Category: Marketing Tips

Being new to the world of marketing can be daunting, especially if you don’t know where to begin. As a rule of thumb, you’ll never want to skip over a marketing plan, which will allow investors to get a better grasp of how their commitment to your business will generate a positive return.

Similarly, if you’re selling your business, having a marketing plan and strategy already set up for your successor is an excellent selling point. Even if you aren’t seeking external support, having a marketing plan software in place can help you get the ball rolling as quickly as possible.

What is a Marketing Plan?

A marketing strategy isn’t just about building content or spending on ads that lands your business quality leads and results in an attractive number of conversions. You’re going to want to know how to get there in the first place.

An effective marketing strategy consists of:

• How you intend for your business to be perceived
• Who your target audience is and how to best approach them
• What your route to market is and how your offerings are segmented
• What your core mission and vision is and how this can enhance your marketing efforts
• What your marketing activity intends to deliver

However, before execution of a marketing strategy comes a marketing plan. Approach a market plan tactically. Treat it similarly to the step that comes before crafting for your first prototype. With one in place, there is less room for error and more room to grow.

Why is Marketing Plan Important?

How you plan the strategic direction of your business can have a direct impact on the actual results that you reap. A marketing plan is what holds everything together, allowing you to keep an eye on whether the right activities are taking place at the right time in front of the right people and using the right platforms.

If your dozens of attempts at various marketing strategies aren’t giving you a better idea of what is and isn’t working, chances are you’re lacking a solid marketing plan. Such is also the case if the activities you’re implementing are interfering more with your business operations rather than making them more efficient.

The formula for a thriving business is having your business strategy, marketing strategy, and marketing plan functioning totally in sync. The more in tune you are with your business goals, the more efficiently you can perform daily tasks that make a positive impact on the bigger business picture.

For a breakdown of why a marketing plan is so crucial for your business, read on.

Focus

A blueprint requires a clear school of thought, which means a marketing plan will give you the opportunity to thoroughly determine what types of activities can direct your eventual strategy.

Especially for entrepreneurs, it can be easy to become distracted by a new opportunity. If you’re making any tactical changes to your strategy, you’ll want to make sure these can be properly implemented in the first place. Flexibility has its perks but a lack of focus can often prevent you from seeing certain opportunities through to the end.

With a marketing plan, you can always keep track of whether these new and existing activities are aligning with the direction your business is strategically following.

Plan and manage resources effectively

A lack of budget and marketing resources will usually indicate that your business isn’t entirely sure of what it needs or should be doing in the first place. Implementing a marketing plan and strategy from the very beginning allows you to set aside the correct amount for your marketing budget.

It will also help you determine the level of resources you’ll need to deliver the strategy to completion. Remember, resources don’t entirely depend on your internal manpower. You can easily outsource specialists in web design and social media or even incorporate a marketing plan tool. This is especially helpful when you aren’t currently employing anyone with a specialization in marketing.

Another important resource a marketing plan can help you manage is time. With a clear plan of action in place, there’s less room to procrastinate or take shortcuts that can potentially harm your marketing output.

Transparency

Ultimately, the end goal of your marketing strategy is to generate a positive ROI. After all, if the investment you’re making on marketing efforts can barely break even with the profits you’re incurring, you probably aren’t doing it right. With a marketing plan, you can work on creating measurable goals that can be tracked and recorded over time.

If, for example, you’re launching an SEO campaign focused on the website content, how much website traffic and leads in your pipeline you’re earning can dictate the success of this action. The metrics you’ll be tracking will depend on your goals. However, the same principle applies across the board.

Data begets total transparency and can help you make more informed decisions regarding your overarching marketing strategy. It can also identify metrics that are underperforming and potential flaws that exist in your current system.

Consistency

When you find yourself in desperate need of sales, it can be all too easy to engage in sporadic marketing. Though a quick new wave of marketing activity is sometimes successful in pooling new clients, you often won’t have accounted for a dedicated resource and might suddenly have to halt your marketing efforts altogether. Spontaneity can be exciting and, sometimes, pay off, but isn’t always sustainable.

