ACKNOWLEDGMENTS - agric.wa.gov.au · definitions for marketing currently—and each of them is...

Sales and marketing

Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development

Plan, Prepare, Prosper

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This document is part of the Plan, Prepare, Prosper program that was developed under the Pilot of Drought Reform Measures (‘the pilot’), a joint initiative between the Australian Government and the Western Australian Government. The program aims to support businesses to prepare for drought, climate variability, financial and other challenges.

Plan, Prepare, Prosper is a strategic planning process that will help businesses to assess their business and determine the best course of action in response to known and projected challenges to business performance.

The Department of Agriculture and Food, Western Australia would like to recognise and thank the Rural Business Development Corporation, Curtin University, the Centre for Entrepreneurship, Agknowledge®, Farmanco, Plan Farm, David Koutsoukis, Greg Barnes and others for their contributions in the development of this program and permission to use their intellectual property.

Adaptation of material for agricultural processing enterprises undertaken by Growing Australia Pty Ltd from base material prepared by Nancye Gannaway, Department of Agriculture and Food, Western Australia.

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER

The Chief Executive Officer of the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development and the State of Western Australia accept no liability whatsoever by reason of negligence or otherwise arising from the use or release of this information or any part of it.

Copyright © Western Australian Agriculture Authority 2017

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ..................................................................................................... 1

Introduction to marketing for success .................................................................... 0

Section One: Sales and Marketing REFERENCE MATERIAL ................................ 2

Part of the Big Picture ...................................................................................... 4

1.1 Being proactive ........................................................................................... 4

1.2 Components of our strategic plan ............................................................... 7

An overview of marketing ................................................................................ 8

2.1 What is marketing? ..................................................................................... 8

2.2 Key marketing concepts ............................................................................. 9

2.3 The Bow-Tie model of marketing .............................................................. 11

Strategic Marketing – Selecting the best target customers for your business .......................................................................................................... 13

3.1 Busy Fool syndrome ................................................................................. 13

3.2 Market segmentation ................................................................................ 14

3.3 Target market analysis and selection ....................................................... 15

3.4 Matching distinctive business competencies with customers ................... 16

3.5 A profit-driven and risk-conscious approach to target marketing .............. 19

3.6 ‘Marketing’ encompasses three very different groups of customers! ........ 23

3.7 Creating a strategy market canvas ........................................................... 26

3.8 What is your strategy? .............................................................................. 30

BRAND MARKETING – Branding to build sales, profits and business value ................................................................................................................. 33

4.1 What is branding, and why is it important? ............................................... 33

4.2 What is a brand?....................................................................................... 34

4.3 Physical representations of a brand.......................................................... 35

4.4 How much is a brand worth? .................................................................... 35

4.5 Brand equity, and why it is critically important to success? ...................... 36

4.6 How to build and strengthen a brand? ...................................................... 38

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Practical marketing – How will you change customers minds so they choose you? ................................................................................................... 41

5.1 Touchpoint Marketing ............................................................................... 42

5.2 Marketing Tools ........................................................................................ 45

5.3 Websites .................................................................................................. 46

5.4 Social media for business ........................................................................ 47

5.5 Top tips for starting out on social media ................................................... 47

5.6 What is my social media strategy? ........................................................... 50

5.7 A social media example ........................................................................... 56

How To Calculate ROI Of A Marketing Campaign ....................................... 58

Case Study ...................................................................................................... 61

References ...................................................................................................... 63

Section Two: Sales and Marketing Activity Book ................................................ 65

Your Elevator Statement – first draft ................................................................ 67

What are your current product/s? ..................................................................... 68

What is your target market? ............................................................................. 69

Which products and customers are making you successful? ........................... 72

What is our – Market Canvas? ......................................................................... 74

What is our strategy? ....................................................................................... 76

Identify your focus on new, existing or old customers ...................................... 79

Identify your business’s major barriers to selling more? ................................... 80

How does your ideal customer view your brand ............................................... 81

Touchpoint audit ............................................................................................... 92

What is my social media strategy? ................................................................... 95

Your Elevator Statement – SECOND draft ..................................................... 105

What are you thinking? ................................................................................... 107

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INTRODUCTION TO MARKETING FOR SUCCESS

Outcomes

Today we will be working through your marketing program, and possible strategies for increasing its effectiveness and impact.

We will explore the advantages of target marketing – of focusing your marketing on those customers which best suit your business, and have the greatest potential for maximising your success. This involves analysing both your own business’s strengths and weaknesses, and the capabilities, plans and lifestyle preferences of the owners, as well as assessing what different types of customers are looking for from their food manufacturer suppliers and the extent to which these ‘fit’ with your business.

We will subsequently explore branding, one of the most important concepts in modern day marketing, with its proven capacity to increase sales, profits and business value. This will culminate in you developing your own ‘target brand’ for your business, based on the globally recognised CBBE model (Keller 2001).

Finally, we will look at ways to cost-effectively go about strengthening your brand and increasing your sales, through the use of ‘touchpoint marketing’.

Throughout the day we will be bringing current marketing theory, practice and experiences back to you, your business and your strategic plan, with considerable time made available for you to progress your plan.

Workshop Manual

To make it easier for you to review your ideas and thoughts that you collate during this workshop we have divided your manual into two sections.

Section One: Reference Material

This section contains the concepts and knowledge shared by your facilitator today. This section is very helpful as reference material after the workshop when you want to revisit an explanation of a concept.

Section Two: Activity Booklet

This section provides a place for you to record your ideas and thoughts as you progress through the sales and marketing workshop.



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SECTION ONE: SALES AND MARKETING REFERENCE MATERIAL



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PART OF THE BIG PICTURE

1.1 Being proactive

Running a business is often time consuming and hectic. It’s very easy for us to focus on getting things done and be drawn constantly into the operational side of our business. We need to ensure that we always find time to work on the business management side of our business. This includes tasks such as strategic planning, financial management, strategic marketing etc.

It’s very important that we spend time working on our business as well as in our business.

Figure 1 The two sides of or business



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Marketing is part of your strategic business plan. Remember your strategic business plan should represent a clear picture of the vision and the goals of the enterprise and the major steps by which it proposes to reach its goals.

As illustrated in the diagram below, a strategic plan is like your road map to guide you from your current state to your preferred future state.

Figure 2 Strategic roadmap


Strategic planning is an ongoing process undertaken by a business to develop its strategy to be successful and how it plans to achieve its overall long-term goals.

The strategic planning process was explained in workshop one and is summarised in the following diagram. Today we’re focusing on the strategic thinking and strategy formulation and planning.

Figure 3 Strategic planning process

Through this process, you will ask and answer three key questions (Bailey 1981):

1. Where is my business now?

2. Where do I need to take it?

3. What do I need to do to get there?



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1.2 Components of our strategic plan

As covered in workshop one of the Plan, Prepare, Prosper program, your strategic plan includes the components covered in the following diagram. Today we will be focusing on sales and marketing today. You will develop or refine existing goals in sales and marketing to support the achievement of your vision.

Figure 4 Anatomy of a strategic plan

Figure 5 SMARTT Definitions

When developing your goals think about what you must achieve to make your strategy and ultimately your vision a reality. Ensure your goals measure results not activity.


AN OVERVIEW OF MARKETING

2.1 What is marketing?

Increasingly, marketing is recognised globally as the primary business tool used to generate growth of an organisation—usually in terms of its sales turnover.

At its most simplistic, marketing is about “meeting customers’ needs profitably”, by providing superior value. It’s the process commercial businesses engage in to:

1. sell more product

2. enable them to charge more for what they sell, and

3. to maximise the dollar value of each customer to their organisation.

The American Marketing Association (2012) defines marketing as:

The organisational function and the set of tools for creating, communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organisation and its stakeholders.

However, it is important to recognise that there is no one definition of marketing that is accepted worldwide. Indeed, Sheth (1999) notes that there are at least 14 different definitions for marketing currently—and each of them is ‘right’ (i.e. all make sense and helps a business be more successful)… and is very different from all the other definitions of marketing.

This results from marketing being called the ‘ultimate bastard discipline’. Basically it is a new body of knowledge, with its roots in many different areas of the physical and social sciences, including psychology, demography, neuroscience, communication, statistics, sociology, and many others.

Marketing applies to all products—whether these are goods, services, ideas, experiences, events, individuals, destinations, properties, organisations or information (Kotler and Keller 2011). It also applies to organisations selling to consumers, other businesses, industries or global markets, as well as to not-for-profit and government organisations.



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2.2 Key marketing concepts

Fundamentally, marketing enables an organisation to respond proactively to a customer’s needs, and by so doing, achieve its own objectives. It is based on a number of key concepts, some of which are outlined below:

1) Perception IS reality

Factual / veridical truth is not what determines a customer’s behaviour or choices—it is their perceptions that they base their decisions and choices upon.

Complicating this for marketers, an individual’s perception is exclusive to them—it is a process unique to them of translating their sensory impressions of what happens around them into a coherent and unified view of the world and their role within it.

2) Customers don’t buy products; they buy the benefits and consequences that the product provides them

While a business may supply a good or service, the customer is buying a product from them—the bundle of benefits that they can access or have in their life as a result of making the purchase.

In 1960, Levitt, one of the ‘grandfathers’ of marketing globally, expressed this simply when noting that a customer is not buying a drill-bit, they are buying the hole in the wall the drill bit will provide them.

3) Market research is insurance against the fantasies of business owners and managers as to what is going on in the customer’s mind

Market research—the function that links the consumers, customers and public to the marketer through information about their behaviours, choices, thoughts, feelings, characteristics and actions.

It exists to provide business owners and managers with quality information about their markets, customers, competitors and environment. (Without this information, decision making relies solely on managers’ fantasies about what is happening around them, which may or may not be accurate or useful.)

