Data or Creativity?

Had an interesting chat with an old colleague of mine the other day who came through the old school marketing ranks (to be fair, so did I), he spent a lot of time in a senior data role in a telecoms company we both worked for; and he has kept the strong ethos that marketing should be strongly data-led first and foremost, it should be the driving force behind the strategy and tactics of the business.

I disagree to some extent, there are obviously times when data is incredibly important (predominately if you are doing some qualitative research on what your target market(s) think about you or you are analysing analytics from campaigns or web site etc), but this should only inform you and not be the single driving force behind any major business decisions or campaigns.

Data (just like technology) enables opportunities for marketers, but the creativity is where the real value is created.

I think we see this problem occurring everyday, big brands push their flashing advertising on us, but very little of it sticks in the minds of the consumers – they lack the creativity needed to be memorable (and therefore successful), I’m sure the data says the execution was perfect, but if it doesn’t hold consumers interest or create that desire, you’ve lost the war.

So yes, data is important, let it drive discussion and debate in the boardrooms (I’m all for that), but never let it drive business decisions; creativity is what’s needed to drive the creation of the value, and it’s this value which will ultimately decide whether your strategies and tactics are successful.

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What’s the Purpose of Business Development?

You have a business with a great marketing plan, an absolutely brilliant brand image, you’re growing brand equity, have a constant supply of successful campaigns going out, through social media channels you are increasing your Fans, Followers, Pins etc and engaging with your market.

Are you booking the right kind of (profitable) work with the clients you pursued, or are you a hapless bystander who took whatever projects (and price) that came your way?

So what’s next, how do you take your business to the next level?

Answering these questions is where business development comes in.

Business Development Role

A supreme understanding of all media (both online and offline) is just the start, the key role of business development is to understand to the nth degree customer relationships, how to build brand advocates, and how to cultivate strong brand equity through customer service.

Business development must involves an evaluation of customer feedback and some form of sentiment analysis to determine if current the marketing strategies and tactical outputs are indeed as effective as originally planned.

Only by working through this analysis can it be determined if there are any missed opportunities or refinement to existing strategies or campaigns.

Where Businesses Fail

We are all seen businesses and business owners start off with the very best of intentions. They go big (often punching above their weight), as they should, they employ the perfect marketing strategies designed to target their perfect audience (and customers), and slowly they start to build their brand equity. However, if their marketing plan is not evaluated and re-evaluated how can they be sure that their plan is continuing to be effective (or are they simply wasting time, money and energy!).

As technology changes, trends change, and the target audience responds differently to marketing messages, so much the marketing plan needs to change. Consider the following questions when re-evaluating marketing plan:

• Have the core demographic changed?
• Is there any new technology been employed by the market? (apps, mobile devices, web platforms, media etc) 
• Have the trends changed? How have changing trends altered your audience’s behaviour or attention?
• Are you still making the best of your company’s available resources? 
• Have there been any legal, political, social or major economic changes since the marketing strategy was devised?
• Is every aspect of the business on track with the marketing plan? Is every department remaining consistent? 
• Is every aspect of your marketing and advertising still remaining true to your brand message?

The Purpose of Business Development

As already mentioned, Business Development should understand completely customer relationships and how the market and customer behaviour changes, how the interations you have within your business alter those customer relationships.

With this knowledge, business development teams are able to refine marketing plans and improve your overall business plan.

They should be in a position to be able to:

• Identify gaps within your marketing strategy
• Recognise unused internal resources and missed opportunities
• Cultivate and grow current customer/partner relationships
• Attract new customers and partners
• Brand advocates

The more you can let ‘business development’ into the marketing planning process, the more you can tie activity to desired results, the more leverage you have in driving client development behaviour.

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Eight Hour Marketing Plan™

Develop a basic Marketing Plan in only 8 hours with the 8 Hour Marketing Plan™
I first published my eight hour marketing plan in 2000 when I worked with a number of online businesses to try to get them to understand how easy it was to develop a simple plan.  This is a little out of date now and I will get around to updating it at some time; but I thought it was worth publishing anyway.

Hour 1 - Information gathering about your business

Get yourself a large box. Gather as much information as you can in one hour. This may not seem like long, but believe me after one hour you will be glad to stop ... and surprised at how much information you have gathered!.
Do not stop to read any of it ... this is the gathering phase. You may enlist others to help you in this or any other phase, but keep them within the same one hour restriction.

Your gathering should include all of your past advertising and marketing materials. Include items such as letterheads, envelopes, business cards, direct-mail pieces, magazine ads, Yellow Pages ads, invoices, statements, counter cards, sales samples, packaging materials, press releases, PR stories, promo items, print outs of web pages and anything else used to market your company.

Next, add sales statistical information available about your company. Place sales reports from the past three years in the box. Look for breakout information such as sales by year, month, product line, customer and geographical area. Place any target information or sales rep information in the box. When your time is up, stop. If you happen to run across something else, drop it in the box, but don't spend any more time on this. The secret is to keep to the time limit.

