Our 7 Step Strategic Marketing Plan Review

The Strategic Marketing Group has developed our 7 Step Strategic Marketing Plan Review so we can consistently evaluate, understand, and strengthen your organization’s plan with the goal to discover how to generate more sales and revenue.

We guide you though each of these steps, collect the necessary information, research your market niche, and then develop your road map to success.

Once we know where you are, what you have, and where you want to go, we route out a trip, segment by segment, creating a complete itinerary to get you on your way to your marketing objectives.
Ready to go? Let’s pack up the bus and hit the road!

• What plan are you using now?

You do have an existing marketing plan. It may not be on paper, captured in PowerPoint slides, or in a fancy binder. It may be simply word of mouth (which is some of the most effective marketing, period) or an ad in your church bulletin or local paper. But you do have a plan.

The point is we first need to identify what you are doing today so that we can learn from it and when possible, measure its results. Why? Because, this is the starting point for your trip. Welcome aboard.

• What do you want and where do you want to go?

So, from a big picture, high level, long-term, general direction perspective – what do you want for your organization in 1, 3, 5 years?

These are not goals – that is too specific at this point. This is the general direction for your route.  For example, if you were in Dallas, do you want to go to Boston, Miami, Seattle, or San Diego? This is a general direction type discussion setting the framework for your organization’s marketing direction.

• Who do you serve?

Now that we know where you want to go, we need to determine who you are going to take along with you. Obviously, you need some clients or customers, right? So who are they? This would be called your “target market” by some, but we believe that this is too general. For marketing to be really effective, you need to know who you are selling to. For example:
Not companies who need IT services, but organizations that have $2-$15 million in revenue, house their servers on site, and do not have a full time IT staff.
-or-
Not people with money to invest, but male business executives who have at least $1 million in liquid assets to invest and are between 50 and 65 years of age, married, the kids are out of the home.

So, we need to determine precisely who will be joining us on our cross country adventure.

Wait!  Stop!   Hold everything!

There’s another question that needs to be asked here as well. Why do these prospects want to come along with us? What makes us different or better than anyone else in our market niche? Why would they choose us? Once we understand what makes us unique in the market we have a much better picture of our market strengths.

• What is working today?

Now that we know who we want on the trip and why they want to join us, we need to find out how you have attracted the customers you already have.

So, what parts of your existing plan are working right now? How effective are they and what are they costing you? Is there any way to optimize or improve the way these campaigns are working?

• What else have you done?

What other methods or campaigns have you tried in the past? How effective were they? Why did you stop using them – expense? Poor ROI? You got tired of running them?

By learning from the past we can work with you to avoid the same mistakes, correct what went wrong, or rework methods that had been successful. This knowledge is valuable, so why waste it?

• What’s missing?

So here’s what we know now:

• What your current marketing plan is from Step 1.
• Who you plan to serve from Step 3.
• What is working today from Step 4.
• What has been done in the past (successes and failures) from Step 5.
• Where you want to go from Step 2.

The next question is, from a marketing perspective, what’s missing? What is holding you back from getting to where you want to take your organization?

Do you need:

• More customers?
• Better relationships with your existing customers so you can get additional and repeat sales?
• To adjust your price points or introduce new product lines or services?

We help you uncover the missing links between where you are today and where you want your organization to be tomorrow.

• Pulling It All Together.

Now that we have all of the pieces identified, we come along side of you to pull everything together and create a route that maps out your revised marketing plan and incorporates everything we have identified. This route map to success identifies what options are available to complete the necessary steps to get you to your destination. Once the options are known, we create your trip itinerary which becomes your implementation timetable.

When The Strategic Marketing Group completes this extensive assessment you and your organization will have the road map to getting where you want to go.

Many times our clients are surprised to discover that as they implement the road map the profits from increased sales and revenue realized in the early steps actually pay for the later steps.

The next step is yours.

Don’t miss your chance to get started on your 7 Step Strategic Marketing Plan Review and get on the road to meeting your sales and revenue goals. Call us today – 765.807.8642