Market research can be consumer-based or business-to-business (B2B) focused, and either quantitative (based on figures and statistical analysis) or qualitative (exploratory research looking for possible trends, explanations or patterns of relevance) in nature.


At its most simplistic, market research for a small business may comprise just one or two questions for every new customer such as:

How did you find out about us? or

Why did you choose us rather than someone else?

Questions for existing customers could include profiling questions about their physical characteristics (location, age, education level, etc.), decision-making process or perceptions of the business:

If you took over running this business, what are the first two changes you would make to make it more successful or to increase how happy your customers are? or On a 10-point scale, how willing would you be to recommend this business to a friend or colleague?

Ex-customers, particularly those the business really did not want to lose, may be asked questions such as:

Why did you change to a new supplier? or What did we need to do better to keep your business?

Finally, target customers (customers the firm wants but does not currently have) could be asked questions such as:

Which supplier do you currently use? and What areas do you think suppliers in general need to improve on?



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2.3 The Bow-Tie model of marketing

One simple, integrated approach to marketing is the Bow-Tie model (Winter 2009).

Figure 6 The Bow-Tie model of marketing

As demonstrated by the model, at its most basic, marketing covers three key areas:

1) Strategic target marketing

The process by which a firm determines where, when and how it will compete (Jain and Haley 2012). Ultimately this can be seen as the process by which the firm chooses which customers it will do business with, where these customers are carefully selected to be those that will maximise the success of the organisation over time.

2) Brand marketing

The process by which a firm ‘battles for the minds’ of customers within its markets, through building a strong brand and positioning its products optimally within their respective markets to achieve competitive superiority.


3) Practical marketing

Characterised by using the ‘marketing mix’ (initially price, distribution, promotions and product) to maximise a firm’s attractiveness to its target customers. (The marketing mix has since been expanded significantly to include people, physical evidence, processes and packaging, among other emerging tools.)



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STRATEGIC MARKETING – SELECTING THE BEST TARGET CUSTOMERS FOR YOUR BUSINESS

Let’s start with strategic target marketing.

Figure 7 Selecting the best customers for your business

3.1 Busy Fool syndrome

Many small business owners demonstrate what is referred to as ‘Busy Fool Syndrome’—working hard, working long, but not making much money.

From a marketing perspective, one of the key cures for Busy Fool is to focus the business on doing business with those customers that will make it successful. In marketing terms, this is called market segmentation and target marketing.


3.2 Market segmentation

Market segmentation is the process of breaking a large group of customers (a ‘market’) into subgroups, to better be able to understand the needs of each subgroup, and evaluate its ‘strategic fit’ with the organisation.

Strategic fit refers to the extent to which there is a match between both:

a) The resources, attributes and capabilities of the organisation and its products.

b) The needs that the customer is wanting satisfied, and the way that the customer goes about making decisions.

A variety of approaches to market segmentation exists for both consumer and business markets:

Consumer markets:

Demographic

Psychographic

Geographic

Needs-based

Behavioural

Distribution-channel

Price

Profit Margin

Lifestyle

Business markets:

Location

Size

Needs-based / buying criteria

Price

Level of quality

Profit margin

How decisions are made

Sales volumes

Buying status

Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development:


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3.3 Target market analysis and selection

Target market selection is the process of identifying and focusing on the best opportunities for a business in its market – those customers that are most likely to maximise its success.

Attractiveness of a potential target market is based both on market attractiveness and on the business’s likely ‘strength’ or competitiveness in that market.

1. Market Attractiveness

Factors to consider when establishing the attractiveness of a market include:

market size ($ and units)

market growth (%)

pricing trends (premium versus discounting over time)

intensity of the competition (size, number, capabilities)

overall risk in the industry (macro trends that could affect future performance)

opportunity to differentiate products and services (existing groups with unmet

needs suited to the company).

2. Business Strength

Business strength or ability to successfully compete in a market is influenced by:

product or service uniqueness and share of market buying on this basis

brand recognition

recent market share growth or decline

customer loyalty (own and competitors)

relative cost position (cost structure compared with competitors)

production capacity

distribution strength.

What is your Ideal Target Market?

Ensure you select the best customers for your business!

http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/strategic-planning-and-the-market-attractiveness-f.html#glossary-competition

http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/strategic-planning-and-the-market-attractiveness-f.html#glossary-branding

http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/strategic-planning-and-the-market-attractiveness-f.html#glossary-market_share


http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/strategic-planning-and-the-market-attractiveness-f.html#glossary-customer

http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/strategic-planning-and-the-market-attractiveness-f.html#glossary-cost

http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/strategic-planning-and-the-market-attractiveness-f.html#glossary-positioning

http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/strategic-planning-and-the-market-attractiveness-f.html#glossary-distribution


A business needs to match what it is they do particularly well (their ‘distinctive competencies’—best quality, best service, best experience, most convenient or cheapest)—with those customers that place significant value on this, and so are prepared to pay a fair price for its products.

3.4 Matching distinctive business competencies with customers

It is important for food manufacturers to recognise that their business is suited to particular types of customers, and not to others, based on its distinctive competencies, its resources, capabilities, plans and lifestyle preferences of the owners – and the needs and preferences of the customers.

To gain clarity as to which type of customers best suit your business it may be helpful to identify your distinctive business competencies.

The five possible distinctive competencies that a business may demonstrate are:

Best Quality

Best Experience

Best Service

Most convenient (easiest to do business with)

Lowest Price



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Figure 8 The Myth of Excellence

Note, a business does not need to be the best at all five of the above competencies. As outlined in the Myth of Excellence (Matthews and Crawford 2001), successful businesses:

1. Are the BEST at one of the above competencies.

2. Are above average at one of the other above competencies.

3. Only need to meet the minimum customer requirements in the other three competencies.


There are three strategies for a business to increase its success from a strategic marketing perspective:

1) If its target customers are seeking value and are prepared to pay a fair price for what its current ‘competencies’ are, it should continue doing business with its current customers and seek more customers like them. Its focus is on getting better at what it already does well.

In situations where current customers are not highly valuing a food business’s product. For example, its current ‘competencies’ are not what they are looking for, the food business has two options:

2) Change target customers to a group that does value its current ‘competencies’ highly—after ensuring that this group offers the business sufficient sales to meet its revenue and profit objectives.

3) Change ‘competencies’ so that the food business better meets the needs and provides these target customers what they value.



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3.5 A profit-driven and risk-conscious approach to target marketing

Where to spend its marketing dollars and resources is one of the most important decisions a business can make.

From both profit-maximising and risk-management perspectives, it is critically important that a business first focuses its marketing efforts on securing its existing target customers and its best-performing products. In both cases, these are the ones that currently generate the majority of its profits.

In the example below, the company needs to focus its marketing program first on the customers and products which are currently generating the majority of its current profits.

Table 1 Total net profit example

TOTAL NET PROFIT 300,000

BY CUSTOMER Net Profit % of Net Profit

IGA 108,000 36%

Herdsman Fresh 68,000 23%

Boatshed 38,000 13%

Weekend markets around Perth 26,000 9%

North-West Roadhouses 19,000 6%

BY PRODUCT Net Profit % of Net Profit

Product A 198,000 66%

Product B 24,000 8%

Product C 13,000 4%

Product D 11,000 4%

Only then should most businesses start to look for additional target markets to grow.


One way of identifying these is to determine the relative reward (in terms of profit) generated by each product currently being sold, then focus marketing efforts on growing sales of those products generating above-average profit margins. Similarly, determining the profit margins generated by different customers, or groups of customers, enables a business to then focus its marketing on what will make it more successful into the future - keeping current customers generating above-average profit margins, and attracting more customers like them.

This is illustrated by the diagram below:

Figure 9 Identifying which customers and products are making you successful… and which are just making you busy.

Undertaking this analysis also enables a company to identify both its ‘average’ and ‘poor’ customers currently.



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As illustrated in the diagram below there are different initiatives for each category of customers.

Figure 10 Targeting your marketing to your best customers, changing how you do business with the rest of your customers to increase their profitability


For best customers, a business needs to focus their marketing and energy on keeping these customers and attracting more like them.

For average customers, a business may seek to change what it offers them, the level of service provided, or how much it charges them, while still retaining them as customers. If successful, this approach will significantly increase the profits generated by this group of customers, and in turn, the overall profitability of the business.

For poor customers, the business needs to significantly change the way it does business with them. At the moment it is undertaking a whole lot of activity and effort, and using a considerable proportion of its resources, and not receiving an adequate reward for this effort and investment.

It can do this by reducing the quality or size of the product it offers them at a given price, or the level of service at this price. Alternatively, it can charge them more for the same product or service. Either way, the business will either:

1. Free up resources when these customers choose to go elsewhere given the changes to how the business transacts with them.

2. Make an acceptable profit margin doing business with them under the changed terms and conditions.

Note that some products and customers may be important for strategic reasons other than profit generation. (This forms a fourth group of customers or products, the ‘sacred cows’, that may have below-average or only average profit margins but contribute in other significant ways to the ongoing success of the company.) In this instance, profit margins are NOT a critical consideration of how to do business with this customer / product / group of customers.



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3.6 ‘Marketing’ encompasses three very different groups of customers!

The first thing to realise is that ‘marketing’ is a term that very many different people use to describe very many different things. Because of this, many business owners are confused about what marketing is, and is not.

