The Marketing Plan Development Process Flow

I’m going to continue posting the materials from my Udemy.com online course entitled The Marketing Plan Seminar so that my followers can get a feel for the kind of work that I can do for them on a consulting basis. If you can’t wait for the installments to be posted you can order the complete course at http://udemy.com/The-Marketing-Plan-Seminar at any time. In the mean time, I hope you will enjoy each small installment and please do give me a call if doing so triggers something for you where I can be of help with an Instant Strategy Session or working with you longer term with the Monthly Mentoring Mode.  Enjoy!

The Marketing Plan Development Process Flow

The Marketing Plan Seminar - Slide5
This image goes with the accompanying video that is part of the online Marketing Plan Seminar. This is slide number 5.

This slide illustrates the seven major steps in developing your overall marketing plan. There may be intermediate or sub-steps required during plan development but these are the major ones. Have a good look and a good listen to this one. It is critical to your marketing planning success.

As you can see from the diagram, it’s important to consider both external input — from customers and market and competitive research — as well as your own internal constraints. But don’t let internal constraints alone limit your thinking. There may be ways around them that you’ll come up with as you develop your initial thoughts and plans.

Once the preliminary analysis is complete it is time to kick around the pros and cons of each idea and home in on the actual recommendations that will be implemented as tactics in your overall marketing plan. And don’t forget to include the mechanisms to periodically measure the results of your strategy so that you can continously adjust and fine-tune it based on what’s working and what’s not working as well as you’d planned.

Scoop.it

Why Have A Marketing Plan?

I’m going to continue posting the materials from my Udemy.com online course entitled The Marketing Plan Seminar so that my followers can get a feel for the kind of work that I can do for them on a consulting basis. If you can’t wait for the installments to be posted you can order the complete course at http://udemy.com/The-Marketing-Plan-Seminar. In the mean time, I hope you will enjoy each small installment and give me a call if doing so triggers something for you where I can be of help.  Enjoy!

Why Have A Marketing Plan?

Why A Plan?
This image goes with the accompanying video that is part of the online Marketing Plan Seminar. This is slide number 4.

 

Here’s another question for you and this one is not rhetorical at all. It outlines why you really need to have a formal marketing plan. Have a look and a listen.

 

If you don’t have a plan it is nearly impossible to reach your goal successfully.  Your plan supports your vision for your business and charts the path to lead you from where you are currently to where you want to be.

 

Where Is Your Marketing Plan?

I’m going to start posting the materials from my Udemy.com online course entitled The Marketing Plan Seminar so that my followers can get a feel for the kind of work that I can do for them on a consulting basis. If you can’t wait for the installments to be posted you can order the complete course at http://udemy.com/The-Marketing-Plan-Seminar. In the mean time, I hope you will enjoy each small installment and give me a call if doing so triggers something for you where I can be of help.  Enjoy!

Where Is Your Marketing Plan?

Where Is Your Marketing Plan Slide
This image goes with the accompanying video that is part of the online Marketing Plan Seminar. This is slide number 3.

Here’s a bit of a rhetorical question for you. And in the accompanying video I explain what I mean by that. Have a look and a listen.

It really is critically important that your plan be formal and published. Formal makes it more concrete and publishing it so that others can see it, review it, question it or suggest improvements to it helps create buy-in and helps make you accountable for its implementation.

 

It’s a Small World (After All?)

Design to Test BookI had the opportunity to participate in an Executive Briefing breakfast meeting this past Tuesday and one of the participants was a man named Dale who was, of all things, a veteran of the electronic automatic test equipment (ATE) world, a world that I inhabited many years ago.

We spoke about how there were 10 big ATE companies in the 70s and 80s and 50 medium sized companies and literally dozens of small ones — his among them.  Today there are two, maybe three big ones, a few medium sized ones and very few small ones. A lot of that has to do with the implosion of the technology world that occurred in the early 2000s, but a lot of it also has to do with a shift in test methodology whose creation I sparked.

Once upon a time I thought it would be good to teach electronic designers, who once worried only about function and not mundane things like manufacturability, testability or yield.  So I wrote the first book and ended up traveling the world teaching and preaching DFT, as it was then called. And I had fun, fame and respect from the electronics test community. “Rambo” of testability. “Pope” of testability. Those were heady days.

