Editor’s note: This article was first published in September 2013. The promotion channels it describes, such as Facebook promoted offers and ads in blogs and magazines, reflect 2013 practice, and Ira Kalb’s affiliation with USC’s business school is as stated in 2013.
One of the most common reasons businesses fail is the lack of a workable marketing plan, according to Ira Kalb, a professor at the University of Southern California’s business school and author of The DNA of Marketing. History is indeed full of great products that failed, only to become a huge success years later in the hands of another entrepreneur. The product and the market are the same; the only thing that has changed is the marketing strategy each of them applied.
It’s not the project, it’s not the idea, it’s not the money. Even with all of that, we have nothing if we don’t reach our potential customers. So what should we keep in mind when putting together a good marketing plan for our product or service?
Marketing plans have two main elements:
- Objectives.
- The strategy for reaching those objectives.
What kind of objectives?
Objectives should be measurable, challenging and achievable. Measurable goals give everyone in the company a shared target. If our objective is to reach €100,000 in sales this month, it’s easy to see at the end of the 30 days whether we got there or not, and if we didn’t, to analyse why and what we can do to get there the following month.
They should be challenging but achievable goals, so that people don’t get bored. Along the way, we’ll also motivate the people who have potential. But above all, they must be realistic, achievable goals, because otherwise we could end up disheartening the company’s staff.
(Related: The main causes of failure in business and in life in general)
To build a suitable marketing strategy, we need to stop and look at the following points:
Market research
We can’t just “fire at will” with our strategy, so we’ll need to know what our target market is, or which particular market we want to focus our marketing strategy on. (7 steps to define your target market once you have the idea)
Branding (corporate image and/or brand positioning)
Once we have the relevant information about our target market, we need to develop the brand strategy, through which we’ll work out how the customer is going to perceive our product or company. We need to build up purchase expectations and, at the same time, show what sets us apart from the competition.
The product or service
We need to adapt our product or service to the needs of that target market, and it’s vitally important that the product lives up to the expectations we’ve sold through our brand. Sometimes companies focus on making a sale at any cost. That’s short-term gain and long-term pain. “Don’t make a sale, make a customer.” That’s the business philosophy of companies that think long term.
If the product or service doesn’t deliver what the customer expected, the buyer will be disappointed, and that disappointment will spread by word of mouth like a pyramid. Good reviews of a product take the stairs; bad ones take the elevator.
Price
Once the product is defined, the cost of sales can be worked out and pricing strategies can be designed. This is perhaps where many business owners get lost. Clearly, if we have a distinctive product, better than our competitors’, exclusive to a certain type of customer and of high quality, we’ll always be able to charge a higher price, and so our profit margin will be higher too.
Our distribution and sales system
Broadly speaking, a product can be sold in two ways today:
- A salesperson sells to the customer in person (face to face)
- Online (with no interaction)
Within “face to face” there are different systems: we can supply a wholesaler who then sells to retailers, we can set up a franchise system and supply our franchisees, we can sell directly to the end customer ourselves, we can create a referral system, and so on.
You always have to look for a way to reach as many end customers as possible at the lowest cost and with as little involvement on our part as possible. Today, clearly, we should sell through as many sales channels as we can, and never rule out online sales, since the internet is our cheapest salesperson.
And finally: promoting our product or service
This may be the most important part of our strategy, and today the opportunities to make our product known are endless. They range from the most traditional, such as a salesperson pounding the pavement to find customers, to all the zero-cost or low-cost marketing strategies, not forgetting:
- Discount coupon strategies.
- Promoted offers on Facebook.
- Advertising with Google AdSense or similar services.
- Ads in blogs or magazines specialising in your company’s field.
- Local press, local radio, regional television, and so on.
Your business can fail for hundreds of reasons, but at least try to make sure it doesn’t fail because the public never even got to know your product.
Further reading
- 10 reasons small businesses fail early on
- The 10 commandments for failing in business, guaranteed
- 4 examples of companies that had to adapt by transforming their business
- The 2 most brilliant business strategies in corporate history
Source: adapted, with changes, from Ira Kalb’s The DNA of Marketing.
Featured image: EEJCC, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
