build a unified document that fully diagnoses your current situation.
Your key insights will come from a number of sources.
If you are market oriented, the most important insights you’ll uncover are from customers. You don’t have to put your business on hold while you run (and pay for) massive research projects, but you can do simple interviews of a few key customers, or talk to your sales or service teams. This can help separate fact from fiction, and real customer needs from internal assumptions. You’ll need to answer questions like:
Talking to real customers helps deepen your understanding of them, so you can develop what an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) for each group of similar customers. Here are a couple of tools to help you do that:
You'll also want to have a clear idea of you product and service offering, how each is performing, how they align to customer needs, what new product development is planned or needed. Here's some questions:
One useful way to define your product range and the benefits offered beyond the tangible, is to map them using the Augmented Product model.
It’s said that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. The key here is to analyse the performance of your previous marketing efforts, so you for each you can determine whether you should do it again:
For any marketing activity, campaign or project you ran, you should answer these kinds of questions:
Beyond campaign analysis, you could also be looking more broadly across the customer funnel and marketing channels in general:
You should also review what resources you have available to effectively deliver the marketing plan, in terms of people and software systems:
Take a look at this article on key marketing skills for different organisation types and sizes. In SMEs, often a mix of external agencies/contractors and in-house staff is an effective and practical way to execute marketing resourcing.
And whether you’re working from scraps of paper or a modern CRM, it’s worth comparing your current systems with this article on Why choose HubSpot, as it details the different marketing, sales and service tools needed across the stages of the customer lifecycle (see the below image as an example).
There are many questions to ask about your competitors and the market:
To can use the Context Map tool to map the market environment for your business.
And there are plenty of tools you can use to map your competitive positioning visually, like the Blue Ocean Strategy canvas or a classic Competitive Matrix.
The Blue Ocean Strategy Canvas
Finally we come to segmentation. This is not about your product. It’s about the reality of the market you are in. You want to build a picture of that market, divided into groups or customers with common traits, needs and buying patterns. They will be like-minded in many ways, face similar challenges, and have common behaviours.
To make segmentation easier, it usually helps to combine all your research together with different possible ways of segmentation:
Then for each segment described, you need to find (or calculate) the:
You can use a template to map all this out and represent your segmentation visually.
By experimenting with different segmentations, you’ll come to a picture that not only shows segments not being targeted, but also which segments are currently in your competitors’ sights.
This will help guide the strategic choices you will make next week.
Don’t panic. Anything you can do to progress your marketing before EOFY is a positive step.
To prepare for next week, make sure you:
This will set you up nicely for next week’s session on marketing strategy.