You have probably never heard of IEEE-Std-1149 or boundary scan — the so-called “dot one” standard. These are terms that are familiar only to those involved in the design and test of the integrated circuits. But that standard is incorporated in the integrated circuits that are used in  virtually every electronic product you use today — including the device you are using to read this post. I literally changed the world of electronics test.

Creating the IEEE standard became a crusade of sorts for me. The standard got co-opted by some very large companies with their own agendas and thus my one truly altruistic act ended up killing my DFT seminar business.  Go figure.  No good deed goes unpunished!

I tell this story only to illustrate that change happens. In the technology world, in the marketing world and in our own lives.  And we can either adapt to those changes or we’re out of business. I (thankfully) had other things to teach, preach and sell and had supporters who appreciated my high technology hardware and software technical and marketing skills and whose support has gotten me to where I am today — a consultant who can share his marketing knowledge — for a price — with those who appreciate that wisdom and the love with which it is shared.

Do you have a crusade within you? A passion to change the world in whatever way you can? If so, share it with us. If not, let us help you create one. Because it truly is through the passion of individuals that we create change in the world.  Let us hear from you in the Comments section and thanks for reading.

The Marketing Seminar/Workshop – Encore Edition

The Marketing Seminar/Workshop – Table of Contents

A live encore presentation of The Marketing Seminar/Workshop will be held on January 24, 2013, in Northeast Portland. It has been produced and will be presented by Jon Turino, an award-winning speaker and one of Portland’s premier marketing strategy consultants. Here’s the Table of Contents for the session:

Helping Businesses Grow Through Better Marketing Strategies

Jon Turino Marketing Strategy Consultant Portland, OR

  • Our Agenda for Today
    • A short presentation by Jon
    • Workshop session
  • Where Is Your Marketing Plan?
  • Why a Plan?
  • The Process Flow
  • Elements of a Marketing Plan – 1
  • Elements of a Marketing Plan – 2
  • Elements of a Marketing Plan – 3
  • Who Are We Trying to Reach?
  • What Message(s) Are We Sending?
  • What Message(s) Are We Sending?
  • What Media Should We Use?
  • Social Media Considerations
  • Converting Leads to Customers
  • Other Elements to Consider
  • Other Tools in Your Arsenal
  • Your Networking World
  • Some Networking Tips
  • What’s In It For You?
  • Let’s Get You A Plan! – Workshop Session

Registration information will be forthcoming soon.

Marketing Seminar Workshop Large Flyer - Dec 6 2012 Session

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Link to Event Page with PayPal Registration Here.

 

The Power of “Why?”

Woodblocks Image WhyI’m prompted by reading a recent post on LinkedIn about what to do when clients ask you to do something wrong to offer some simple advice as to how to get that client to reach his or her own “Aha” moment and abandon their folly.

Simply ask “Why?”  And continue to ask “Why?” until you get the same answer a minimum of three times in a row. You may, at this point, be fairly confident that you’ve discovered the root cause of the clients’ need, want or desire.  And the client may, by this time, achieved the desired state of realization.

If you are a parent you know just how aggravating the constant “Why?” question from your young children can be. “Why is the sky blue?,” when asked by a 5-year-old, can’t reasonably be answered with an explanation of the layers of the atmosphere and the behavior of light in that atmosphere. Because the child won’t understand that answer and thus you will be faced with an innumerable and unending series of “why”s which will only beget another innumerable and unending series of additional “why” questions.

Far better to say something like “Because that’s the color Mother Nature wanted it to be.” If you get another “why” to this answer you’ll have to come up with some simple reason why Mother Nature would do such a thing, but you are not, in this case, constrained by reality or facts. You can use whatever it takes to end the questions, including distracting the child from that train of thought altogether. By asking, for example, “Why do you like brown (or pink or green or yellow) ice cream the best?  Shall we go get some?”