A lack of a marketing plan can cause an erratic pipeline of sales opportunities due to the unhealthy development of stop-start habits. Allocating a dedicated resource to your marketing plan will allow you to market your business consistently and efficiently, making it easier to keep track of monthly sales predictions. It’ll also guarantee a constant amount of sales flowing through your business funnel.

It provides clarity

At its very foundation, the key to a successful business is a team that knows what it’s doing. A clear marketing plan will outline growth targets, overall business goals, and how team members can contribute to the success of your ultimate strategy.

Not to mention, clarity allows employees to keep better track of their responsibilities, increases productivity, and enhances performance. The better your staff can manage themselves and obtain a clear, visual representation of the tasks they’ve already achieved, the more they’ll be motivated to perform their responsibilities well.

Conclusion

A marketing plan can prove itself helpful throughout any stage of your business but is especially effective when incorporated from the get-go. It helps direct your strategy and makes your marketing projects more purposeful and targeted. While it’s entirely possible to forego a marketing plan and still achieve business success, it could take you much longer and put you at risk of expending unnecessary resources.

For an all in one marketing platform that can help you execute your projects to the best of your ability, sign up with us at Market Plan today! With over 10 built-in marketing apps such as kanban task delegation, a blog, and keyword planner, and projections, all your marketing goals become that much more achievable.

Using Big Data

Big data and real-time data analytics are among the biggest trends in business today. Campaign projection software, resource allocation tracking systems, and other similar programs give a company valuable inputs about customers and employees. Getting those insights in real-time will help them respond better to concerns.

Using big data opens various opportunities for a company. Maximize revenue, learn how to take care of personnel better, and improve the customer journey, all using big data. Analytics can also help a company strategize better and protect itself from financial, reputational, or technological losses.

As helpful as they may be, insights like these come with a cost. The most significant barrier for many businesses is that the infrastructure a company needs for a fully-realized data analytics system is expensive. In this article, we delve into the reasons why your company should consider real-time data analytics despite this.

It mitigates pain points or major errors in the workflow

Real-time data analytics provides near-instantaneous insight, allowing companies to spot workflow problems quickly. This leads to a faster turnaround for solutions. It also results in a workforce with a growth mindset.

Having ready access to data prevents issues from becoming causes for downtime or complete operational breakdown. The company can preserve its revenue-earning capacity and keep its reputation intact.

It helps companies note new strategies competitors use.

Data obtained real-time can also help businesses keep tabs on the competition. A company can stay ahead by receiving notifications when their rivals deploy new strategies like raising or lowering prices or switching to different office hours.

It can also use campaign planning tools to know in advance how their product might fare when pitted against one from another company. Strategizing data use lets a business constantly evolve while keeping itself attuned to how the industry is shifting.

It helps companies manage resources better.

Smarter Resource Management

Finding the right people for a project is a challenge for most organizations. Before the advent of data-based decision making, managers allocated resources manually. They also partly relied on historical information about people’s capacities and the amount of money needed for specific projects, which isn’t the most scientific way of making decisions.

Manual resource allocation was a time-consuming process; businesses waited until the end of the month for reports on how the company spent resources. At this point, there could not be any interventions made apart from adjusting the order for next months’ supplies, or reshuffling personnel to better roles.

With real-time analytics, though, a company can have a better handle on their resources. For example, they can see at once which resources are idle and which ones are operating at full capacity. Seeing this allows them to make the necessary changes as they are needed and before the situation becomes irreparable.

It makes it easier to detect fraud

Simpler Crisis Management

Successful businesses must contend with fraudulent operators and criminals in their industry. These individuals might attack from all fronts, even from within the company. Real-time data analytics helps businesses track suspicious movements. Systems can flag fraud, theft, insider trading, and other dubious activities for observation.

