|
|
|
For Marketing
Plans, Process Is
Half the Value
|
Business New Haven
4/20/1998
By: Deborah Ketai
|
Do you know who your best prospects are, how to reach them, and why they would buy from you rather than from your competitors? Are you getting maximum bang for your marketing buck?
If not, better work on your marketing plan.
A strong plan acts as a decision-making filter, ensuring that the organization's philosophy, strategy and actions work together. For Wendy Pinckney of IKON Office Solutions, marketing plans are part of the strategic planning process.
The director of marketing for IKON's Northeast district, Pinckney believes no company can develop a successful marketing action plan without clear overall goals and objectives.
Kenneth Laird, an associate professor of marketing and former chair of the marketing department at Southern Connecticut State University, sees a marketing plan as both a snapshot of the present and a roadmap to the future. A good marketing plan, Laird says, translates the company's vision and mission into both long-term strategy and short-term tactics.
How short is short-term? As the new marketing director for Stamford-based ConnMart, an online marketing company, Glenn Archer of West Haven has been working on separate but complementary 30-, 60- and 90-day action plans for both traditional and online marketing efforts. When he worked for cable companies, Archer says, “We pretty much did an annual marketing plan, but with this business, and I think with a lot of businesses these days, it has to be more often.”
While plans must reflect current market conditions, length is no indication of quality. Lesley Mills, president of Griswold Special Care, notes, “You can have a good marketing plan a page long and you can have a bad one that's 50 pages.”
Mills, a career entrepreneur who previously owned both a computer systems business serving the health-care industry and a 25-room Victorian inn in Spring Lake, N.J., says marketing plans must “define what is unique about what you're offering.”
In outlining her plan for Griswold, she noticed a marketing opportunity - a sizable but underserved population. Many outpatients don't require nursing care but do need paid help to live independently. These are motivated consumers - their desire to stay in their own homes is matched by an equally strong fear of falling or being stricken when they are alone at night. Moreover, few home care agencies offer homemaking services, since Medicare does not cover them.
To differentiate the New Haven-based home care company from its competition, Mills' plan created an overnight companion service that is affordable and attractive to the consumer and profitable to Griswold.
Archer doesn't worry as much as Mills, Pinckney or Laird about analyzing the competition, partly because conditions change so rapidly in the cybermarket. He views the main functions of an online marketing plan as “making sure your ship is in order and that you get the [company] name out.”
In contrast, when he worked in the cable industry, Archer says, “the biggest challenge was public relations and trying to develop a sales-type culture in what many people perceive as a monopoly.
Industry specifics aside, Laird suggests that putting together a strategic marketing plan gives business owners and executives a much-needed reality check. “They have to align their strengths with the opportunities,” says Laird, “and they have to take an honest look at what they really do best.”
Bottom line? If you can't see what's different and better about your company, chances are neither will the market.
|
Go FirstGo PreviousGo
NextGo LastGo
to Index
|
|