Hour 2 - Information gathering about your customers and competitors

Use a second box to gather information about your customers and your competitors, but again, do so within a one-hour time frame. Put in the box copies of your customer/client lists, details about your top customers, mailing lists, etc. If you have time, talk to your best customers and ask them why they do business with you.

Competitor information can be easily gleaned from several sources (web sites, in-house material etc).
Find copies of their magazine ads. Focus on the information that is readily available.

Hour 3 - Preparation

This third block should be used to compile the documents you have gathered into meaningful information. Again, give yourself one hours of uninterrupted time and, this time, you may want to consider getting away from your office or normal place of work.
Spread out all of the contents of your first box onto a table. With a note pad handy, start by looking at the sales numbers. Take a few moments to jot down the answers to these questions, as well as others you may have:

• Who are your biggest clients?
• What do they buy from you?
• What months are the most successful for you?
• What is your best product line?
• What are your sales trends?

Next, look at all of your marketing materials. Spread them out on the table. Think about each piece, as well as the entire collection. Obviously, you could spend a whole day critiquing your sales numbers and your marketing items. But by keeping the exercise to just one hour (remember you can build on this work later), you will better focus your attention. Here are some questions for this part of the exercise:

• What do your marketing pieces say about you?
• Is there a consistency to your approach?
• To whom are you speaking?
• Do the pieces tell the message you want told?
• How do your message increase sales?
• What relationship does your marketing team have with your sales team?

As you're making these notes, take one sheet of paper and designate it the "ideas page". As an idea comes into your mind ... no matter how crazy ... write it down.

Hour 4 - More Preparation

Now, put the sales numbers and the marketing materials aside.

Take the information and materials about your clients and your competitors and place them on the table. Select your three strongest competitors and your 10 best customers.

Spend a few minutes (3-4) thinking about each of them. Then ask yourself the following questions:

• Why do your best 10 customers choose you instead of your competitors?
• Do your competitors spend all their money with you or some with your competitors too?
• Do you offer your customers anything unique?
• Why are these competitors good? (if they are!)

This is the critical step in this process. An hours sounds like a long time on this, but it isn't!.
Once you have finished, put everything back in the boxes and stop (remember the time limit).

Congratulations ... you are halfway through the process.

Hour 5-6 - The Outline

Get your notes (for this part you can refer to specific items in the boxes if needed).
Unlike the other sections, you need two hours of uninterrupted time to complete this next stage. Beginning with your notes, build a brief outline of where you are. To help in the process, I've put together the following questions; most questions should have between three and five answers:

• What were your sales in the past three years?
• What do you want your sales to be next year?
• Why do your best customers do business with you?
• Who are your main competitors?
• Why do our customers do business with someone else?
• If you lost 2% of your average sized customers, what revenues would you lose ?
• How many customers are you losing each year?
• What does your current marketing materials say about you?
• What is the single best thing you do to market your business?

Hour 5-6 - The Outline

Remember you have two hours to complete this Outline stage, if you are asking the right type of questions, and really thinking about the answers, honest, truthful answers .. you need the two-hours.

Hour 7-8 - The Plan

This is another two-hours stage.

Use your notes and the items you have in the boxes to help with this final stage. You are now going to prepare the first draft of your marketing plan.

The idea is that you now have enough information and ideas to put together your marketing plan.  Don't worry if you find you cannot complete yours as shown here, just do what you can with the information you have, use your plan as a start of your activities and go from there.

What you have done will start as a guide for your day to day marketing activities, and you should be able to answer simple questions like; what do you want to say? why do you want to say it? to whom do you want to say it? where do you say it? wow do you want to say it? etc.

If you spend the Eight hours wisely, you will have a simple plan for marketing and the beginnings of the full marketing plan.

Hour 7-8 - The Plan

Remember that this is another two-hours stage.

What you have done will start as a guide for your day to day marketing activities, and you should be able to answer simple questions like; what do you want to say? why do you want to say it? to whom do you want to say it? where do you say it? wow do you want to say it? etc.

If you spend the Eight hours wisely, you will have a simple plan for marketing and the beginnings of the full marketing plan.

Continue working on the plan on a day by day basis, NEVER let it gather dust, you really need to revise the plan at least every quarter to get the most from it, and next year, it may only take you one hour to completely revise for the new sales year!

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Elements of a Marketing Plan

I just wanted to publish this really quick Marketing Plan template for you all.

1. Executive Summary
Write 2-3 paragraphs that just explain the document that the reader is about to read. I would suggest that your write one paragraph on what business you are in, one on your target markets/customers and one on where the revenues are going to come from.

2. Situation Analysis
What business are you in maybe some high level figures (sales, market share etc). Anything on any specific threats or opportunities.

2.1. Market Summary
Where are your best sales generated from ? (what type of customers?, which products etc).

2.1.1. Market Demographics
An overview that profiles your best markets/customers (i.e. what sector are they in, how big are they etc).

2.1.2. Market Trends
Any trends spotted in your notes, and general market trends of forecasts noted.

2.1.3. SWOT Analysis
During your note taking, you will have noted your companies strengths and weaknesses, and also any opportunities and threats when you looked at your competitors.