Figure 11 New, current and ex-customers

Perhaps most important is the difference between:

1. Marketing to get new customers.

2. Marketing to grow the relationship and profitability of existing customers.

3. Marketing to re-activate old customers to start doing business with you again.


To choose to buy something from a company, a new customer needs to move through a series of stages, and have a number of requirements met. This can often be an involved, costly and slow process. They have no experience with the firm, so are unlikely to believe claims that need to be experienced to be believed, such as ‘best value’, ‘best quality’, ‘best service’, etc. Additionally, they have existing relationships with a competitor which needs to be overcome before they can start doing business with you.

In comparison, existing customers are already doing business with a company. They have experienced what its products and service is actually like. The challenge is not to convince them to buy from a company, but to increase how much they buy, and the profit margins associated with this, over time. This concept is sometimes referred to as ‘increasing the customer lifetime value’—how much, on average, each existing customer will spend with a firm from the first sale to the last, before the relationship ends.

Ex-customers have ceased doing business with a company for one of a number of different reasons. (Surprisingly, neither dissatisfaction with the company nor actions of a competitor to woo them away are the most common cause for leaving. Most ex-customers switched solely because there was not a strong enough reason to stay, so they thought they might try someone else! (News of the World 2006)). The challenge is in interesting them again in what the company has to offer powerfully enough to motivate them to make contact. The following table may assist you to identify likely ways you can go about significantly increasing your sales to each of the three different types of customers (New, Existing, Ex-customers).

Your marketing should subsequently be focussed on making these outcomes happen.



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Table 2 Initiatives to increase sales for different customer groups

NEW

Marketing to attract new customers

EXISTING

Marketing to grow lifetime value of each

existing Customer

EX-CUSTOMERS

Marketing to reactivate

ex-customers

How many target customers are aware you

exist?

Increase how long they remain your customer.

Are willing to do business with you

again.

How many know enough to know you are relevant to

them?

Buy more at a time when they buy. Buy more often.

Prefer your product to their existing

supplier’s.

How many genuinely like and want what you are

offering?

Buy other products and services you offer.

Motivated to contact you about what is

possible.

How many prefer you over your competitors?

Pay a higher price for what they buy over time.

Actually buy from you again.

How many can easily buy your products from you?

Trade up to higher priced options you offer.

How many actually take action and have contact

with you?

Buy more from you & less from your competitors.

How many actually then proceed to make a

purchase?

Recommend new customers to you.


3.7 Creating a market canvas

If you are completing the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development Plan, Prepare, Prosper program you will have already created a draft strategy canvas for your business in workshop one – Introduction to Strategic Planning. Therefore the following information will not be knew to you and this is a time to check if you need to refine your strategy.

If you are completing this Sales and Marketing workshop as a stand-alone workshop then the following information is very important and will need to be covered thoroughly.

Your competitive advantage is the most important part of your strategy statement – it describes the logic of why you will succeed, how you differ, or what you are doing better than the competition.

As illustrated in the following diagram, your competitive advantage is the strategic sweet spot for a business. It is where it meets customers’ needs in a way that rival businesses can’t (Collis & Rukstad 2008). Figure 12 Strategic sweet spot



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Creating a market canvas can help you to identify your competitive advantage. To develop a market canvas, you list the factors that customers value (think what are the customer’s key needs) and then compare your ability to provide these factors against competitor offerings. Steps to create a market canvas to identify your competitive advantage.

1. Identify the key factors that are important to customers and insert them into a graph (see example below). Ask yourself questions such as, what are their needs? What do they base their decision to purchase (or not) on?

Note, often we jump to conclusions as to what are the key factors customers value. To avoid this, make sure you are using real information. It is very likely that you will need to conduct further market research to identify these factors – speak to customers, competitors etc.

2. Draw your ‘current’ strategy profile (see example below).

3. Draw your competitors ‘current’ strategy profile (see example below).

4. Compare your business with your competitors and look for where your strategy needs to change. Ask yourself questions such as, does your profile differ from competitors or is it the same? If it’s the same can you identify where your profile needs to change?

5. Draw your ‘need to be’ strategy profile on your canvas.

6. Explore whether this will work. Go and seek feedback from real customers. Examples of questions to answer are;

What would customers feel about the potential new offering?

Would a customer value the change?

What would be the benefits to the customer?

What would be the adoption hurdles for existing and new customers?

7. Use your gathered feedback to build the best ‘need to be’ strategy profile.

8. Use this ‘need to be’ strategy profile to guide your decision making during your strategic planning profile. For example, what is the gap between the ‘current’ and ‘need to be’ strategy profile? What do we need to do to close the gap? Note, you should aim to only support projects or initiatives that will help to close the gap.


The following are examples of a market canvases for different industries.

Figure 13 Market canvas for Southwest airlines The strategic profile of southwest airlines differs dramatically from those of its competitors in the short – haul airline industry. Note how Southwest's profile has more in common with the car’s than with the profile of other airlines.

Source: Collis, DJ & Rukstad, MG 2008, ‘Strategy and competition – can you say what your strategy is?’, Harvard Business Review, April 2008.



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Figure 14 Market canvas for Wal-Mart The strategic profile of Wal-Mart differs dramatically from those of its competitors in the retail industry. By focusing on low prices and ensuring their strategy differentiates them from competitors Wal-Mart has been successful in the challenging retail industry.

Source: Chan Kim, W & Mauborgne, R 2002, ‘Charting your company’s future’, Harvard Business Review, June 2002.


3.8 What is your strategy?

What our competitive game plan will be

Through creating your strategic market canvas you are well positioned to identify your overall business strategy statement. Your strategy statement must identify the target customer, the value proposition, and how the latter fits two requirements:

Your strategy statement will answer, ‘How your business will position itself to be successful?’.

Your strategy is not the same as a strategic plan. Your strategy is the making of an integrated set of choices that collectively position your business in its industry so as to create sustainable advantage relative to competition and deliver superior financial returns (Martin 2013).

The details such as goals, key initiatives, resource allocation etc., become your strategic plan that helps you to execute your strategy.

There is one strategy for a given business, not a set of strategies. It is one integrated and logical set of choices. A preferred approach as outlined by author and professor Roger Martin (2010) is to treat strategy making as developing a set of answers to the following five interlinked questions, which cascade logically from the first to the last:

1. What is our winning aspiration?

What are our broad aspirations for our organisation & the concrete goals against which we can measure our progress?

2. Where will we play?

Across the potential field available to us, where will we choose to play and not play?

3. How will we win?

In our chosen place to play, how will we choose to win against the competitors there?

4. What capabilities need to be in place?

What capabilities are necessary to build and maintain to win in our chosen manner?

5. What management systems must be instituted?

What management systems are necessary to operate to build and maintain the key capabilities?



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The trick is to have five answers that are consistent with one another and actually reinforce one another. To create a good strategy you will have to iterate — think a little bit about Aspirations & Goals, then a little bit about Where to Play and How to Win, then back to Aspirations & Goals to check and modify, then down to Capabilities and Management Systems to check whether it is really doable, then back up again to modify accordingly.

While it may sound a bit daunting, iterating like this actually makes creating your strategy easier. It will save you from endless visioning exercises, misdirected SWOT analyses, and lots of uninformed big thinking.

Creating your strategy in relatively small and concrete chunks and honing the answers to the five questions through iteration will get you a better strategy, with much less pain and wasted time.

Your strategy then informs what initiatives actually make sense and are likely to produce the result you actually want. Such a strategy actually makes planning easy, as it helps you to identify which initiatives should and should not be part of your strategic plan – it makes it easier to decide what is critical and what is not.

As stated by Roger Martin (2014), focus your energy on the key choices that influence revenue decision makers – that is, customers. They will decide to spend their money with your business if your value proposition is superior to competitors’. Two choices determine success:

1. The where to play decision (which specific customers to target)

2. The how to win decision (how to create a compelling value proposition for the target customers)

If a customer is not in the segment or area where the company chooses to play, they probably won’t even become aware of the availability and nature of your offering.

If the company does connect with that customer, the how to win choice will determine whether they will find the offering’s targeted value equation compelling.

In essence your strategy describes your:

1. broad goal (objective)

2. your target market

3. your competitive advantage.


Make the logic explicit

Martin (2014) highlights, the only way to improve your strategic choices is to test the logic of your thinking. For example, for your choices to make sense, what do you need to believe about customers, about the evolution of your industry, about competition, about your capabilities?

It is critical to write down the answers to these questions as it provides you with clarity and future recall of why you made your strategic decisions the way you did.

Strategy statement

Although you make take several pages to show your decision making, background information and the why you’ve chosen a specific strategy, it’s very useful to summarise your strategy into one simple statement. This allows you to clearly and easily explain your strategy to others.

Extra note

Roger Martin (2010) states, “People can potentially make creating a strategy much harder than it needs to be. For some, the problem is that they focus too much on the tools: environmental scans, SWOT analyses, customer analyses, competitor analyses, financial modeling, and so on. Other people get into trouble because they think it’s all about the broad, conceptual, future-oriented, big picture stuff — not to be confused with tactics. Still other times, people think that strategy is what happens when we think about changing directions.

“The reality is that strategy is at some level about all those things, and you can’t do a satisfactory job with your analysis alone, or your big picture alone, or your changes alone. You have to do a bit of work on all of them.”



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BRAND MARKETING – BRANDING TO BUILD SALES, PROFITS AND BUSINESS VALUE

Figure 15 What’s going on in the mind of your customer?

4.1 What is branding, and why is it important?

Branding is the process of giving your business or its products a unique identity that enables target customers to identify it as yours, and different in some important way from similar products.

Without a brand, a product is generic, that is, similar in all important ways to other products like it and so, importantly, substitutable. In this situation, a customer (logically enough) chooses based on lowest price. This then minimises the profit margin the supplier can make on each sale and, unless they have a low-cost base to their operations, is likely to have serious negative implications for the long-term success and viability of their product and business.