A financial institution, for instance, could be alerted by an analytics program about large amounts of money deposited from a political hotspot. This deposit could be a red flag for money laundering. Tools like these help prevent a company from becoming an unwitting accomplice or a victim of a crime.

It helps a company improve its service

Real-time data analytics can flag issues that crop up when customers use a company’s product or service. This allows a company to respond quickly to prevent these concerns from becoming more extensive and less easily managed.

The benefits are clear, especially today when social media could easily exacerbate a problem that could be solved easily behind closed doors or with a few well-placed calls regarding customer service.

It keeps a company in the black.

Get Reliable Results

Professional services organizations generally have slim margins. With real-time analytics, a company can leverage information to improve revenue. They can optimize realized hourly bill rates and billable utilization, or the hours billed divided by available hours.

If you can see in real-time a project’s billable hours, you will know if the billing is lower than the projections. You can intervene before the problem makes a negative impact on the overall profit margin.

Companies need to make these adjustments as the incidents occur so they can control the situation. If they wait until the end of a project, they would have lost the window within which they can reap insights about the amount of work employees are doing. Real-time analytics offer more visibility into billing.

It ensures more reliable forecasting

Real Forecasting

Service professionals can be more confident in their forecasting and run their business with more certainty with the help of real-time analytics. Forecasts used to be somewhat inaccurate in the past. For instance, when a project is in the planning stage, managers have to manually check calendars to identify which resources would be available within the given duration.

In contrast, real-time analytics does away with time-consuming spreadsheets. With campaign planning software, a manager can instantly see project backlogs, services projects that are still in the pipeline, projects invoiced, and projects for which clients have paid.

They also have access to revenue and analyze it at various levels. You can see how much money is coming into the company through multiple lenses like customer type, project type, and even region where the project launched.

It helps match supply with demand

With real-time visibility into a pipeline, a manager is always aware of the resources at their disposal. They can quickly gauge how much of the product or service clients want at any given time and figure out where they can source from within the company to fulfil the demand.

Analytics tells you a lot about your resource pool. In the past, it was not possible to have this kind of instantaneous view into a company’s resources, and this is valuable to companies that rely on moving large volumes of inventory or meeting multiple clients’ requests at the same time.

It helps control the value leakage

Free services and discounts are a part of any company’s strategy. A software company, for example, could offer discounted services to sell product licenses. Companies implement this type of promotion strategically so that the company does not negatively impact the market for service organizations.

Real-time analytics gives organizations a clearer picture of the real amount of discounting for a project. It allows businesses to define the giveaway parameters. You don’t necessarily want to give your entire service away for free; analytics will help your company contain your products’ value.

Tools like these will let you see how much value has leaked out of the bucket. It can also give your business insights into whether this is an acceptable amount of leakage or if you need to make interventions and execute changes.

Conclusion

Real-time data analytics are valuable for any organization. Whether service- or product-oriented, analytics tools can help you see the big picture and work on solutions that accurately respond to the situations on the ground. With these technologies, you will surely reap the long-term benefits—provided, of course, that you know what to do with the data and act promptly.

Help your team maximize your company’s real-time data with MarketPlan. Our campaign analytics software enables marketing teams to create sound and reliable projections while keeping you connected on one platform. Get in touch with us today to learn more!

One of the most critical aspects of your business plan is the sales forecast. As a tool that helps you predict future revenue, your sales forecast ties into the other elements of your business plan, including the market analysis, marketing plan, and pricing sections. The objective of a sales forecast is to build and justify your sales estimate for the upcoming year.

Traditionally, sales managers are responsible for preparing sales forecasts and ensuring their teams have a goal to reach during each business period. But how do you start? Why is sales forecasting as important as it is? Keep reading to find out.

The Importance of Sales Forecasting

Sales forecasting is a supplement to your finances as it will allow you to create essential financial statements, such as a balance sheet, cash flow statement, and more.

Besides being a crucial tool for your business finances, a sales forecast also allows you to set clear goals for your business. It will open you to things that you want to achieve and push you to reflect upon your goals.

