Companies and industries are required to understand their business marketing plans.
Since the industry is switching to digital, there are lots of options that are on your plate.
However effectively using your strategies and making sure that your marketing plan is on point, you are going to do an assessment of both that includes your business as well as your marketing activities.
It doesn’t matter if you are flying solo or hiring professionals for this, doing the marketing plan assessment can help you in identifying the holes and motivating the team to work better.
What is a Marketing Plan Assessment?
Conducting a marketing plan assessment is helpful for business regardless of the scale.
The assessment helps you in evaluating your objective in detail. Also, you can get better potential about your new product, idea as well as your investment.
The comprehensive analysis includes environmental forces, entry barriers, market trends, risks, competitions, resources, opportunities, and constraints.
For business, if you are considering entering a new market, the marketing plan assessment can be helpful to take the steps that can be crucial for successful results.
It also helps in enabling your company to make use of the limited resources for the business. It includes making decisions regarding where to use the resources so it can give fruitful results.
It helps in avoiding wastage and chances like a missed opportunity.
To understand this, here is a case study of Coca -Cola marketing plan –
Coca-cola replaced its original Coke with its new coke in 1985. The idea was to challenge the sudden popularity and increasing consumers of Pepsi.
But after 79 days, The public made an outcry of registration and demand to bring back the original one.
Coca-cola had to again replace their original formula and that’s how the new coke phased out.
Well, the company did research where they spend millions of dollars. The research was two years long where they focused on different physical aspects.
But they overlooked the brand and customer loyalty with the taste.
The company failed to ask the questions that actually mattered during their research. With that, not just they gather Information that is not relevant to them but also wastes two years and a million dollars on it.
Takeaway: Coca-cola researched before the product launch. However, the important point to learn from this is to not do research just for the sake of doing it.
The assessment is important to understand that what you are doing is right and exactly what helps you.
Steps To Follow For Creating Your Market Plan Assessment
It’s important to understand if you have the right steps for creating the market plan assessment.
Market plan assessment is important however not knowing the specific goals and requirements.
To keep the process hassle-free, here are the steps that you can follow.
Step 1: Determine The Goals First
Before you contact the professionals, or you do it on your own. In both cases, you need to understand the goals of your business.
Start with considering the goals of your business and make it divided into the service, sales, and marketing goals.
You can follow with –
- Starting up the overall descriptions regarding the business as well as goals.
- Determine which are important for the relevant to your marketing and sales.
According to Forbes, setting goals and documenting as well as periodically reviewing them can help you in getting successful results up to 95%.
When you are establishing the goals, here are few points to ensure about –
- Realistic
- Attainable
- Specific
- Time- Drive
- Measurable
Step 2: Identify Whom You Are Targeting
The business needs better aim to whom they are targeting when it comes to their customers. There are different types of customers, depending on who you are targeting and understanding why your business is about them.
The questions you can start with –
- What are the problems that your products and services can help your customers?
- What are the key influencers and who are the decision-makers?
With this, you can create the persona of your buyers instead of having a general view.
Step 3: Identify The Marketing & Sales Process
The important part of marketing is to understand what are the tactics and ongoing process you are doing.
It includes the sales tactics, process, and activities to achieve the set goals and objectives for the business.
It’s important to have specific goals, depending on the categories such as –
- Closed sales
- Revenue
- Proposals
- Leads
- Customer retention rates
Include the top incentives that help achieve the goals in the next quarter and year.
Visual the activities and what your funnel looks like. Also, it depends on the industry, but still, you are going to need a few stages like –
- Brand awareness
- Conversion
- Close
Step 4: Analyze Your Marketing Results & Sales Activities
Consider your marketing results, including the KPIs or key performance indicators. Make sure that it’s related to your specific marketing and sales activities.
Take a look at support systems related to marketing and sales.
To calculate your current sales process, here are a few points to understand.
- Takes average sales revenue for generating the proposals, including your customer lifetime value.
- How many sales do you need to hit the monthly revenue targets?
- How many leaders do you need for a sales proposal?
Marketing Plan Assessment Checklist To Follow
Marketing plan assessment is a set including seven important key components. This focuses on important aspects of marketing plans which include customer segmentation, product position, price, etc.
The answers to such questions can help in understanding the market. Depending on the outcome and analyzing the market can help in finding a suitable approach to the business.
