I Don't Need A Marketing Plan, I Just Want Results!

By John Hogg

Tags:

Marketing Planning Marketing Strategy

It is not uncommon to meet with business owners and be told that they don't need a marketing plan, they just want someone to come in and tell them what they need to do for the next 12 months.

"I don't want a Marketing Plan! I want you to tell me what I need to do over the next 12 months?!?"

Whilst there is a certain amount of irony in this expression, we're also not very good with a crystal ball.

A lot of people tell us that marketing just isn't delivering for them, yet when you ask them to conduct a quick planning process they run for cover.

Of course this is a natural response because on one hand there has probably been an army of "consultants" traipse through their doors long before you ever turned up. In addition to this business owners want results, they want you to do something that will impact on sales and add to the bottomline. Quite frankly from their position a marketing plan just doesn't add to the bottomline.

Or does it?

OK, we all know that a good plan will help you to achieve your objectives but this is reality we are dealing with here.  We're not in the classroom now. Business owners are dealing with reality day in and day out and quite often there just aren't enough hours in the day.

Is There Another Way To Build Your Marketing Plan?

So how do we make this work?

Well for a start let's not get precious. We're supposed to be the creative ones after all. Let’s try and turn this situation on its head and ask a completely different question altogether. 

This time let’s ask the following question:

"Would you like us to help grow your business?"

I would hazard a guess that the answer to this question will most probably be a bit more of an enthusiastic, ‘Yes Please!’.

So what are we going to do now to achieve this?

Well, let’s start by asking a few questions to get to know them and their business a bit better.

  • What is your business?

  • Why does the company exist?

  • What does the company actually do?

Now let’s dig a bit deeper and find out what it is they want to achieve from their business.

  • What are your company's goals and aspirations for the future?

  • Where do you want to be in 3 to 5 years?

Ok, this is great.  We've now started to get some sense of who they are and what it is they want to achieve.  Armed with this knowledge alone at least we have a chance of delivering upon whatever it is that they actually want to achieve.

At this stage it is also worthwhile looking outside the business at the environment/ market in which they operate.

  • What sorts of pressures could the company face during the course of their business?

  • Who are your competitors and what strengths or weaknesses do they have?

When you look at yourself compared to the market in this way it is always worthwhile trying to see how you can stand out from the rest.  You want to find out that very reason why someone would decide to choose you!

  • What makes you different?

But enough of this naval gazing for a second, what are we actually going to do to grow this business?  After all, that is what we said we would to do, isn’t it?

Well, the good news is that if we have started to answer these questions we will have a pretty good foundation to start with but we also need to get started, we actually need to do something…

It is time to get our finger out!

Let’s look at our products/ services:

  • Are they any good?
  • What can we focus on as a distinct advantage?
  • Do our products need to be developed further or do we even need new products to add to our line?
  • What is our proposition for customers and clients?
  • Perhaps we need to define our pricing strategy or even how and where we sell our products to our customers.

Moving on from this and more than likely you will want to promote your products/ services ‘somewhere’.

  • Where are your customers?
  • How will you get your products to them?
  • In fact, who are these prospective customers after all?
  • What types of people are they?
  • Do they have any specific characteristics or demographics?

The more we know about them the better...

  • What are their behaviours?
  • What do they like / not like?
  • Have they any particular aspirations or desires?

The more questions you can think of the better.  All you need to do is try and get inside the heads of your customers and perhaps group them into common groupings (segments) based on similar behaviours or characteristics.

Once we know the types of customers we want to get our specific products and services in front of we now need to decide on how we are going to actually do this and get our message in front of them.

  • Will it be an offline message, say a newspaper article or a radio ad
  • Will it be online, say a social media post, a blog or even a Facebook advertisement?
  • Or does it actually need to take a bit of everything across multiples mediums?
  • Taking this forward we also need to ask what this message is going to be?
  • What do we want our customers to hear and think about us when we eventually get our message in front of them?

Excellent!

This is great we now have an idea of what it is that we have to do in order to achieve what this business set out to achieve in the first place.

  • But how much will this all cost and when are we actually going to do each of these initiatives?

Well there you go Mr/ Mrs Disgruntled...

I know you have no faith in spending money and taking time  to build a marketing plan, but using a simple process like the one above and asking a few questions like these we will have a much better chance of success. Putting together a plan in this way should't be feared, it should be embraced due to the impact it is going to have on your business.

If you want us to help grow your business we will do a much better job if we understand the context it exists within.

A Marketing Plan isn't a scientific, 1,000 page long document pontificating about all sorts of marketing theory. Well it doesn't have to be in our eyes.

To be used and become a 'living' document in your business helping you to achieve the growth you want to, it needs to be real and it needs to be honest.

OK, it may take a short period of time to do it but it will repay itself in spades.

Why wouldn't you want to know where your company is today; what it is you want to achieve; what it is you are going to do to achieve it; and then the mechanisms you are going to use to deliver it on time, in budget and be able to measure your success?

At the end of the day this is simply a bog standard, four-step planning model:

  1. where are you now?
  2. where do you want to be?
  3. what are you going to do to get there?
  4. how will you know you’ve arrived?

But if these questions help to frame what it is you are going to do to grow your business, isn’t it worth it? 

In today’s world a lot of people are guilty of just running in head first and getting stuck in. There’s a lot to be said for a can-do attitude and getting things done but if we don’t actually know what it is we need to be doing, or where it is we are going then our chances of achieving something meaningful is actually quite small.

I meet a lot of business owners who have continual problems with their marketing.  They say it just doesn’t work.  They say they've tried but it was useless.  The staff are useless.  The agencies are useless.  It just doesn’t work.

I see this from two points of view:

  1. They want help with their marketing but at the same time, no matter how quick and painless it may be, they just don’t want to spend the time trying to develop a plan of attack. Unfortunately this is a case of someone who wants help but who won't give it the time it needs to get that help? Nothing will ever change...

  2. On the other hand I can also see this from the business owners point of view. They have a particular need i.e. grow their business, yet they don’t have a plan and then let’s assume a variety of agencies start to turn up at their door one by one: Let’s say the PR agency calls first. Well they’re going to sell a PR campaign today. Next it’s the turn of the Ad agency as they have a great Ad campaign all ready to go. The Brand agency arrives wanting to sell a new brand identity and lastly the Web/ Digital Agency rocks up wanting to sell them a new website. Just because you have something to sell doesn’t mean it is right for your customer to buy it!If your customer doesn’t know where it is they need to go then it will be pretty difficult to achieve this no matter which means you use.  Personally, I am a great believer that you need to invest time in your clients to make sure you understand them and you know what it is they need to achieve. With this new found strategic perspective you can now design a programme of activity for your clients which will ‘fit your their needs’ perfectly.

So there you go, if you can't take the time to plan your marketing in advance it is going to be very difficult to achieve the right results.  Don't expect a stranger to turn up and without any direction know exactly what it is you need to do to start selling your wares like snow of a ditch.

If only it worked like that!

If you’d like to find out more about our approach to Client issues and delivering the right result for their business, why not drop me a line.

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John Hogg Enlighten IC

John Hogg

John is managing director of Enlighten IC and has been involved in legal marketing and technology marketing for over 25 years. He is passionate about how an inbound approach to marketing can help firms to drive leads and grow their business.

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