4.2 What is a brand?

A brand is a group of brain cells wired together in the mind of every customer (or any other stakeholder) to help them make sense of everything they know about you, and what you mean to them. They use this over-arching assessment of you to make decisions about the nature of the relationship they may have with you over time.

This ‘brand’ comprises a range of diverse information that integrates the:

category(s) they have placed you in to make sense of your salience (importance) to them

facts they know about you

images, experiences and associations they have with you

feelings they have about you

judgements they have come to about you

conclusions about how you are relevant to them personally and the sort of relationship it would be best to have with you into the future.

Figure 16 A brand comprises a range of diverse information integrated by the customer

Feelings they have about you

Judgements they have come to

about you

What sort of relationship they want with you?

Facts they know about you

Their conclusions about whether you

are relevant to them

Category they have placed

you in - importance

BRAND



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4.3 Physical representations of a brand

A brand is represented, and triggered, by a unique name, term or tagline, design, symbol, jingle or any other physical feature that identifies one seller's good or service as distinct from those of other sellers (adapted from the American Marketing Association Dictionary 2012).

4.4 How much is a brand worth?

Given the above, a powerful brand can readily generate significantly more sales, and a substantially higher profit margin, for a product. Basically, it significantly increases the likelihood of success.

The value of these additional sales and profit margins per sale is how brand equity is calculated in dollar terms. Globally, shares in companies such as Coke, Apple, Google and Microsoft are valued at an additional $60–80 billion because of the brand equity of their brands (Interbrand Top 100 Brands 2012).

While the dollar value of brand equity for small business may be significantly less, the same principles apply. A strong brand can significantly increase the profitability of a company and its longer term success and viability (Keller 2001), and so, how much the business is worth (Yeanoplos 2012).


4.5 Brand equity, and why it is critically important to success?

At its most simplistic, ‘brand equity’ is ultimately how much better (or worse) a customer believes a ‘branded product’ is than a generic or unbranded alternative. This impression then impacts upon a range of the customer’s critical decisions and behaviours that directly determines the product’s success, including:

how willing they are to even consider buying the branded product

how they rank it compared to competitor products

how likely they are to buy

how much they buy relative to competitor products

what sort of premium, if any, they are willing to pay for the branded product over what they would pay for a generic product or relative to a competitor’s product

how loyal they are, and what sort of relationship they want with the branded product or company over time

how easy they are to deal with over time, as a customer

how likely they are to recommend the product or company to others.

Customers start by stereotyping or categorising you, in terms of grouping you with other things you are like (brand salience). Facts about your performance, and justifications for these facts, are added under brand performance, while images, experiences, memories and associations between you and other things are added under brand imagery.

Based on the perceptions of brand performance and the brand imagery you evoke in their minds, they subsequently come to a series of judgements about you, and develop feelings towards you.

On the basis of these judgements and feelings, a customer determines the appropriate role for you in their life going forward—what sort of relationship they will have with you.



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Keller (2001) expressed this as a ‘consumer-based brand equity’ pyramid:

Figure 17 The consumer-based Brand Equity Pyramid helps identify the nature of your customer relationships

BRAND SALIENCE

BRAND RESONANCE

CONSUMER

JUDGMENTS CONSUMER FEELINGS

BRAND PERFORMANCE

BRAND

IMAGERY

Facts about your performance and

justification for these facts.

Images, memories, experiences and associations between you and other things.

Customers start by stereotyping you, in terms of grouping you with other things you are like (brand salience).

What sort of relationship they will have with you?

Customer determines the appropriate role for

you in their life going forward.


4.6 How to build and strengthen a brand?

Most businesses need to build their own distinctive, strong brands to be successful. Additionally, a business may choose to develop quite separate brands for each of its products, or different product categories.

Your challenge is to build an optimal brand in the minds of your target customers – a brand that maximises the likelihood they will buy from you and be willing to pay a good price for what they purchase. Note, getting them to champion you within their business and refer others are also target outcomes!

This process involves you adding to the information the customer already has about your category of product that applies to you and all of your competitors. You are seeking to add to this so that the customer sees your product as clearly different and better (i.e. adding the red to the green circle below.)

Figure 18 Defining the extras that make your product a better or worse option



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You are seeking to build on your brand to transform it from its ‘current state’ in your target customers mind, to a ‘future state’ or IDEAL BRAND which is optimal for you and which will maximise the likelihood they will purchase from you and how much they will pay when they do.

Based on the brand pyramid approach outlined previously you can design a future brand for your business or a particular product.

Note, your facilitator will take you through activities to complete the following steps.

Step 1: Identify your points of difference

Identify the key ways you or your product is clearly different and better than your competitors. Focus on the ways that you believe are most important to your target customers, and understand why most of your existing customers have chosen you over your competitors.

Step 2: Identify the key consequences, benefits and outcomes your customers want

Identify the key consequences, benefits and outcomes your customers want in their lives, both for their business and for them personally, as a result of doing business with you? What problem to you help them solve?

It’s useful to think of the above in terms of:

Fairy tale

Horror movie

Documentary

Step 3: Identify your ideal BRAND RESONANCE – the role you play in your best customers’ lives at the moment

Imagine your best customer was describing the role you play in their lives to another target customer. Write down what they would say to explain the role they have allocated to you in their business currently. For example, is this a preferred supplier of a particular type of produce? A solution provider? Their partner for your sort of product?


Step 4: Identify your customers JUDGEMENTS

What are the most important JUDGEMENTS they needed to come to about you BEFORE they were willing to allocate you this role in their lives?

Step 5: Identify your customers FEELINGS

How do your best customers FEEL about you and your products currently? What feelings underlie their decision to allocate you this role in their lives?

For example, trust you, enjoy doing business with you, want you to do well, grateful for what you do for them, impressed by you etc.

Step 6: Identify the key FACTS your customers need to create the JUDGEMENTS and FEELINGS

What are the key facts your target customers need to know about your business and product to be able to come to the previously identified JUDGEMENTS and FEELINGS?

Step 7: What EXPERIENCES do your customers need to create the JUDGEMENTS and FEELINGS

What EXPERIENCES do they need to have before they can come to the previously identified JUDGEMENTS and FEELINGS about your business and products? What images most strongly relate to these JUDGEMENTS and FEELINGS? And what do you want your target customers associating you with, to maximise the chance they will come to these JUDGEMENTS and FEELINGS about you?

For example, Woolworths uses strong farming and fresh food associations to build its ‘Fresh’ brand.

Step 8: What CATEGORY do you want your target customer to place you in?

Relating this back to your previously identified ‘business competencies’ and the type of food you produce is often worthwhile. For example, ‘one of the best quality and best-tasting gelatos in Australia’ or ‘one of the most professional salad production firms in Asia’, etc.



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PRACTICAL MARKETING – HOW WILL YOU CHANGE CUSTOMERS MINDS SO THEY CHOOSE YOU?

Figure 19 Getting your customers to choose you

Traditionally, practical, on-the-ground, grass-roots marketing for small businesses centred around developing and implementing a marketing plan based on the ‘4Ps’:

Getting the pricing right

Developing a product that is attractive and meets customers’ needs

Ensuring location (place) and distribution coverage and solutions are in place;

and

Using promotions to raise awareness, build brands and motivate purchase.


Subsequently this was expanded to also include:

optimising packaging for distribution, value-adding and promotional purposes

getting the right people in place to best service and create value for the

customer

developing and implementing the right processes to optimise the customer’s

experiences when doing business with the company

proactively managing the physical evidence the customer uses to come to

conclusions about the attractiveness of a company and its products.

5.1 Touchpoint Marketing

A simpler marketing process is emerging based on a more common-sense approach. Touchpoint marketing is focused on building an optimal brand in the customer’s mind in a highly cost-effective way. It does this by continually improving on the different touchpoints involved in doing business with a customer. A ‘touchpoint’ is simply a point where the customer makes contact (or ‘touches’) something to do with the company or one of its products or services.

Customers use these collective touchpoints—every single time they have come into contact with the company and / or its products, to come to a conclusion about how attractive it is to them—i.e. to build its ‘brand’ in their minds. ‘Touchpoint marketing’ involves proactively identifying, and subsequently optimising, each of these touchpoints to build a stronger, more attractive brand in the customer’s mind over time.

As shown by the following diagram there are three main categories of touchpoints:

before a customer purchases something from a business

while a customer is purchasing something from a business

after the customer has purchased something from a business.



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Figure 20 Building an optimal brand

A ‘Touchpoint audit’ involves first comprehensively identifying a business’s current touchpoints with its customers at each of these three key stages—BEFORE PURCHASE, DURING PURCHASE and AFTER PURCHASE. That is, it lists every time and way the customer comes into contact with the business or its products or services.

Subsequently it rates the importance of each of these touchpoints in generating and growing sales AND how the company is currently performing at this touchpoint. (Ideally both of these ratings would be based on market research, where the customer identifies the touchpoints influencing them to date, and their perceptions of the company’s performance at each.)

Additional touchpoints not currently being used by the firm with the potential to have a high impact on target customers (e.g. social media initiatives) are then added to the list, based on a review of competitors, and what is happening outside of the firm’s immediate industry and geographic market.

Finally, the company reviews this ‘Touchpoint audit’ and identifies what are the most important touchpoints it needs to focus its marketing efforts on in the next calendar year. These then become the focus of a significant proportion of its marketing activities.


The target brand is then reviewed to ensure each of the key brand attributes identified within its IDEAL brand pyramid are currently being generated by its touchpoints. Are there any critically important Facts or Images that are not being effectively or strongly enough communicated by the company’s existing touchpoints? Is the company failing to generate a particular Feeling or Judgement needed for it to build its IDEAL brand in the mind of its target customers? In either of these situations, the company would then identify changes or additions to its touchpoints to better communicate these key brand attributes.