Here is the checklist that you can follow.
Get Your Customer Segmentation
Customer segmentation is a helpful step that includes grouping customers into specific groups for marketing purposes. It can be narrowed down based on their gender, demographics, interest, or purchase habits.
The process is thought of as your strategy that includes the management and understanding of grouping customers on the data basis you will use it.
With this, you can target the individual and get better sales along with tailoring their shopping experience for better customer satisfaction.
Customer segmentation offers a better approach rather than one size fits all. This gives you a better understanding of what type of customers you are aiming for and how your marketing is going to affect them.
To make sure that your marketing plan is effective, you should understand what and who is ideal for the approach.
There are different type on which the segmentation is divided –
- Geographic segmentation
- Psychographic segmentation
- Firmographic segmentation
- Behavioral segmentation
- Demographic segmentation
Analyze Your Competition
For business, it’s important to consider the competitors. It’s not just for keeping yourself updated but also to understand what your customer wants.
Analyzing the competition helps you in identifying the strategies behind your competitor’s success. Also, you can learn from their mistakes too.
For a marketing plan, analyzing your competitors gives you an insight into the market and the already established names. With an understanding of what tactics are helpful for approaching customers and what to drop.
It allows you to differentiate between what you do and what else you offer. It keeps you ahead of others and keeps your strategy impactful too.
Competitive analysis is one of the must-do actions and for all businesses. it’s important for creating the space for your brand in the market.
Marketing plan assessment can help you in understanding how your competitive research is doing so far.
When you are doing it properly, you can get answers for like –
- You can enhance the marketing process
- You can understand the market working in a better way.
- You can actually discover more, it can help you in filling the gaps.
- You can create better plans for your business.
To make sure, you are doing it properly, here are a few basic steps to keep your comprehensive competitive analysis –
- Start with understanding who your competitors are.
- Find the products, what you offer, and the competition you both have.
- Analyze their marketing strategy and sales.
- Get the results of their strategies and how it’s helping them. See the results to know better.
- Evaluate how they are helping it. And discover their content management.
- See promoting ways and their market content strategy.
- Look out for their strategy on social media and other platforms.
Takeaway: When you do the competitive analysis and understand how your services are working. Understanding the competitors to know the market, your audience, and everything including the planning to sell your products.
Revaluate The Price
Price is a crucial aspect of market planning as its assessment value that customers see and willing to pay for it.
In both cases of high and low price, your product becomes limited to certain growth only. The negative pricing can affect its sales and cash flow too.
The pricing process of any products or services is based on certain things for example –
- The variable cost
- Your profit margin
- The fixed cost
Revaluating the pricing can be an important aspect as it helps you in understanding if your pricing is suitable for the product you are selling or not.
Maybe it’s too low that you are not covering your expenses. Or maybe it’s too high that your targeted audience can’t purchase it.
Without understanding the worth of your product and market value, selling your product can be a hassle. Also, market planning can be not that effective.
Takeaway: Pricing of your product or services should be considered the factors including the sellers and buyers both.
Also implanting the price that the buyer can afford or they understand why it’s worth paying more is crucial. Giving them random numbers without showing the actual worth can make people skip your products
Review Your Promotion
The promotion helps your product to set itself apart from what others are selling in the market. With the right promotion, you can target the customer and show them what is different about your product or service.
You keep your selling on point and promote the product to have better reach to your audience. With this, you also promote the brand to the people.
Also, promotion includes lots of products together. It can be a famous one or less popular product together. With this, you give a major boost to the overall and you get more attention from the right audience.
Takeaway: Process your promotion to understand what is lacking. There are some major mistakes people do that you might be doing too.
Market plan assessment helps you in understanding what are the plot holes affecting your overall market planning.
Promotion can help you find the problems and solve them for the customers. Processing the whole plan again can help you in doing it right.
Check Your Product Positioning
Product placement is a crucial and overlooked step in the marketing plan. It’s for targeting the right audience and with the positioning, you can do it a better way.
The placing makes your products more visible to the market and the customers you are targeting.
The benefits of positioning your products are a crucial part of marketing. It includes –
- To make it more market-oriented
- To cope with the changes
- To meet the purchase expectations
- To promote better loyalty & goodwill
- To better attention from customers
- To get attention from different types of customers
Takeaway: There are tons of products and brands, not understanding how to position your business can make your product invisible and lost in-crowd.
