This presentation was given to my MBA class at Presidio Graduate School as part of an Ignite Presentation assignment, which asked me to provide an overview of what keep in mind when working with clients based on Kotler and Keller's Marketing Management text.
My topic: Kotler and Keller: Overview: What needs to be covered more for your clients? Helpful hints, based on themes from the text and what we’re learning in class, in creating your strategic marketing plans.
What’s is the company or organizational strategy? You have to know what you’re selling first.
- What problem is your EL partner trying to solve?
- How saturated is the marketplace in which they operate?
- Is the product or service differentiated enough to warrant marketing?
What tools can help inform a worthwhile strategic direction? Scan the environment.
- Presdio’s digital library
- Business and consumer trends
- Indentify potential partnerships
This would fall into the “situation analysis” portion of the marketing plan.
Helping them to see a unique opportunity in the marketplace that everyone can be excited about will help make the rest of the process go more smoothly.
Who is your target? Where do they live? What do they think about?
- Think like a consumer
- Start broad
Very few companies can experience success among a mainstream audience.
Begin looking for segments and explore different potential user types that may be receptive to your clients product or service
Create user profiles to help put a face on your partners’ end-users
Create multiple positioning statements based on the research you’ve conducted.
This will force you to explore multiple angles that may resonate more or less with different target audiences.
At this point you may feel you have a lot of knowledge and understanding, both about your EL partner’s business and your target audience.
But this over-confidence can be dangerous. It’s very important to conduct market research to check your thinking and be open to making changes.
Traditional focus groups are often used as a way to better understand consumers’ emotional response to a new product or service.
Often times creative exercises are leveraged to assist consumers in digging deeper into the “why” behind their opinions.
And it’s a great way to identify any “red flags” or serious problems that need addressing.
More likely the form this will take in working with your EL partners is informal face-to-face interviews.
- Door to door is less common now
- Intercepting people at busy locations is better, but people are rushed and questions must be limited
Or you can gather a group of friends in a more casual setting and take them through a process similar to what you’d do in a formal focus group.
These lovely men were photographed during some in-home research I did while working at Yahoo!
Revisions should be made to your marketing strategy based on qualitative feedback.
Conduct quantitative research to validate the direction you’re heading.
This is most often now conducted online, ideally among a nationally representative sample of consumers.
At this stage you should have a good sense of the optimal product (or service), price, place and promotion.
But figuring out a communications strategy – where you reach them with marketing messages – can be overwhelming.
Everyone is fighting for consumer attention these days. They’re bombarded with messages wherever they look.
It’s important for you to work with your EL partners to identify how they can best connect with their audience and create value.
There are many channels to choose from.
Take into consideration their financial and human capital constraints.
Also consider what is each vehicle best at? For example, TV is useful as an awareness vehicle while the internet allows for relationship creation.
Your objective for using each channel should be unique, but the combined effort should support the holistic strategy.
This image summarizes media trends in 2010.
Keep your EL partners up to date on social media and mobile advertising trends to ensure they’re approach is unique.
Help them to identify their brand advocates – the people that already love what they’re doing and are spreading positive word of mouth.
Then provide them with suggested incentives to increase engagement and make their band advocates work harder for them.
This can include tactics to turn brand haters into loyalists, as Southwest and others have done through Twitter.
Help them to identify and establish metrics they can use to monitor their success moving forward.
Sales is a backwards looking data point – it’s important that they be more proactive in their approach.
When we hand our strategic marketing plan over to our EL partners we may be done, but they are not.
It’s important to communicate the importance of continuing to keep their finger on the pulse of their business.
The marketplace is more dynamic than ever – they must be dynamic too, if they want long-term success.