During the process of developing a sales forecast, you’ll have to consider what results you want to see over the next month or even the next year. Goals are essential for your company as they will help give it direction. A sales forecast will help you set KPIs and make sure you hit the numbers you need.

Aside from giving your team direction, sales forecasts act as a guide to the amount of money you should spend for the sake of your business. Use your sales forecast to help you plan your marketing, operations, and administration budgets.

No business owner wants to run out of funds in the middle of operations, and a clear forecast makes it easier to create income-generating strategies that will sustain your business.

How To Create a Sales Forecast

Building a sales forecast doesn’t have to be complicated. Sure, it’s going to take time because of all the details involved, but the results are worth it. You don’t need a huge number of data points, but that doesn’t mean you should come up with ballpark figures. At the end of the day, it’s a process that will lay the foundation for a realistic business strategy.

Here are some tips to help you create a complete and detailed sales forecast.

1. Map Your Process

Begin by mapping the sales process. Doing so will help you manage and document your sales better, which will enforce consistency and accountability. Your sales process also includes your pipeline stages. In this case, you need to define each stage according to the behavior of your prospects.

2. Refer to Past Data

One of the easiest ways to forecast sale is to refer to your past data. Projecting sales based on past performance will help you set a decent baseline. It will present you with reliable data that will help you predict your future sales. There’s no need to go back to data from day one—instead, you can look back at the past two years to get enough data. Keep in mind that you will need to adjust the numbers for inflation and estimate prices for your latest sales forecast.

3. Make a Unit Sales Projection

To come up with your Unit Sales Projection (USP), you need to start by forecasting unit sales every month. This is often thought to be limited to the sales of physical goods, but a lot of service-based businesses also create unit sales projections because it’s a lot easier to break things down for reliable forecasting.

If you’re creating a unit sales projection using past data, you can use the corresponding period from the past to go forward.

4. Predict Prices

It’s natural to feel that you need to adjust your future prices for inflation based on your past data. To do this, project the prices as you did with you unit sales—monthly going forward one year.

5. Calculate Your Average Unit Costs

The Cost Per Unit (CPU) refers to the amount paid for one unit. For physical products, the CPU is determined y the set price by the supplier. It doesn’t include salaries or marketing expenses. If you’re calculating for a service, the CPU is the cost of delivering said service.

6. Use Visuals

Make your sales forecast easier to understand and read with visuals. One of the most highly recommended visuals for sales forecasting is charts. A chart will make your sales easy to see and is a great way to highlight irrationalities in terms of your sales growth. Regardless of the visual aid you use, these tools will make your forecast more presentable to investors and lenders as well as your team.

7. Calculate Everything

When you finally have your unit sales projections, projected prices, and average unit costs, it’s time to put everything together. Start by multiplying the USP by the projected prices to get your sales. Do the same with the USP and the average unit costs to find the costs of your sales. After that, subtract the costs of sales from your sales. There you have it!

8. Prepare For Ongoing Adjustment

Keep in mind your forecasts will never be wholly accurate. While they play crucial roles, they are ultimately predictions that will require some adjustments along the way. You’ll also have to remember that there are a lot of factors that can affect your sales, which is why when you finished with your sales forecast, it’s time to focus on tracking your actual numbers and revise your projections accordingly.

9. Use a Tool

Keep all your data for your sales forecast in one place by using a tool. Find a free marketing tool like MarketPlan that will allow you to automate all your data and make creating a sales forecast for your business so much easier.

Conclusion

These are some of the tips you need to keep in mind when you’re creating a sales forecast for your business. Indeed, it could be a tedious process but there is a wealth of information that you can pick up along the way to help you form more effective strategies for better results.

A sales forecast will lay the foundation for your business plan and help you make better financial decisions. Make your sales forecast more convenient with the help of marketing tools as they will help you plan, executive, project, and optimize your marketing strategy from one place.

We’re a free marketing tool that offers more than ten marketing mini-apps to help you stay on top of business forecasting and analytics. Sign up today to start planning for success!

