Where are you and where do you want to go?
Developing a Marketing Plan means having a plan to get to a particular destination. Any plan needs a good understanding of where you are now in order to identify how you are going to get to that destination. For car travel, you determine if you will take the freeway or side roads. For marketing, you do the same thing.
The most critical detail when developing a marketing plan, and the most overlooked is
WHERE DO YOU MAKE MONEY!
You've made it to Part 4 of this series, so you also probably are among the few who even know the answer to this question.
But are you disciplined with your marketing, advertising and public relations (M.A.P. - your map to getting to your defined destination) to
focus on what makes you money?
We go back to the question of the loss leader. It is probably easy to sell the loss leader item - people readily get that they are getting a great value. But if you spend more on promoting the loss leader than you recover in cost AND if you don't have your sales team ready to make the upsell for the more costly/ more valuable to YOU item, then you have lost twice. You've lost money on the loss leader item AND you paid to advertise it.
Don't Assume
Don't assume that your sales team is prepared to make the upsell. Build it into the system.
- Put the loss leader item in the back of the store, next to a hot selling product with a good profit margin.
- Have the path folks would take to get to the loss leader defined, and make sure you have good signage in the process.
- Have high profit, smaller items available by the checkout for impulse buys.
- Test when to have sales folks approach people during the process.
The above speak specifically to a retail shop, but actually can be applied in an online or any sales process. When do you offer 'talk to a representative' while folks are searching...is there a 'time on site' or 'number of pages viewed' that determine when a redirect or floater appears?
Is it the person or the process or the product?
Do you test when your sales representatives mention different features, upsells, cross-sells to identify patterns? Some of the successes may not be person specific, but rather how far you have to get someone in the discussion before introducing something new.
Timing
And don't forget questions about timing. If you're a seasonal business (e.g., snow shovels), what are all the pieces that impact your profit margin. You may get a great price on raw materials, but does the warehousing eat into your costs? Can you run a promotion in summer to sell the shovels, get the lower cost on the raw materials, cover the extra warehousing costs by the summer promotion (which also improves cash flow) and now get a higher profit margin in your main season? If you didn't plan for the summer promotion, though, your margin would not have been as high.
Next, we'll move into more nitty gritty.
