Hindsight is a wonderful thing.  Looking back at my career in marketing, the handful of companies I’ve worked for (before Appletree) have, I think, all had a Marketing Plan. What I realise now though, is that I never ever saw the Marketing Plan, or had any idea what was included in it.

So assuming they had been written, were they filed somewhere (on paper on a shelf in the early days)? It seems the efforts of the Marketing Manager or team were completely wasted as no one else in the company had buy-in yet alone visibility of the plan.

Whilst we emphasise to all the companies that we work with that a Marketing Plan is crucial to the development of the business, more importantly is that the plan is in visible to everyone in the company, and is an integral part of the daily activities the business undertakes.

In a recent blog, we talked about the components of a marketing plan; all the things you need to consider in order to find the right marketing tools for you, and how to use them. That should be the hard part, but in reality we find that the hard part for a lot of companies is actually putting that plan into practice, on a regular basis.

At Appletree our Marketing Schedule is up on the wall. We create and agree the Plan together as a team, then follow it week by week.  A lot of our marketing is content-based, so we agree which areas of our business we are going to write about each week or month, and apply the topic to our social media, blogs, newsletters and/or networking introductions. Without the Plan, we’d all be talking about different services and sending out completely different messages to our customers and prospects, ultimately diluting our brand.

When starting to write your Plan, the most important thing you have to work out is what is the value proposition of your company or brand? This is the value that customers need to see in order to buy from you.

Today’s customers subconsciously consider a multitude of factors when making a buying decision. The driving force behind most buying decisions is the value proposition of seller. The total value proposition is the sum of the offerings and the experiences delivered to your customers, during all their interactions with your organisation.

The offerings are the factors people consider in purely rational terms: what does the product do? How much does it cost? How does it work?

The emotional responses are more implicit: How will this make me feel?  There is also their social or political response: How will it make me look?, What will others think of me? The behaviours and emotions of customers fundamentally impact how they interact with, and buy from, your organisation.

Here are three key business development considerations:

1. Get an understanding of what your company’s value proposition is – from both a rational and emotional perspective
2. Write a Marketing Plan based on communicating that value proposition
3. Use your Marketing Plan! Include team members when writing it; present it to all the employees in the business.  Make it visual to everyone and carry out the activities written in the schedule on a regular basis.

Or, stick it on a shelf and dust off again next year when it comes to the dreaded planning time again!

If you’d like help in creating a Marketing Plan, our planning days are really effective and you’ll have an effective Marketing Plan by the end of it, one that you can and will want to use. Email us or give us a call on 01635 578500.