For example:

target category: how the business or its product wants its target market to

categorise it needs to be repeated over and over again in sales spiels, advertising, websites, tender documents, etc.

brand imagery: the brand images identified need to be included in brochures,

signage, on websites, in displays, etc. Experiences need to be proactively designed to happen effectively and well during the appropriate touchpoint(s)—for example, the interaction with a sales rep, or at a Trade Show.

brand facts: key facts need to be repeated over and over again in the company’s brochures, advertising, website, signage, tender documents, sales spiels, etc.

brand judgements and feelings: touchpoints need to be reviewed so management is confident that they will, collectively, generate each and every one of the targeted judgements and feelings required by the target brand. If uncertainty exists, the touchpoints need to be redesigned so they do achieve their targeted impact.

Market research can then be periodically undertaken to determine the extent to which the targeted category, imagery, facts, feelings and judgements are being successfully embedded in the minds of target customers.



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5.2 Marketing Tools

Marketing tools are product development and promotional strategies and actions that a business uses to develop and promote its products or services. Marketing tools can be used to create touch points.

Examples of marketing tools are:

Market research surveys

Focus groups

Logo

Business cards

Email signature block

Stationary

Website

Search engine optimisation

Hashtags

Google My Business

Database

Email marketing

Blogs

Forums

Referrals

Networking

Video / Youtube

Podcasts

Television – advertisements

Television – free coverage, interviews etc

Radio – advertisements

Radio – free coverage, interviews etc

Magazine – advertisements

Magazine – free coverage, interviews etc

Newspaper – advertisements

Newspaper – free coverage, interviews etc

Advertorials

Webinars

Direct mail

Point of sale

Surveys

Flyers

Online advertisements – Google ads etc

Roadside signage

Banners

Expos / tradeshows

Sponsorship

Brand ambassadors

Markets

Events

Business premises

Aps / games

Business vehicles

Staff uniforms

Catalogues

Special discounts

Coupons

Loyalty programs

Competitions

Free trials / samples


5.3 Websites

Your website is one of your most important marketing tools. Your website can establish credibility and can be an effective communication tool. Your website influence people’s decisions and educate them.

Your website runs 24/7 without any supervision or need to lock it up. You can always be there for your customers.

Another important factor is that you own your website. In comparison, you don’t own your Facebook page or other social media pages.

Your website can be the base for all other marketing. For example, you can use social media to bring people back to your own website, and maximising your search engine optimisation (SEO).

Think about the following regarding your website:

Does it shine and sparkle, does it feel loved? Remember websites degrade quickly.

Does it cater for sales (if relevant to you)?

Does it provide the “lobby” experience? Does the tone reflect the brand and professionalism that you would like to convey?

Does it use images? Images are very effective – use them.

Does it build your credibility?

Have you maximised Search Engine Optimisation?

Is your website mobile friendly?

The content is about them not you. For example, how does your service or product help them solve their problems.

You can use your website as a publishing engine.

You can work with a website designer to develop your website or you can create your own via online tools such Shopify, Weebley, Wordpress, Squarespace etc,



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5.4 Social media for business

The benefits of using social media for small businesses include, but are not limited to:

Generating exposure and brand awareness.

Creating new leads.

Driving traffic to your business website.

Communicating with your market (seeking feedback etc.).

Reduced overall marketing expenses.

Ultimately, improved sales.

The key to social media is in our ability to mirror the way our customers interact in their everyday lives, creating touch points in ways they’re receptive to.

Remember, social media initiatives and tools that are successful in the Australian market may not be successful in other countries. For example, Facebook is not available in China, values and beliefs often differ across cultures. Therefore, if you are exporting your products think about what marketing tools and initiatives would be effective for the target market in that particular country.

5.5 Top tips for starting out on social media

There is so much out there on social media, the following top tips may be helpful for starting out on social media.

1) Give yourself time to up skill yourself in social media

As you start off, you’ll need to spend time learning how the platforms work, how to take good photos, create good content and where to find interesting content to share.

Realise that social media is a long-term building-relationships strategy, not a magic wand. Therefore, allocate enough time to learn (say 1-2 hours each week, you’ll get faster over time), but don’t put all your marketing energy into social media, as results aren’t instant.

Brainstorm each month for an overall plan to follow, and then dedicate time each day to update and schedule your content/engage with clients. Some take 15-30 minutes a day.

2) Schedule where possible, but don’t loose the human interaction

Scheduling means you can bulk schedule content you’ve found, or photos you’ve taken during a morning at work. It’ll keep social media from becoming overwhelming and means you won’t be scrambling for new content to share.


3) Share interesting and relevant content, either created by yourself and by others

It’s been proven that taking an educational/helpful sales methods rather than general marketing is more effective.

Get people thinking, provide interesting/little known secrets/information about the company or product.

Content doesn’t necessarily have to be about the product all the time, can post about the company/employees.

Provide a human side to the company

Make it relatable and personable.

Be transparent.

Can post content that relates/promotes the “lifestyle” of your target audience.

Means you must research and create consumer profiles.

Have a general “theme” to your social media account.

Not sure how much behind the scenes to show? Use the 5-3-2 rule as a guide.

50% should be curated content from another relevant source.

30% should be content about your product.

20% should be deemed ‘personal' to humanize your company. This can be in the form of behind-the-scenes or humour.

4) Monitor your clients and competitors

Important for social media marketing to be fully effective.

KNOW what your competitors are doing and how can you differentiate your product from theirs? What are they doing right? What are they doing that could help increase your competitive advantage?

People have the power to post their opinions for the world to see on social media, whether they are positive or negative.

Respond/engage with all customer conversation/feedback positively, even if the feedback is negative.

Don’t try to hide the negative feedback. Customers value transparency, use it as a learning curve. Your positive engagement with the customer and willingness to learn from their experience will build on a positive rapport between consumer and company and reflect positively on your brand.



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5) Be seen to be helpful

Consumers value transparency and when the brands listen to what they want.

Improves engagement and brand loyalty.

Can help you improve your brand and product.

6) Do your homework

Know your target audience, their demographic, their age, what they enjoy doing, where to find them.

Know what their interests are and what social media platforms they choose to use.

From this, you should be able to identify three key messages that you may be able to effectively communicate to your target audience.

Also important to identify any concerns/risks that may come from communicating certain content to your target audience via social media.

7) Measure your results

Use web based analytics to measure social media results.

Identify what went well and what didn’t. This can help you decide in the future what to use and what not to use.

Check whether your social media marketing has impacted your sales. For example, what is your return on your investment.

8) Use your social media statistics to better target your audience

Pay attention to what’s working and what isn’t.

Focus on what is working and build on it.

Look at how you can increase value to your company by putting more time/effort into certain areas.

9) Increase website traffic with social media

Use your channels to drive consumers to your website and increase traffic to your website.

Direct consumers to your website to answer questions, read new articles/blog posts/news about company etc.


5.6 What is my social media strategy?

At first using social media for marketing purposes can feel overwhelming. The following steps may help you create a plan for social media that is both manageable and provides successful results. The steps are very similar for using other marketing tools.

STEP 1: Define your desired social media outcome.

It can be easy to go into social media with a plan to get onto Facebook and reach as many followers as possible. But how is this going to help you?

So define your social media outcome that will help drive you to the end results you want.

For example, what do you want social media to help you achieve? Do you want social media to help you:

Increase brand exposure/awareness?

Increase brand loyalty?

Build a community?

Other?

STEP 2: Where is your audience?

Continuing on from the work you’ve previously done in this Sales and Marketing session to define your target audience, you now need to identify where your target audience sits online. For example, do they:

Use Pinterest to plan their meals for the week?

Spend their time on Instagram browsing for food inspiration?

Use Facebook to share

Subscribe to favourite food blogs?

None or all of the above?

Tip: Keep it simple by choosing only one or two platforms to work with.

STEP 3: Brainstorm social media opportunities

Use techniques such as brainstorming to help you identify potential social media opportunities that would be suitable for your brand and target audience?



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STEP 4: Identify risks of a social media campaign?

You will need to know what to/what not to include on social media.

The following tools may assist you to identify the risks that come with Social Media as a tool in your marketing arsenal.

Tool 1: Brainstorming your brand risks

Used to brainstorm and map potential risks that could be attached to your brand.

Using the tool. Consider three to four areas of your marketing strategies that you

want to use social media to influence. This may be loyalty, perception, brand

advocacy.

Before posting, take a step back and try to see how your message

is going to be perceived.

Sharing other companies content means that

you may be aligning yourself with other

companies/ people/practices and what values

they promote.

Do these other companies values and

practices align with your own or your

target audience’s? Or will they be

represented as your own?

Know what will be well received/not

by your target audience.

Take note of what doesn’t sit well with

your audience, to avoid posting

irrelevant content.

Think Point! Imagine you are selling free range eggs and animal welfare attributes are a point of differentiation. What happens if the company whose content you’ve shared is investigated for welfare breaches?


Tool 2: Risk Matrix to prioritise and manage your risks

List and prioritise risks using the Risk Matrix and describe risk management

strategies for each (if required).

Be clear in your risk plan, what are your brands values and what are your own?

RISK MATRIX

Figure 21 Risk Matrix



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STEP 5: Define SMARTT goals.

Define your SMARTT goal and remember to know what you’re measuring so you know whether you’re succeeding or not. For example:

For brand exposure, your measurement might be the conversion rate of new customers from Facebook by the first quarter.

For brand advocacy, you might be measuring the increase in customer stories shared for 2017.

Figure 22 SMARTT Definition

STEP 6: Define your strategies and actions

Next, based on your SMART goal/s you will need to identify the critical success factors, barriers and resulting strategies and actions that will make your goal/s happen?

