Part 1 of Marketing Planning For 2021: Strategy Before Tactics!
Hey-
I’m thinking about the best way to talk about recovery with folks and market their businesses effectively heading into 2021. And, I’m still trying to figure out how to stick things into a story, but I do have 5 ideas that may be useful.
Let’s see how this goes.
1. Start with the diagnosis:
By this I mean that we need to start by figuring out what it is we are exactly attempting to fix or achieve.
We need to start by diagnosing where we are, what we are dealing with, and what we are hoping to achieve.
2. Do some research:
I’ve been doing some planning for a virtual talk I’m giving on Thursday for the fall National Sports Forum on segmenting, targeting, and positioning.
One of the keys here is that you have to do some research to be able to get things pulled together.
You combine research with the total love of data right now and getting something useful to folks can feel pretty challenging.
But what I’ve realized is that you can do a lot of research pretty easily and much more cheaply than you might have imagined in the past.
For our intents, you want to start out talking with your customers or your prospects and find out how they are making decisions, what they are looking, and where your brand stands in their decision making process.
This doesn’t need to be complex, but start there.
Then you can move onto quantitative research and some primary and secondary research.
3. Segment up the market:
Think of a pizza.
The market is the whole pizza.
Then you slice up the market.
Each slice is a segment of your market.
They will be different sizes because the segmentation should be done based on the actions that folks take.
How do you segment your market?
You calculate the size.
You get a rough estimate of the total value of the segment.
Then you figure out your percentage of the segment.
Simple.
If anyone wants to see a sample one I did, send me a note and I’ll email you a photo.
4. Target!
Not the store, but pick a destination.
If segmenting is the pizza and the slices, targeting is picking the slice of pizza you want.
My son is 10, he goes for a big one with lots of pepperoni on it.
That’s a good way to think about targeting in business.
You want to pick a big target that has a lot of potential, that may be easy for you to enter, that maybe doesn’t have the level of competition you’d be afraid of.
How many do you pick?
Depends on your segmenting and I simplified it above. But if you have 5-8 segments. Look at the numbers and the resources you have available.
If you try to target everyone, you are targeting no one.
Depending on the circumstances you are dealing with, one may be enough. I’d never say more than 3 though. You just tend to lose focus and impact after that.
5. Position yourself against the competition:
In my experience, you can’t be everything to everyone.
This is why positioning matters.
You need to position yourself according to the people you want to attract or the businesses you are competing against.
In the famous book by Jack Trout and Al Ries, they talk about positioning as owning a word in your target customer’s head.
In the world of marketing, you might call those brand codes.
But what do you want people to think about when they think about your brand?
I became very direct about things a long time ago. I didn't pick it, but it became one of the things that folks recognized about me.
Sometimes the position you’ve taken comes out without your intention, but it pays to position yourself against something.
As I’ve been writing this, I realize that this is the first part of a two parter that I will get to next week where I cover how to put together your plan for the tactical aspects of the coming year.
But these first 5 steps are all about developing a strategy to gain market share and to attack certain segments.
That’s a good place to start when thinking about 2021.
Dave
P.S.: 2 books for you to check out this week that will help with all of this…
Positioning by Jack Trout and Al Ries
Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt