Developing a marketing plan

An Digital Marketing strategy should not be created in isolation to an offline strategy. Instead, marketers need to take a holistic view of all business objectives and marketing opportunities. Offline and online activities should complement each other, both having the potential to reach different audiences in different ways. However, the Internet is exceptionally useful as a research and information tool in the strategy process.

Step 1: Know Yourself and Know Your Market

The starting point for any business and marketing strategy is to know who you are. “You” refers to the organisation as a whole (although, of course, a little bit of self discovery is always advised). While this can, and should, be re-addressed periodically, start by looking at what the business problems are right now, so that a strategy can be developed that solves these problems.

• What is the nature of the organisation now?
• Who are the customers and what are their needs? How can the organisation fulfil the needs of the customer?
• What is the social context that the organisation operates in? 

Step 2: Strategic Analysis

With a solid understanding of where the organisation is right now, further analysis systematically evaluates the organisations environmental and social context, objectives and strategies so as to identify weaknesses and opportunities. 

Porter’s five forces analysis

Porter’s Five Forces Analysis is useful in understanding the attractiveness of the market in which an organisation is transacting. However, this framework for analysis was developed before the Internet, which has disrupted the markets in which we operate.

Production and distribution costs in many industries have been drastically lowered; the barriers to entry and costs of switching are reduced. This means that there are more competitors in the market as the barriers to entry for new organisations is reduced, and that cost is less likely to inhibit customers from switching to a competing product as there are less likely to be high costs associated with doing so. Perhaps most importantly, the bargaining power of end users is increased as they have greater access to information when making a purchase decision.

Often, the Internet migrates competition primarily to price (Porter, 2001). This means that organisations seek to attract and retain customers solely through offering services and goods at a lower price, though this is not necessarily the best strategy for companies to follow. Strategic differentiation comes from the value that a company can provide to a consumer.

Competitors

When analysing competitors, it is not only product and price that lead the discovery process. While there may be obvious competitors in the same industry, an organization needs to consider what (or who) else may be vying for consumers’ attention and valuable search engine traffic.

In identifying competitors, analyse the needs of your customers, and determine how else customers might fulfil those needs. Products and services are not only competing for customers’ money: they are fundamentally competing for customers’ attention.

Considering the customised Converse shoes: the customer needs are not likely to be that they have bare feet. Instead, the shoes are fulfilling a customer’s need for individuality and self-expression. NikeID is an obvious competitor, but so is a service like Face Your Manga (www.faceyourmanga.com) that allows web users to create custom Manga avatars to use online.

Step 3: Set Marketing Objectives

Marketing objectives are the desired outcomes of the marketing plan. What are the specific goals that will indicate the success of the marketing strategy?

These should be unique to an organisation, and are based around the outcomes that will make money for the organisation. This is a strategy, so the focus is on long-term success. Establish milestones that will indicate that the strategy is on the path to success.

Step 4: Generate Strategies and Tactics for Achieving Objectives

It’s time to put into practice the tactics covered in this textbook. Based on your analysis of your organisation and its objectives, consider strategies and tactics that will help you to meet these objectives.

For example, an objective could be the acquisition of new customers. A tactic could be display advertising on content websites that reflect your target market.

If customer retention is the objective, an email newsletter strategy can help to build relationships with an existing interested database of prospects.

Step 5: Evaluate Strategies

After generating strategies, they need to be evaluated against the needs and resources of your organisation. At this stage, it can be useful to follow Humphrey’s SWOT analysis for a full analysis of the strategies generated.

For each strategy, a SWOT analysis reveals the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats afforded by a strategy (and of course can be used to evaluate the plan in its entirety).

SWOT analysis will reveal the feasibility and the attractiveness of the strategies generated.

The needs of the organisation include: 

• Long-term goals
• Short-term objectives
• ROI 

The resources of the organisation include: 

• In house talent and staff
• Budget
• Contracted agencies 

Step 6: Implement

You know what you want, and you’ve made a plan for how to get it. Now do it.

Step 7: Track, Analyse, Optimise

Digital Marketing’s chief advantage over offline marketing? It uses hyperlinks to spread messages. This means that Digital Marketing can be tracked, the data can be analysed and this can then feed back into the planning to optimise the marketing strategy.

The Internet allows you to track each tactic on its own, and then intelligent analysis should allow you to consider how these tactics work together.