Here are some examples of what actions you might take for two different goals.

Goal 1 – Strengthen brand loyalty

Strategies to support goal 1:

Publish behind the scenes photos so customers get to know the family behind the brand.

Listen to your customers and reply to everything.

Provide helpful tips surrounding your product.

Sell the lifestyle and values that surround your company. For example, free range, organic etc. Remember, customers want to align with brands that are similar to what they believe in, and will turn away from brands that aren’t.


Goal 2 – Build brand advocacy

Strategies to support goal 2:

Monitor conversations

Reshare positive messages about your brand.

Create VIP experiences, such as exclusive offers etc.

Reach out to those customers who already love your brand and are helping to promote it, and offer them something small to say thanks for the support.

Encourage (but don’t push) your staff to use their personal accounts to talk about their positive experiences of working at your company.

To encourage more positives, reach out to other accounts to try your product and share their stories about their experience

What are some actions around social media that might be a part of your strategic plan? For example:

1) Reviewed five social media platforms for use by my business by June 30, 2018.

2) Selected two social media platforms for use in my marketing by July 15 2018.

It’s important to note that, while tools and strategy work together, not to confuse the two. Tools in the digital world change rapidly. If a tool doesn’t work, simply try something else to achieve your goal.



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STEP 7: Monitor and evaluate results

As part of your continuous improvement process, remember to monitor and evaluate your results. Questions you might ask yourself are:

Are your strategies working?

Are you achieving your desired targets (goals)?

Do you need to do more research on your target market?

Do you need to stop, start or continue anything?

Figure 23 Continuous Improvement Cycle

Tips on monitoring and evaluating results:

Use web based analytics to measure social media results.

Identify what went well and what didn’t. This can help you decide in the future what to use and what not to use.

Check whether your social media marketing has impacted your sales. For example, what is your return on your investment.

Use your social media statistics to better target your audience.

Pay attention to what’s working and what isn’t.

Focus on what is working and build on it.

Look at how you can increase value to your company by putting more time/effort into certain areas.

Increase website traffic with social media.

Use your channels to drive consumers to your website and increase traffic to your website.

Direct consumers to your website to answer questions, read new articles/blog posts/news about company etc.


5.7 A social media example

The following is a real-life example of the Department of Agriculture and Food Western Australia using social media to support the achievement of a goal.

The Department of Agriculture and Food Western Australia regards the following post as a successful post as the Department reached more than 30,000 people. The post added value to the Departments brand because it helped their target market make a connection to the commercial producer. When talking about biosecurity matters it can be hard to imagine the impact a commercial producer would feel however, if you draw a line back to something the target market (general public) can relate to, it makes it easier to understand.

This post made a biosecurity problem real for the general householder. It used a topic that people are passionate about, which is keeping bees safe.



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The following is a possible example of the goal, strategy and actions that were behind the post:

Biosecurity (focus area)

Risks

General public not aware of impact their behaviour may have on biosecurity. Scare campaigns may alienate target audience. Incorrect stories or misinterpreted information may be counterproductive and harmful.

Goal Increase % of the general public who are aware of the importance of biosecurity from 5% to 20% by June 2018.

Critical Success Factors Make the public feel they can have a positive impact on biosecurity.

Barriers General public may not feel it’s relevant to them – lack interest.

Strategy 1 Use social media platforms to inform public of biosecurity importance.

Action 1 Use Facebook to post relevant biosecurity stories monthly. Target 15000 new readers per month.

Action 2 TBC

Action 3 TBC

Strategy 2 Hold information stalls at key events in WA.

Action 1 TBC

Action 2 TBC

Action 3 TBC

Strategy 3 TBC

Action 1 TBC

Action 2 TBC

Action 3 TBC


HOW TO CALCULATE ROI OF A MARKETING CAMPAIGN

As outlined in step 7 of creating a social media plan it’s important to monitor and evaluate results for any marketing activity. Ideally you need to continually improve and refine your marketing initiatives. Key questions to ask yourself are:

1. Did your campaign meet it’s goal and targets?

2. Is it worth your time and resources?

3. Should you be diverting campaign resources elsewhere?

It’s very important to define the measurement tools that will be used for each campaign. For example:

Google analytics (web traffic)

Email open rates

Sales

Social media engagement

Email subscribers

Media mentions (Google alerts)

Coupon codes

Return on investment

Calculating Return On Investment (ROI) is an important measurement tool. The following information is from a web article written for Investopedia by Andrew Beattie (Beattie 2015).

Simple ROI

The most basic way to calculate the ROI of a marketing campaign is to integrate it into the overall business line calculation. You take the sales growth from that business or product line, subtract the marketing costs, and then divide by the marketing cost like so:

(Sales Growth - Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost = ROI

So if sales grew by $1,000 and the marketing campaign cost $100, then the simple ROI is 900% (($1000-$100) / $100).

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/returnoninvestment.asp

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/product-line.asp



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Campaign Attributable ROI

The simple ROI is easy to do, but it is loaded with a pretty big assumption. The assumption is that the total month-over-month sales growth is directly attributable to the marketing campaign.

For the marketing ROI to have any real meaning, it is vital to have comparisons. Monthly comparisons, particularly the sales from the business line in the months prior to the campaign launching, can help show the impact more clearly.

To really get at the impact, however, you can get a little more critical. Using a 12-month campaign lead up, you can calculate the existing sales trend. If sales are seeing an organic growth on average of 4% per month over the last 12-month period, then your ROI calculation for the marketing campaign should strip out 4% from the sales growth. So it becomes:

(Sales Growth - Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost - Average Organic Sales Growth = ROI

So lets say we have a company that averages 4% organic sales growth and they run a $10,000 campaign for a month. The sales growth for that month is $15,000. The calculation goes:

($15,000 - $10,000) / $10,000 = 50%

And then we take out the 4% for a still stellar 46% ROI. In real life, however, most campaigns bring much more modest returns, so taking out the organic growth can make a big difference.

On the flip side, however, companies with negative sales growth need to value the slowing of the trend as a success. For example, if sales drop $1,000 a month on average for the last 12-month period and a $500 marketing campaign results in a sales drop of only $200 that month, then your calculation centres on the $800 ($1,000 - $200) you avoided losing despite the established trend. So even though sales dropped, your campaign has an ROI of 60% (($800 - $500) / $500), a stellar return in the first month of a campaign allowing you to defend sales before growing them.

Challenges with Marketing ROI

Once you have a fairly accurate calculation, the remaining challenge is the time period. Marketing is a long-term, multiple touch process that leads to sales growth over time. The month over month change we were using for simplicity's sake is more likely to be spread over several months or even a year. The ROI of the initial months in the series may be flat or low as the campaign starts to penetrate the target market. As time goes by, sales growth should follow and the cumulative ROI of the campaign will start to look better.

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/organicgrowth.asp

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/target-market.asp


Another challenge is that many marketing campaigns are designed around more than just generating sales. Marketing agencies know that clients are results oriented, so they get around weak ROI figures by adding in more of the soft metrics that may or may not drive sales in the future. These can include things like brand awareness via media mentions, social media likes and even the content output rate for the campaign. Brand awareness is worth considering, but not if the campaign itself is failing to drive sales growth over time.

Other Scenarios

We’ve also been focusing on sales growth, whereas many campaigns are aimed at increasing leads with the businesses sales staff responsible for conversion. In this case, you need to estimate the dollar value of the leads by multiplying the growth in leads by your historical conversion rate (what percent actually buy).

There are also hybrid campaigns where the marketer brings leads through a qualifying filter to get a non-sales conversion; for example, something like a person signing up for monthly real estate analysis reports, giving the marketer an email to pass onto the mortgage broker client. The ROI for a campaign like this still has to measured by how many of those email leads you actually convert into paid sales for goods or services over time.

The Bottom Line

To be clear, marketing is an essential part of most businesses and can pay many times over what it costs. To make the most of your marketing spend, however, you need to know how to measure its results. Marketing firms will sometimes try to distract you with softer metrics, but ROI is the one that matters for most businesses. The ROI of any marketing campaign ultimately comes in the form of increased sales. It is a good idea to run your calculation using sales growth less the average organic growth on a regular basis throughout any campaign because the results do take time to build. That said, if the ROI isn’t there after a few months, it might just be the wrong campaign for your target market.

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/softmetrics.asp

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/brandawareness.asp

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/social-media.asp

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/conversion.asp

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/realestate.asp

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/mortgagebroker.asp

http://www.investopedia.com/articles/06/admoats.asp

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/metrics.asp



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CASE STUDY

Daringly different ideas bring forth rich fruits

Despite more competition in the market than ever before, Nudie natural fruit juices continues to thrive (even among larger competitors) thanks to thinking outside the square when marketing products.

Business situation

James Ajaka is the CEO of Nudie, a hugely successful company founded on creating pure fruit juices.

Since launching in January 2003, Nudie’s promise of nothing but fruit has resonated with customers Australia-wide. The company has grown from blending 256 pieces of fruit to make its juices in its first week to currently using 5 million. It has also gone from three employees in January 2003 to 74 employees today.

Nudie now sits in the top three growing grocery brands in Australia. It has since become the first company to produce both chai seed-infused breakfast drinks and coconut water, and will continue to expand the product range in the future.

Business response

Take risks to stand out from the pack

From day one, James and the founding team members acknowledged that they had to go about things differently.

To stand out from the pack, they coined the unusual name Nudie, and created products made with nothing but fruit using exotic blends. Nudie also featured quirky, cute and fun illustrations that made the labels instantly recognisable in store. This was completely different to what was currently on the shelves — dull, boring cartons that all looked the same with pictures of fruit on them.