When dealing in the real world of business with presumably educated and intelligent adults, however, the above example won’t work very well. You’ll want to have the client come up with real answers to your “why” questions so that you can eliminate the superficial or fallacious reasons that led to the request in the first place. You might ask “Why do you want to paint the delivery van chartreuse when the company logo colors are orange and brown?” If you get an answer like “Because my new girlfriend thinks it would be cute.” you can ask “And why do you think cute will be better than businesslike?” or something to that effect.

You can, and usually without upsetting the client too badly, get to a good solution using this powerful technique.  Give it a try the next time you are faced with a demand that seems unreasonable. And please share with us the results. Why? Because I’ll bet they’ll be enlightening and humorous at the same time.

You can see some examples of wrongheadedness at 15 Question Silent Marketing Test, which also includes a video. Thanks for reading.

Scoop.it

How Much Is An Idea Worth?

Golden Egg Illustration for a New IdeaIt doesn’t look like much, does it? An egg made of metal. OK, a nice metal. Gold. How much is it worth?

The answer, of course, is: “It depends.”  The same answer you’ll get when you ask “What’s the right marketing strategy for my business?”

What is your business? Who are your target markets? What messages are you using to create buying actions from the members of those markets? What media are you using to deliver those messages? Are they working as well as you’d like them to?

What if you took an hour to just talk to someone about some new ideas for improving your marketing strategies? What if you discovered that there were things you weren’t doing anymore that you used to do that used to bring in a consistent stream of business? What if you, or the other person, or the two of you together, came up with some new ideas for penetrating new markets, or doing a better job of converting leads to customers in your current markets, or developing more compelling messages or finding new ways to deliver those messages?

How much is that worth? Is it worth an hour of your time? Is it worth a few hundred dollars to have that discussion with someone who’s not buried in your day-to-day issues and problems and who might provide, or trigger within you, some new ideas that could dramatically, or maybe even only marginally improve your top line? Take just a moment to imagine the possibilities. It could be worth a heck of a lot more than an hour of your time and a few hundred dollars in consulting fees now, couldn’t it?

Of course you could be too busy putting out fires and chasing the next sale to make time to spend that hour. And money is tight, isn’t it? But things won’t get better if you keep doing the same things you are doing now, will they?

New ways to deliver your messages. New messages. Better messages. Maybe new markets. Maybe new ways to approach those markets. What might those ideas be worth? Give that some thought an let me know what you think.

Thanks for reading and best of luck in valuing that egg. And call or write me if you want some help with that.

 

Markets, Messages and Media

Markets, Media and Messages for MoneyThere’s been a ton of discussion in one of my Linkedin groups about the “Three Ps” of marketing. Some of it has been practical and some pretty esoteric. Some pretty bland and some pretty heated. Some to the point and some veering pretty far off. Even to the point of introducing the Three As, the Three Bs, the Three Cs, etc., with the possibility of twenty six Three Things (using the English alphabet.  So I figure I can put my two cents in for the Three Ms — Markets, Messages and Media. Because this is where I concentrate with my clients when it comes to marketing strategy development.

If you participate in networking groups you’ve no doubt heard the advice about providing your fellow participants with fairly specific targets in response to the “Who is a good lead for you?” question. The idea here is to avoid “spray and pray” marketing by trying to sell to everyone whether they might need or want your product or service or not.

You’ll need to hone your messages to resonate with their needs and wants if you expect to get them to respond to your calls to action. What problems can you solve for them? How much time or money can you save them? What painful situations can you extricate them from or prevent from happening with your offering. What will they get if they do what you ask? What’s the benefit that’s in it for them?

If you pay attention to the demographics of your real target market niches, you’ll use the right media to try to get their attention with your tailored messages.  That means avoiding the “tactic of the day” trap, or throwing darts in the dark as I described it in an earlier blog post. How many 70 year old people shopping for cemetery plots are doing that on their iPhones or Android smart phones? Do you really need that mobile app to reach them or is there a more appropriate and more effective media for doing so?

Markets, messages and media. Three critical “Ms” that are central to your marketing strategies. Have you reviewed yours lately? Do they still fit with what you are trying to do, who you are trying to reach and how you are reaching them or could they use a fresh look from your advisory board or an outside consultant?

Give that some thought. And please let me know what you think about what I’ve said as well.  Thanks for reading and I look forward to receiving your comments.