2.1.4. Competitor Analysis
Any notes of interest about your competition, especially if you believe its why they are good at what they do.

2.2. SWOT Analysis
Write down your companies strengths and weaknesses and any External Opportunities and Threats that you have made a note of, you only need bullet points.

2.3. Competition
Do your competitors fall into certain categories?
Name your largest competitors, do you know what percentage of the market they have?

2.4. Services
What services do you offer your customers?
Again, bullet points are fine here, you just need basic information for now.

2.5. Keys to Success
Do you know what these are ? They usually center around:

• Customer Satisfaction
• Growth
• Customer Retention
• Operations Effectiveness
• Products
• People (your staff)

2.6. Critical Issues
Do you know what these are ? They maybe things like:

• Customer Retention
• High operating costs
• Poor brand awareness
• Poor market focus
• Little marketing effort
• People poorly trained and lack motivation

2.7. Historical Results
Jot down those old sales figures, note anything activity or product you were particularly successful at.

2.8. Micro-environment
You may not be able to fully answer this right now, but use the following headings later.

Consumer trends - what's generally happening in the market.
Economic changes - is the market spending? General business economy good or bad ?
Technology advancements - technology is advancing, are your products ? what are your customers expecting ?
Competitive activity - is competition increasing ? What sort of customers are they winning ?
Political and legal environment - is your business related to political changes ? This could include tax, legislation etc

3.0. Marketing Strategy
Based on what you know, you should have a good idea of what you need to do, this is your Marketing Strategy, write it down.

It could be based on revenues, operating costs, customers or market share

3.1. Mission
You might be in a position to suggest a Mission for the business.
There are a few basic elements that a good mission statement offers:

• It identifies your organisation
• It identifies your customers
• It tells the world what you do

3.2. Marketing Objectives
How do you intend to achieve your stated strategy?

3.3. Financial Objectives
If you want to, you can set yourself some financial objectives. These really need to be worked out with the sales teams too.

3.4. Target Market
What are your primary target markets?

3.5. Positioning
How do you intend to position yourself in the market.

I recommend using the following template ... "For [Customer Segment], our [Product/Service] is [Your USP's or SSP's]".

3.6. Strategy Pyramids
A Strategy Pyramid if correctly written will show in bullet form your proposed Short Term, Medium Term and Long Term strategies.

3.7. Marketing Mix
Write an overview of what (if anything) has worked well over previous years.

3.7.1. Services Marketing
An overview of the services you will be offering your customers.

3.7.2. Pricing Policy
What pricing policy will you adopt ?

Is it to charge less than your competitors ? Cost plus model ?

3.7.3. Promotion Policy
Provide an idea of the value of the budget you might adopt for marketing (if you really do not know at this stage, quote between 1.0 - 2.0% of revenues.

What type of media would you expect to use ?

• TV
• National Press
• Regional Press
• Trade Magazines
• Advertorials
• Exhibitions
• Direct Marketing
• Telemarketing
• Business Gifts
• Case Studies
• Newsletters
• Literature
• Presentations
• Sponsorship

3.7.4. Product Policy
Do you have any specific product policy in mind ? Any products sold well in previous years that need updating ? Any products not selling and need withdrawing ?

3.7.5. Distribution Policy
Will you be using a direct salesforce? Indirect salesforce, Internet ?

3.8. Market Research
Will you be conducting any market research ?
Are there any areas of the market you have little or no knowledge ?

4.0. Financials, Budgets, and Forecasts
Financial overview, include marketing budget, potential forecasts, and any assumptions you may have made.

4.1. Breakeven Analysis
If you have the time to quickly workout your breakeven point note it here.

4.2. Sales Forecast
What sales are you expecting for the year ?
If you can, break it out by month, product and sales area.

4.3. Marketing Budget
Have a quick think about the amounts of money you need to spend on marketing and start detailing it here, just use a 'rule of thumb' if you need to right now;

example:

Business Press ... 34%
Literature ... 10%
Exhibitions ... 14%
Direct Marketing ... 8%
PR ... 4%
Regional Newspapers ... 15%
National Newspapers ... 15%


4.3. Marketing Budget - Return on Investment
You know what you want to spend on marketing, you have made an assumption about the value of the sales, therefore you can work our your return on marketing spend.

5.0. Controls
What controls will you put in place?
Recap on your objectives, pull out some milestones, and sales goals..

5.1. Tactical Plan
Make a chart, marketing activity up the left hand side and quarters or months along the bottom. Suggest some headline activity that should be taking place.

5.2. Marketing Organisation
Quickly draw your marketing organisation, show where they feed into sales

5.3. Contingency Plan
Always plan for the worse, some things that can go wrong include:

Revenues EXCEED projection - can your after-sales team support the effort ? You may need to hire additional staff, and bring in more equipment.
Revenues MISS projection - you have to prepare for the possibility, you may have to redouble your marketing efforts (you MUST NOT decrease marketing spend ... things will then get worse!), you have to get your message out to the market clearer.

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