Although dubious at the start whether this strategy would work, within the first three months of operation, James could see positive feedback and increasing sales.

Find out what fits with your customers’ everyday lifestyle

Ten years ago, people were not as savvy with health and wellbeing as they are now. So Nudie had to figure out a way to push the product in a way to which people would respond.

Although dubious at the start, within the first three months of operation, I could see positive feedback and increasing sales flooding in.

— James Ajaka


One of the ways the company achieved this was to remain practical — not radical — upon launch. While Nudie prides itself on innovation, the philosophy of being able to fit a Nudie into one’s realistic everyday lifestyle was key.

So rather than promising a revolutionary superfood to the public, Nudie was marketed as an easy, convenient and simple way to squeeze more fruit into your diet. The successful tagline was: ‘A whole day's fruit in one bottle’.

Conduct market testing in person and online

James knew it was important to hear exactly what his individual customers wanted. To achieve this, Nudie starting sending free samples to schools, offices and events on a daily basis — and still does today. While onsite, Nudie staff collect as much feedback as they can to review back in the lab.

To support this on-the-ground research, James has embraced online marketing strategies that allow him to communicate with Nudie customers. The most effective online platform for Nudie has been social media, where users have the option to upload their own comments and photos. Nudie now has a wide reach across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest. The company also generates a newsletter.

Last, who better to ask for feedback than your own staff? Many new and innovative ideas come from within the Nudie team. Wanting to leverage the passion of his own people, James created a work environment that encouraged

them to submit ideas and observations in a welcoming setting.

Case study by Action Words, <ceoonline.com.au/pages/id60025-daringly-different-ideas-bring-forth-rich-fruits.aspx>



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REFERENCES

Ashkenas, Ron 2013, ‘Decision making: Four tips for better strategic planning’, Harvard Business Review, October 2013.

Beattie, Andrew 2015, How to calculate ROI of a marketing campaign, Investopedia, viewed June 2017 http://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/053015/how-calculate-roi-marketing-campaign.asp

Chan Kim, W & Mauborgne, R 2002, ‘Charting your company’s future’, Harvard Business Review, June 2002.

Collis, DJ & Rukstad, MG 2008, ‘Strategy and competition – can you say what your strategy is?’, Harvard Business Review, April 2008.

Jain Subhashc C & Haley GT, Voola R and Wickham M 2009, Marketing planning and strategy, Cengage, New York.

Keller, K & Kotler, P 2011, Marketing management, Pearson Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, US.

Keller, K 2003, ‘Understanding brands, branding and brand equity’, Interactive Marketing, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 7–20.

Kelle,r K 2001, ‘Building customer-based brand equity’, Marketing Management, vol. 10, no. 2.

Martin, Roger 2010, ‘Five questions to build a strategy’, Harvard Business Review, May 2010.

Martin, Roger 2013, ‘Don’t let strategy become planning’, Harvard Business Review, Feb 2013.

Martin, Roger 2014, ‘The big lie of strategic planning’, Harvard Business Review, Feb 2014.

Neumeier, M 2006, The brand gap: how to bridge the distance between business strategy and design, New Riders Publishing, Berkeley, US.

Yeanoplos, K 2012, Basic business valuation: best practices to use when valuing a business for sale or to buy, New Riders Publishing, Berkeley, US.



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SECTION TWO: SALES AND MARKETING ACTIVITY BOOK



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YOUR ELEVATOR STATEMENT – FIRST DRAFT

We are going to complete the following activity twice today – once at the start and once again at the end. Record your first draft in the note section below.

As you enter an elevator you realise the person standing next to you is a target customer you desperately would like to start doing business with.

You have from when the door closes to when they get out at their floor (Floor 32 based on the button they have pushed) to convince them why they should do business with you.

What would you say, in the 15 seconds you have available, to communicate you are clearly different, better and important to them?

Jot down the few, most important things, you would say to achieve this. Remember, these are limited to what you could say in 15 seconds!


WHAT ARE YOUR CURRENT PRODUCT/S?



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WHAT IS YOUR TARGET MARKET?

a) Market Attractiveness

Attractiveness of a market is influenced by factors such as:

market size ($ and units)

market growth (%)

pricing trends (premium versus discounting over time)

intensity of the competition (size, number, capabilities)

overall risk in the industry (macro trends that could affect future performance)

opportunity to differentiate products and services (existing groups with unmet

needs suited to the company).

b) Business Strength in the Market

Business strength or ability to successfully compete in a market is influenced by:

product or service uniqueness and share of market buying on this basis

brand recognition

recent market share growth or decline

customer loyalty (own and competitors)

relative cost position (cost structure compared with competitors)

production capacity

distribution strength.

http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/strategic-planning-and-the-market-attractiveness-f.html#glossary-competition

http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/strategic-planning-and-the-market-attractiveness-f.html#glossary-branding



http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/strategic-planning-and-the-market-attractiveness-f.html#glossary-customer

http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/strategic-planning-and-the-market-attractiveness-f.html#glossary-cost

http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/strategic-planning-and-the-market-attractiveness-f.html#glossary-positioning

http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/strategic-planning-and-the-market-attractiveness-f.html#glossary-distribution


What do your customers value?

Completing the following table may assist a food business in gaining clarity as to which type of customers best suit it given its distinctive business competencies.

Target Customer

Alignment

Which business competency do you

need to focus on to be successful

with them?

1. lowest price 2. best quality 3. best service 4. best experience or 5. most convenient / easiest to do

business with.

Match (H/M/L) with

your current

business

competency

Coles and

Woolworths

Gourmet fresh

food markets

Restaurants/cafes

Own retail shop

IGA and / or local

supermarkets

Catering industry

Farmers markets

Interstate and

export markets



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Based on the previous table, there are three strategies for a food business to increase its success from a strategic marketing perspective:

A) If its target customers are seeking value and are prepared to pay a fair price for what its current ‘ice cream flavours’ are, it should continue doing business with its current customers and seek more customers like them. Its focus is on getting better at what it already does well.

In situations where current customers are not highly valuing a food business’s product—i.e. its current ice cream flavours are not what they are looking for, the food business has two options:

B) Change target customers to a group that does value its current ice cream flavours highly—after ensuring that this group offers the business sufficient sales to meet its revenue and profit objectives.

C) Change ice cream flavours so that the food business better meets the needs and provides these target customers what they value.

Which of the above strategies will you choose?


WHICH PRODUCTS AND CUSTOMERS ARE MAKING YOU SUCCESSFUL?

Products

Identify the products that are providing you with the most relative reward (in terms of profit) and focus your marketing efforts on growing sales of these products that are generating above-average profit margins.

Total Net Profit

By Product

Product Total Net Profit Percentage of Net Profit

Which products do you need to focus on?



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Customers

Identify current customers that provide you with above-average profit margins, and focus on keeping them and attracting more customers like them.

Total Net Profit

By Customer

Customer Total Net Profit Percentage of Net Profit

Which customers do you need to focus on?


WHAT IS OUR – MARKET CANVAS?

Your competitive advantage is the most important part of your strategy statement – it describes the logic of why you will succeed, how you differ, or what you are doing better than the competition.

As illustrated in the following diagram, your competitive advantage is the strategic sweet spot for a business. It is where it meets customers’ needs in a way that rival businesses can’t (David et al. 2008).

Figure 12 Strategic sweet spot

Creating a market canvas can help you to identify your competitive advantage. To develop a market canvas you list the factors that customers value (think what are the customers key needs) and then compare your ability to provide these factors against competitor offerings.

To do this well you will need to research your competitors in the market and your customers’ needs. Therefore, you may need to complete or revisit the following activity after you conduct further research. Today, let’s start with a draft.

Use the following template to create your business canvas and refer to your notes an examples in your reference notes. Can you see a strategy that will give you a competitive advantage?



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WHAT IS OUR STRATEGY?

As explained in your reference notes, your strategy is not the same as a strategic plan. Your strategy is the making of an integrated set of choices that collectively position your business in its industry so as to create sustainable advantage relative to competition and deliver superior financial returns (Martin 2013).

It is one integrated and logical set of choices. A preferred approach as outlined by author and professor Roger Martin (2010) is to treat strategy making as developing a set of answers to the following five interlinked questions, which cascade logically from the first to the last:

1. What is our winning aspiration?

What are our broad aspirations for our organisation & the concrete goals against which we can measure our progress?

2. Where will we play?

Across the potential field available to us, where will we choose to play and not play?

3. How will we win?

In our chosen place to play, how will we choose to win against the competitors there?

4. What capabilities need to be in place?

What capabilities are necessary to build and maintain to win in our chosen manner?

5. What management systems must be instituted?

What management systems are necessary to operate to build and maintain the key capabilities?

The trick is to have five answers that are consistent with one another and actually reinforce one another. To create a good strategy you will have to iterate — think a little bit about Aspirations & Goals, then a little bit about Where to Play and How to Win, then back to Aspirations & Goals to check and modify, then down to Capabilities and Management Systems to check whether it is really doable, then back up again to modify accordingly.

In essence your strategy describes your competitive advantage. The strategic sweet spot for a business is where it meets customers’ needs in a way that rival businesses can’t, given the context which it competes.



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Make the logic explicit

It is critical to write down the answers to these questions as it provides you with clarity and future recall of why you made your strategic decisions the way you did.

Strategy statement

Although you make take several pages to show your decision making, background information and the why you’ve chosen a specific strategy, it’s very useful to summarise your strategy into one simple statement. This allows you to clearly and easily explain your strategy to others.

To create your clear strategy statement use the following template to:

1. State your broad goal (objective).

2. State your target market.

3. State your competitive advantage.


OUR STRATEGY STATEMENT

State your broad goal (objective).

State your target market.

State your competitive advantage.