While running a business, the experience of your consumers has to be the highest priority at all times—which is why your marketing strategies should always be in line with what they perceive as good.

After all, your brand is only as good as how your customers perceive it, thus the ongoing task of constantly improving your marketing & sales process to always give your customers a better experience.

Improving your business’ operation and marketing strategy effectively requires a tremendous amount of data to work on. While there may be numerous factors that affect a customer’s purchasing decision, a simple look into the flow of their experience can provide some insight as to how to improve.

At any point, a bird’s eye view of your brand’s overall marketing strategy must be accessible to constantly improve & fine tune it.

In order to view these properly, two frameworks could be applied: the Marketing Funnel and the Customer Journey Map. By utilizing both in the assessment of your customer’s experience, you can create an even better flow that can keep your customers or clients satisfied.

The Marketing Funnel

The marketing funnel—or a sales funnel depending on your business model and strategy used—is a framework that helps you segment and analyze each step of a potential customer’s buyer’s journey.

It starts with the basic premise that people who view your business are not immediately a customer, with each step further cementing their decision to choose your products and services.

The “funnel” analogy shows how numerous potential customers “enter” your sales process, but only a few “make it out” to the other end and actually make a purchase.

By focusing on certain aspects of your sales process, the goal is to “widen” the ending funnel to ultimately increase your overall sales.

The basic sales funnel has four major steps: Awareness, Interest, Decision, and Action—or the AIDA model. As a customer passes through each step, they create a deeper commitment towards making a purchase—which is where marketers take action to have customers go through each part of the process.

Depending on your business type and your ideal customer profile, each step in this process could become very complex and hence it becomes absolutely vital to plan each step, map it out and keep a track of it once it goes live.

The more time and effort that goes into the planning, the more seamless and effective your funnel becomes.

If you are an agency or a sales & marketing team, another important aspect that comes into effective planning is active collaboration within the team members.

More ideas and brainstorming sessions within a team would bring about new ways to improve a funnel to increase conversions, reduce the number of friction points, and to simplify it for the users.

There is little surprise that project management and team collaboration SaaS tools have gained a huge amount of traction in recent times. Companies and brands have understood the positive effects of good collaborative work rather than individual brilliance.

The Customer Journey Map

The customer journey map, on the other hand, focuses on the entire journey of a customer and their relationship with your business and brand.

Unlike the marketing funnel that focuses on getting a potential buyer to make a purchasing decision, the customer journey map focuses on obtaining the loyalty of a consumer and pushing them to become a return customer to purchase repeatedly.

The overall goal of this method is to review each step that a customer takes until they make a decision to purchase again from you.

Right after the first purchase is done, your planning and strategy starts to gain the loyalty of that customer to bring them back again for the next purchase. This phase between the first and the subsequent purchase is where your strategy has to be planned and mapped out extensively.
An introspective look to your business’ buying experience through the lens of a customer can provide you insight on certain chokepoints and weak links that could cause a consumer to not patronize you.

While you may be able to do this through a general look-through of your process, having a consistent look into the comments, feedback, reviews, and suggestions of your regular consumers can come in handy.

By taking note of the data gathered through this model, you can improve your business process, resulting in overall ease of your consumers’ experience. This will then deepen your relationship with your customers—which inevitably breeds loyalty to your brand.

Irrespective of your business model, it can be B2B or B2C, e-commerce or an agency, tracking this journey map gives a significant improvement in overall retention of your existing customers/clients, thereby increasing the revenue numbers.

Conclusion

Improving your business process can easily be done through the strategic and well-implemented use of two models: the marketing funnel and the customer journey map. Not only can you increase the conversion rate that you have through these, but you can also help establish better loyalty from your repeat customers—thus letting your business stay relevant in the market.

Are you looking for marketing software to help enhance your overall strategy? At MarketPlan, we provide you an all-in-one platform solution to help your run and visualize each facet of your marketing strategy. Get in touch with us and sign up to obtain a free account today.