A strategic marketing planning process also helps with:. One caution: A strategic marketing plan focuses on your goals for your products and customers. Every manager knows to expect the best but plan for the worst. In the marketing planning process, here are some challenges you may face:. The steps of the strategic marketing process mission, situation analysis, marketing plan, marketing mix, and implementation and control are different than the process for a specific marketing effort.
Specific efforts may support one goal or business line, but the strategic process supports the entire mission of your organization. Target Marketing Process. Target marketing identifies the specific market segments that will help your business grow. The three main activities of target marketing are segmenting, targeting, and positioning. Organizations use this S-T-P approach to pinpoint the best prospective customers. Content marketers generate demand for a product by generating a steady flow of content that focuses on the problems and desires of potential and current customers.
Here are the five steps of the content marketing process:. The product marketing process is the pipeline from strategy to implementation for a product marketing campaign. To be successful, this process focuses on making sure the product continues to meet the needs of customers throughout the product cycle. Here are the stages of this process:. Inbound marketing draws prospective customers to your product by providing useful and quality content that entices them to find out more.
The inbound approach includes content marketing, social strategies, and search engine optimization, all tactics that bring your target audience to you. Email marketing is one of the most powerful drivers of sales for many businesses. It has an advantage over direct mail because you can track and measure your results, and it tends to be less expensive than other marketing channels. Marketing automation is about software that streamlines, automates, and measures marketing processes and tasks.
It reduces the amount of manual effort and tracking that marketing campaigns require. Automation makes your marketing, and your company, more efficient, effective, and profitable. Whether you have a small company or a large organization, you can gain a competitive edge by automating your ability to target your audience and track and measure your results.
The best marketing teams know the importance of effective campaign management, consistent creative operations, and powerful event logistics -- and Smartsheet helps you deliver on all three so you can be more effective and achieve more. The Smartsheet platform makes it easy to plan, capture, manage, and report on work from anywhere, helping your team be more effective and get more done.
Report on key metrics and get real-time visibility into work as it happens with roll-up reports, dashboards, and automated workflows built to keep your team connected and informed. Try Smartsheet for free, today. Get a Free Smartsheet Demo. In This Article. Simple, powerful marketing campaign management in Smartsheet. Questions to ask when evaluating the mission: Why is your company in business? What is the purpose of your business?
What is the strategic influence for your business? What is the desired public perception for your business?
How does your mission statement clarify your strategy? How does your mission statement unify your team? Step Two: Situation Analysis The second step of the strategic marketing process is to evaluate internal and external factors that affect your business and market. Here are some questions that can help you identify internal and external factors: Strengths: What do you do well?
What are the factors that you control? What is your competitive advantage? How are your products and services superior to others in the marketplace? Weakness: Where are you underperforming? What is limiting your ability to succeed? Where do limited resources affect your success?
Opportunities: What are untapped markets? Where is the potential for new business? Can you take advantage of any market trends? To assess your competition, you need to ask the following questions:. You can find answers to the following questions by contacting your local Chamber of Commerce, your state vital statistics department or the U.
Census Bureau www. Census data is available for every state, county, city, ZIP code, neighborhood, etc. Is the population expected to grow or shrink? What are the demographic characteristics of the population in your area? Who are your potential patients? Are their wants and needs being met elsewhere in the community? If not, how can your practice meet those needs?
Identify a target audience. Keep in mind that your target audience should not only be the patients you want to attract but also the people who can influence and provide exposure to that segment of the population. For example, if you wish to treat patients with arthritis, you might want to get involved in the local and regional Arthritis Foundation and explore senior organizations in the community.
If you want to treat young athletes, you might consider giving talks on sports safety and first-aid tips to coaches and athletes at the local high schools, colleges and YMCAs.
The key to marketing lies in targeting the audience that your practice can serve better than your competition — and communicating this to that group. Determine a budget. Before you can decide what specific marketing strategies you want to implement to achieve your goals, you need to examine your financial information and come up with a marketing budget.
Marketing budgets vary by the type of market a practice is in, the age of a practice and whether the practice has marketed before. However, in our experience, practices in open markets have spent 3 percent to 5 percent of their annual gross incomes on marketing. If your practice is new, in a highly competitive market or has never been marketed before, or if you intend to roll out an ambitious new program or service, you can expect to spend 10 percent or more of your annual gross income the first year you implement the plan.
Some of the initial marketing activities can be expensive. On the other hand, some of the best marketing activities cost practically nothing. Big or small, these are all worthwhile investments that will give the community a positive image of your practice. Develop marketing strategies. With your budget in place, you can begin to define specific marketing strategies that will address your goals, reach your target audience and build your patient base. Remember to focus your strategies on the elements of your practice that can be used to create a special value in the minds of patients and referral sources.
Each strategy should be related to a specific goal and should be made up of numerous actions. For example, one strategy related to the goal of increasing patient satisfaction might be to make the office more patient friendly. The actions required for that strategy might include the following:. Develop a patient self-scheduling system within the practice Web site to eliminate the need to telephone the office for an appointment;.
Conduct post-encounter telephone interviews with new patients within three days of their appointments. Develop an implementation schedule. An implementation schedule is a time-line that shows which marketing actions will be done when and by whom. The schedule should also include the cost of each marketing action and how it fits into the budget estimates for the month period. When creating the schedule, carefully consider how the activities will affect the current practice operations and whether there are sufficient resources such as staff, time and money to accomplish the necessary tasks.
In some cases, it may be necessary to whittle down the list or postpone some activities. In other cases, it might be best to go ahead with full implementation of your plan.
Defining your market potential will identify the overall market size, the total revenue opportunity for your product or service, and your target customer. A baseline estimate is better than no estimate at all. This section should validate your target market can deliver sustained and profitable business growth, making your marketing efforts viable and realistic.
Not sure how to define your market potential and target customer? Check out these 13 questions here. Document how you differentiate your products and services, and what you believe is your competitive edge. Know your business; your strengths, weakness, threats and opportunities SWOT analysis and know the same of your competitors.
Knowing your ultimate goal is to become truly market leading. Not sure how to map out your CVP? Read 5 steps to building a compelling value proposition. Market and price positioning is a highly complex area: get it right and sales and profit flow; get it wrong one way and sales flow, but profit is poor; the other way and sales are poor, but profit per transaction is good.
Any market and price positioning should be based on informed, decision making aligned to your long-term strategic goals. Consider your market position; differentiated, undifferentiated, low end or high-end and identify your white space opportunity.
Detail how you set or adjust your prices including any promotional pricing you may implement discounts, product bundling etc. Your distribution channel — your route to market — should make it easy for your customers to buy what you are offering, in the way they want to buy it, at the time they want to and are ready to consume it. Include your current channels to market and your plans or aspirations to consider new ones i. Naturally this section should be the largest section in your strategic marketing plan.
If your business plan extends over three years, as is typical of many small businesses, then your marketing plan should, too. Medium-term goals in your business plan, and its companion marketing plan, are those required to reach your long-term goals. You might consider developing a medium-term marketing plan around a meaningful goal along the way. For example, suppose your top competitor sells , more bags of potato chips than you do, and your research tells you that you could realistically achieve this goal in year two, then the appropriate time for your medium-term marketing plan might be two years.
If, however, your long-term business plan calls for you to achieve a 10 percent profit in year three and a 5 percent profit after 18 months, then your medium-term marketing plan would extend for 18 months. Other factors affecting the length of your marketing plan include the stability of your industry and company, as well as the economy. In volatile industries and economies, planning over more than two years is extremely difficult.
In these situations, your medium-term plan only may be for a one-year interval.
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