Written strategy statement:



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IDENTIFY YOUR FOCUS ON NEW, EXISTING OR OLD CUSTOMERS

Identify within your target market which of the following groups of customers you will focus on and what you will need to do:

new customers

existing customers

old customers (no longer current customers)


IDENTIFY YOUR BUSINESS’S MAJOR BARRIERS TO SELLING MORE?

Which of the following provide your business with the best opportunities to significantly increase its sales to its target customers? Circle any that you believe your business can significantly improve on and that could then significantly increase sales as a result of this.

Table 3 Initiatives to increase sales for different customer groups

NEW

Marketing to attract new customers

EXISTING

Marketing to grow lifetime value of each

existing Customer

EX-CUSTOMERS

Marketing to reactivate

ex-customers

How many target customers are aware you

exist?

Increase how long they remain your customer.

Are willing to do business with you

again.

How many know enough to know you are relevant to

them?

Buy more at a time when they buy. Buy more often.

Prefer your product to their existing

supplier’s.

How many genuinely like and want what you are

offering?

Buy other products and services you offer.

Motivated to contact you about what is

possible.

How many prefer you over your competitors?

Pay a higher price for what they buy over time.

Actually buy from you again.

How many can easily buy your products from you?

Trade up to higher priced options you offer.

How many actually take action and have contact

with you?

Buy more from you & less from your competitors.

How many actually then proceed to make a

purchase?

Recommend new customers to you.



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HOW DOES YOUR IDEAL CUSTOMER VIEW YOUR BRAND

Figure 21 The consumer-based brand equity pyramid (Keller 2001)

Most businesses need to build their own distinctive, strong brands to be successful. Additionally, the business may choose to develop quite separate brands for each of its products, or different product categories.

The suggestion is to complete this activity for your business or its most important product. You may then choose to repeat the process for each additional product or service you choose to build a unique brand for.

BRAND SALIENCE

BRAND RESONANCE

CONSUMER

JUDGMENTS CONSUMER FEELINGS

BRAND PERFORMANCE

BRAND

IMAGERY

Facts about your performance and

justification for these facts.

Images, memories, experiences and associations between you and other things.

Customers start by stereotyping you, in terms of grouping you with other things you are like (brand salience).

What sort of relationship they will have with you?

Customer determines the appropriate role for

you in their life going forward.


Step 1: Identify your points of difference

Identify the key ways you or your product is clearly different and better than your competitors. Focus on the ways that you believe are most important to your target customers, and understand why most of your existing customers have chosen you over your competitors.



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Step 2: Identify the key consequences, benefits and outcomes your customers want

Identify the key consequences, benefits and outcomes your customers want in their lives, both for their business and for them personally, as a result of doing business with you? What problem to you help them solve?

It’s useful to think of the above in terms of:

Fairy tale

Horror movie

Documentary In the following table add your thoughts in the relevant columns from the perspective of your ideal customer.


Fairy Tale Horror Movie Documentary

What desirable things are going to happen for you in your life as a results of you buying my product from me? What is it specifically about your product? Will it be for the customer’s organisation or for them personally?

What could happen to you if you don’t choose me? (Pain) What are you going to miss out on that you want if you don’t buy my product? (Craving) What undesirable things could happen to you if you buy from someone else? (Fear)

What facts do you need to know to believe my fairy tale and horror movie?

3rd party (certification, awards etc.)

2nd party evidence (testimonials. Client lists, suppliers)

1st party proof (very important info the customer MUST know)



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Step 3: Identify your ideal BRAND RESONANCE – the role you play in your best customers’ lives at the moment

Imagine your best customer was describing the role you play in their lives to another target customer. Write down what they would say to explain the role they have allocated to you in their business currently. For example, is this a preferred supplier of a particular type of produce? A solution provider? Their partner for your sort of product?



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Step 4: Identify your customers JUDGEMENTS

What are the most important JUDGEMENTS they needed to come to about you BEFORE they were willing to allocate you this role in their lives?


Step 5: Identify your customers FEELINGS

How do your best customers FEEL about you and your products currently? What feelings underlie their decision to allocate you this role in their lives?

For example, trust you, enjoy doing business with you, want you to do well, grateful for what you do for them, impressed by you etc.



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Step 6: Identify the key FACTS your customers need to create the JUDGEMENTS and FEELINGS

What are the key facts your target customers need to know about your business and product to be able to come to the previously identified JUDGEMENTS and FEELINGS?


Step 7: What EXPERIENCES do your customers need to create the JUDGEMENTS and FEELINGS

What EXPERIENCES do they need to have before they can come to the previously identified JUDGEMENTS and FEELINGS about your business and products? What images most strongly relate to these JUDGEMENTS and FEELINGS? And what do you want your target customers associating you with, to maximise the chance they will come to these JUDGEMENTS and FEELINGS about you?

For example, Woolworths uses strong farming and fresh food associations to build its ‘Fresh’ brand.



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Step 8: What CATEGORY do you want your target customer to place you in?

Relating this back to your previously identified ‘business competencies’ and the type of food you produce is often worthwhile. For example, ‘one of the best quality and best-tasting gelatos in Australia’ or ‘one of the most professional salad production firms in Asia’, etc.


TOUCHPOINT AUDIT

The following activity relates to information we discussed on pages ? of the reference section of this manual.

Pre-purchase touchpoints Importance (1–5)

Performance (–3 to +3)



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During-purchase touchpoints Importance (1–5)



Post-purchase touchpoints Importance (1–5)




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WHAT IS MY SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY?

At first using social media for marketing purposes can feel overwhelming. The following steps may help you create a strategy for social media that is both manageable and provides successful results.

STEP 1: Define your desired social media outcome.

Defining your social media outcome will help drive you to the end results you want.

For example, what do you want social media to help you achieve? Do you want social media to help you: Increase brand exposure/awareness? Increase brand loyalty? Build a community? Other?


STEP 2: Where is your audience?

Continuing on from the work you’ve previously done in this Sales and Marketing session to define your target audience, you now need to identify where your target audience sits online. For example, do they:

Use Pinterest to plan their meals for the week?

Spend their time on Instagram browsing for food inspiration?

Use Facebook to share

Subscribe to favourite food blogs?

None or all of the above?

Tip: Keep it simple by choosing only one or two platforms to work with.



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STEP 3: Brainstorm social media opportunities

What are the potential social media opportunities that would be suitable for your brand and target audience?


STEP 4: Identify risks of a social media campaign?

You will need to know what to/what not to include on social media.

Brainstorm your brand risks:



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Risk Matrix to prioritise and manage your risks

List and prioritise risks using the Risk Matrix and describe risk management

strategies for each (if required).

Be clear in your risk plan, what are your brands values and what are your own?

RISK MATRIX

Figure 22 Risk Matrix


Risk name

Likelihood Impact Category Response



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STEP 5: Define SMART goals.

Define your SMART goal and remember to know what you’re measuring so you know whether you’re succeeding or not. For example:

For brand exposure, your measurement might be the conversion rate of new customers from Facebook by the first quarter.

For brand advocacy, you might be measuring the increase in customer stories shared for 2017.

Use the planning template on the next page to write your goals.

Figure 22 SMARTT Definition

STEP 6: Define your strategies and actions

Next, based on your SMART goal/s you will need to identify the critical success factors, barriers and resulting strategies and actions that will make your goal/s happen?

Look at the examples on page ? of what actions you might take for two different goals.

On the next page draft your goals, strategies and actions for Sales and Marketing.

It’s important to note that, while tools and strategy work together, not to confuse the two. Tools in the digital world change rapidly. If a tool doesn’t work, simply try something else to achieve your goal.



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Sales and Marketing (focus area)

Risks

Goals

What are our targets - SMART?

Ensure you measure results not activity.

Critical Success Factors

What key conditions will help us to achieve one or more goals?

Barriers

What existing or potential challenges may hinder us to achieve one or more goals?

Strategies

What are the strategies (broad activities) that we need to either: 1) achieve a goal 2) create a critical success factor 3) overcome a barrier 4) all of the above

Actions

What are the action steps that we need to do to achieve a strategy?

Goal Critical Success Factors

Barriers Strategy 1

Action 1

Action 2

Action 3

Strategy 2

Action 1

Action 2

Action 3

Strategy 3

Action 1

Action 2

Action 3

Goal Critical Success Factors

Barriers Strategy 1

Action 1

Action 2

Action 3

Strategy 2

Action 1

Action 2

Action 3

Strategy 3

Action 1

Action 2


STEP 7: Monitor and evaluate results

As part of your continuous improvement process, remember to monitor and evaluate your results. Questions you might ask yourself are:

Are your strategies working?

Are you achieving your desired targets (goals)?

Do you need to do more research on your target market?

Do you need to stop, start or continue anything?

Figure 19 Continuous Improvement Cycle



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YOUR ELEVATOR STATEMENT – SECOND DRAFT

We completed the following activity at the start of our workshop today. We now have an opportunity to do the same activity however now we have gained a greater focus.

As you enter an elevator you realise the person standing next to you is a target customer you desperately would like to start doing business with.

You have from when the door closes to when they get out at their floor (Floor 32 based on the button they have pushed) to convince them why they should do business with you.

What would you say, in the 15 seconds you have available, to communicate you are clearly different, better and important to them?

Jot down the few, most important things, you would say to achieve this. Remember, these are limited to what you could say in 15 seconds!


Let’s see if our elevator statements have improved. What feedback have you received form others? Is there anything you would change?



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WHAT ARE YOU THINKING?

Note the key points you got out of this session for you and your business. Is there anything you need to include in your strategic plan?

Planning point!

What might you include in your strategic plan?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS - agric.wa.gov.au · definitions for marketing currently—and each of them is...

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