 

Making Some Tough Decisions

Times Are Tough - Decisions IllustrationI’ve been working on the upcoming (October 2, 2012) issue of myConnections Newsletter Logo newsletter and as I was examining the MailChimp statistics I came to some conclusions. They’ll be announced in the newsletter itself next week but I thought I’d share them now with those of you who might not have been opening the newsletter regularly or who would like to be informed a little in advance.

The upcoming issue will be the 10th issue of my newsletter and I really enjoy writing it for everyone who reads it. I am always pleased when someone makes it a point to tell me at a networking event how much they enjoy it. I do try to keep it fresh with great content culled from all over the web that I think you’ll actually be able to use.

It is also a lot of work to put that missive together every three weeks. I save links to articles, groups, organizations and resources that I think will be helpful to you as I find them between issues and then curate the best into each new issue.

This newsletter is currently being mailed to 993 email addresses. All are people who I have met and who have shown interest in receiving information from me. Yet the average open rate for this newsletter is only 20.2%.  That’s better than the industry average of 18.1% for my kind of newsletter, but it is still very disappointing. So I’m going to raise my open rate by a whole bunch over the next few issues.

How will I do such a thing? There are really only two ways to do that. I can contine to try to get more of you to open this newsletter, read it and click through on things of interest to you. Or I can begin removing the 770+ people who don’t ever open it from my email list. I’m going to do some of both, of course, and it won’t be an abrupt change, but it is going to happen.

I want to make sure that my efforts reach people who care about growing their businesses through better marketing strategies and, frankly, who will begin to spend some money with me on doing that. An Instant Strategy Session is only $125. The Marketing Plan Seminar online course is only $79. You can sign up for monthly mentoring for as little as $100 per month. There’s only so much I can do without revenue from the product and service packages I offer to support the ongoing freely supplied calendar, resource and newsletter efforts.

If you and I can’t figure out some ways for you to do some better marketing to grow your business with my help then neither of us is worth our salt and I, at least, should stop my current activities and get a “real” job!

So please don’t be one of the 770+ who will lose access to what many consider a very valuable resource. Open each issue and make use of the materials contained in it. And please see if you can’t figure out how best to support my ongoing efforts on your behalf by sending some business my way. That way we’ll both win!


The Power of a Vision

VisionI heard it way back when from Steve Thornton at the 2012 Portland Success Summit. I’ve heard it from Zig Ziglar.  I’ve heard it from Anthony Robbins. I think I’ve heard it from every motivational speaker that I’ve ever had the privilege of listening to, starting 35 years ago with Louis Tice when I worked for the John Fluke Manufacturing Company.

(Quick aside:  With a name like Fluke, you had better deliver results that aren’t flukes, just like Smuckers needs to deliver good tasting jams and jellies!)

I’ve not only heard it and read about it in books including The Magic of Believing, and continued to use it, but I’ve actually taught it to others. And I am still amazed at the power of a vision.

If you can create a clear picture in your mind of how things are — will be, but in the present tense — when you are doing what you most want to do, your subconscious will cause you to resolve the conflict between the current picture of your reality and the reality as you imagine it. Your subconscious does not like conflict, or disharmony as I once heard it described. It wants you to feel content.

So if you create a vision of how you are when you have accomplished the goals you need to achieve your vision, and if you can couple that with a “feeling good” emotion, it will lead you to do the things necessary to change reality as it is today into reality as you visualize it. Or it will modify your picture of reality as you visualize to match where you are now and keep you stuck where you are. But it will resolve the conflict, one way or the other.

This is not new age weirdness. It is proven science that works for people in business, in athletics, in medicine and in any other field. And there are too many people who have used it, continue to use it, proselytize about it and, in fact succeed with it, to ignore.

If you haven’t been exposed to this powerful mechanism for changing your life, you owe it to yourself to learn as much as you can about it as soon as possible so that you can begin to use it to achieve your vision in life. Unless, of course, you are perfectly happy with the way things are in your life right now.

As I used to tell my students:  Make a picture, make it real and make it feel. Your creative subconscious will go to work for you to help you make your vision a reality.

Want more? Order your copy of Inspiration Now! today.