With this, you can effectively and efficiently target the audience. Check the position of your products and check-in your marketing plan assessment to keep it the way you want.
Understand The Packaging or Marketing Collaterals
Packaging includes the choice of material as well as a form of the exterior of the product. With this, you need graphics, colors, fonts, etc for the product wrapping process. It can be a box, bottle, container, etc.
To understand the packaging better, you need to ask three important questions.
- What is your product?
- Who is buying your product?
- How will they buy it?
For the marketing plan, the packaging and labels are helpful or encouraging the buyers to do the purchase.
With the assessment, you can follow the basic information and make sure that your packaging is on point. Also, better packaging reduces security risks as well.
To check that, here are elements you need on your packaging –
- Category or type of product
- Size, details, weight, etc
- Emotional end promise
- Benefit in functions
- Reasons to purchase
- Variant
- Brand
The next one comes is marketing collateral. It’s a choice of media that you use for marketing or promoting your products or services. It also includes print material to digital content.
Anything that you are using for serving the purpose of better communication with customers is included in marketing collateral.
With the help of this, you can easily communicate along with highlighting the key benefits. It appeals to the visual and creates better impressions.
For marketing plan assessment, you are going to need the marketing collateral targeted at the right customer. Also, check what type of media is working for you to communicate better.
Takeaway: As for marketing plan assessment, packaging and marketing collateral are external elements for better marketing.
For having an effective marketing plan that can increase sales, it’s important to have the packaging that can attract people as well as a medium that can communicate well with the customers.
Tips To Do Marketing Plan Assessment For The Business
To understand the market plan assessment, there are a few important tips that you can do the market assessment better.
Use Your Internet
There are lots of market analysis sections depending on the raw data. The internet is important and you can start with it. Demographic data can help you from getting the understanding, also it’s available from the U.S census bureau.
You can also do online market research to get more information about competitions.
Understand As Customers
The best way to understand the customer is to be the customer. Also, it’s not that hard as everyone is a customer at some point. Think like what customers would like to, see the things according to them.
It will help you in understanding what they aspect from the market.
Get The Help Of Visual Aids
Use charts and graphs to get information about the market. The information is highly number-driven including the market analysis. It also adds statistics and metrics.
It will be better to grasp information and data.
Factors To Consider While Making Your Next Marketing Plan
There are some important marketing plan factors that you need to consider while doing the assessment checklist.
These factors can help you in keeping your marketing plan for the SWOT analysis. To keep your marketing in the right way, so you can focus on planning it effectively.
Your Product
At this point, you have the whole business plan is written about your product as well as services. But for the market, you must have the written difference about how your product is not similar to others
Pro Tip: Get the information about why your product is over the competition. Also, use the reasons to market your product to attract customers.
The Place
The area where you are selling your product is important in your marketing plan. Consider the pros and cons of the online outlets or traditional approach i.e. Bricks & Mortars
Make sure you are offering a reason to customers and why they should visit. Also, do the proper research regarding where your audience might be located in better quantity to target easily.
Promotion & Price
Consider doing an advertising strategy or doing a PR strategy. Take initiatives to offer more and relevant to your audience. The idea of doing promotion is how your audience will know about what you are selling and on what basis they want to try it.
Well, price research is crucial. Do not lower your price if it’s not suitable for what you are selling. But do add the worth value offers to make it sensible and better than competitive results.
Convenience & Communication
Todays’ buyers look for convenience. They get options online or they can visit stores. But for both, you are going to work for. The customer does not visit stores if they are not having something specific to offer or promotions.
Or just because online shopping is more convenient, it does mean you can sell anything to them either.
Doing promotion is one way when it comes to conversation. Feedback gives you reviews about how your customers are receiving your products and services.
Frequently Asked Questions ( FAQs)
Why does a company need a market plan assessment?
Market plan assessments are a set of questions that are based on seven key components for planning better market planning. It includes product positioning, promotions, competition analysis, etc.
How can you do the market assessment?
The market assessment depends on determining your market study. Also point out the target customers, gathering data, and comparing to the competitions. These are the basics to do the analysis and keep your market plan on point.
How does market plan assessment help?
The market plan assessment helps in understanding what will work for you or whatnot. There are lots of things that include market planning, with the assessment you can understand the whole process again.
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