Elements of a Marketing Plan — 1

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!

: This image goes with the accompanying video that is part of the online Marketing Plan Seminar. This is slide number 6.

This slide illustrates the first thing that you’ll want to do in developing your marketing plan: market research. Have a look and a listen to this one. The better your research the better your plan will be.

Elements of a Marketing Plan — 1

You’ll want to make sure that you take a real objective look at your markets — people who are really likely to be intersted in what you can supply. You’ll want to estimate the size of your market(s) and segment them into niches where appropriate. “Everyone” is not a well defined target market!

You also need to identify competitors, not only for your product or service but also for the overall dollars that are available from your prospective customers for your type of product or service. Look also at barriers to entry. How expensive is it to enter the market? What regulations or licenses could impact your entry into the market? And what about physical location needs and alternatives if you are considering a brick and mortar based business.

The more complete your research, the better your planning results will be. Don’t skimp on this step!

November 29, 2012December 14, 2012

How’s Your Scotoma Quotient?

If you aren’t familiar with the term, WebMD defines the scotoma as “An isolated area of varying size and shape, within the visual field, in which vision is absent or depressed.” And as “A blind spot in psychological awareness.” The first one discusses a physical manifestation while the second refers to a psychological manifestation. And that is the one I want to talk about.

The psychological scotoma is most often discussed in the context of cognitive dissonance — typically described as the feeling of discomfort when simultaneously holding two or more differing ideas, beliefs, values or emotional reactions. The phrase was coined by Leon Festinger in 1956 and published in his 1957 book called “A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance.” According to Festinger, people engage in a process he termed “dissonance reduction” which can be achieved in one of three ways: lowering the importance of one of the discordant factors, adding consonant elements, or changing one of the dissonant factors.

In plain English what is being said is this: If reality as you are experiencing it does not match the vision of reality that you are holding in your mind, you will feel disharmony. And your subconscious mind will do whatever it takes to resolve that disharmony by either changing or applying a scotoma (blind spot) to your currently held vision or causing you to do whatever is necessary to change your current reality into something that matches your currently held vision.

This theory, which is one of the most influential and extensively studied theories in social psychology, is the basis for a technique called visual image formation. Using this method you create picture in your mind of how things are when you have achieved your goals. The picture is created in the present tense and is supported by a connected emotional good feeling like lying on a beach or getting married (presuming that was a happy experience!). If your current reality doesn’t match this picture, your creative subconscious will help you do the things you need to make reality as it is match reality as you envision it.

There is a great book called The Magic of Believing, written by Claude M. Bristol and published in 1983, that goes into this theory in great practical rather than scientific detail and I highly recommend it to you. Because it also warns of the second way in which disharmony can be resolved: by altering your mental vision, typically with a scotoma. Your creative subconscious will resolve the disharmony,but you want that to happen by fixing your reality, not altering your vision. Or “patching” it with a scotoma to block out the uncomfortable or disharmonious feelings.

It helps sometimes to revisit your vision on a regular basis to make sure that certain parts of it haven’t been papered over with scotomas that have reduced your energies toward making reality as it is match reality as it should be.

There’s a lot more to this story than will fit here and perhaps I’ll elaborate in a future post. In the meantime, please let me have your comments on this post. Thanks for reading and I hope this helps you identify and eliminate your scotomas.

Scoop.it

November 29, 2012December 17, 2012

Authority versus Power

Do you know the difference between these two terms? And I don’t mean just the dictionary difference, I mean the difference in behavioral terms of both those wield and those who submit to one or another of their forms.

You may be given the authority, by someone with higher authority or with real or perceived power, to sign checks in your company, to hire and fire people, to issue purchase orders (up to your authorized amount) and the like. This authority was given to you and it may be revoked at any time for any reason, however arbitrary (although the more arbitrary the reason the more justified it will be).

Power, on the other hand, is something that you give yourself, even if you have no authority to grant it to yourself. And no one can take it away from you. Let me give you an example.

The supply room people in your company are tired of being interrupted all the time by people demanding pencils, pens, paper, paper clips, staples, copies, etc. So they put out a memo that says, in essence, “In order to serve you better, office supplies will now be available for pickup on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10 AM to Noon and from 2 PM to 4 PM. Please drop your written and approved request forms – downloadable on the company Intranet – at least 24 hours in advance to insure that your supplies will be ready for pickup at the time you choose. – Supply Room Management”

Who gave the supply room “management” the authority to modify the behavior of everyone in the company who uses office supplies? No one did. They gave themselves the power to change their environment and work habits by issuing the memo – and publishing it to the whole company because they also own the copy machines and do the mail deliveries! And who is going to question their obvious attempt to be more helpful to everyone? Aren’t they doing this “in order to serve you better?” You don’t want better service? What are you, some kind of subversive chronic complainer who needs to be reported up the management chain?

OK, the CEO’s admin wants something on Wednesday. Are the supply room folks going to give her a hard time? Of course they’re not. They’ll bend over backwards to make her happy so that she compliments their wonderful service to her boss. So guess what he thinks when he hears a complaint about their “in order to serve you better” memo? You’ve got it.

Think about this the next time you decide to submit to an arbitrary “rule” provided by someone “in authority.” Make sure that it’s not an example of the misuse of power I’ve described above. And think about it as well when you think you can do some real good by assuming the power to do so!

As always, your comments are solicited. And thanks for reading. Much more on this topic to follow in the future.

Scoop.it

November 29, 2012December 14, 2012

The Marketing Plan Development Process Flow

: 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

November 27, 2012November 28, 2012

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.

November 27, 2012November 27, 2012

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?

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.

November 25, 2012June 9, 2015

10 Reasons Not to Hire an Expert

$Calvin & Hobbes - Math Homework$ I’ve been curating a lot of articles lately and re-posting them for the edification of my friends, fans and connections and several of those posts have been lists of 5, 10, 12, 20 or more things you can do to improve your business, life, social media strategy or anything else. In fact a lot of experts say that the titles for your posts should have numbers in them and that lists make for good content. So here’s mine!

1. You know more about the subject of how to solve a given problem than anyone else possibly could. Especially someone from outside your organization who lacks the in-depth participation that you have in the original creation of the problem.

2. You know that an outside expert will ask you a lot of irrelevant questions in an attempt to get to the root cause of your problem and you really don’t have time to answer a bunch of those kinds of questions.

3. You worked with an expert once that your company hired to solve a problem that you couldn’t solve on your own and that expert simply presented your solution to management in such a way as to get it accepted while giving no credit to you.

4. You can’t pay an outside expert $125 an hour to quickly provide recommendations to solve the problem you’ve been wrestling with for weeks or months and that has been preventing my ability to grow my business. Too expensive!

5. You’ve been doing things this way for years and the last thing you need is some wise guy in a suit with a briefcase coming in here to tell you that there might be better ways to do things. So what if you’re working 60 hours per week? You don’t need any help.

6. Strategy, schmategy! You’ve just got to get the message out to everyone possible that they are just dumb if they don’t buy your product/service. Don’t these experts realize that you wouldn’t be in this business if you didn’t know what you were doing?

7. You don’t need some expert telling you that what you’re currently doing isn’t working as well as you’d like it to. You already know that! You just need to work harder at what you’re doing and get your people to do so as well.

8. You’ve heard all about this “working smarter” stuff and you just don’t believe in it. The old ways have always worked for you in the past and all of this newfangled stuff is just going to make more work for you.

9. How can anyone without detailed knowledge of the ins and outs of your particular business help you by showing you how generally successful goals, strategies and tactics that work for others could work for you?

10. You don’t have time to talk with any experts. You’ve got too many problems of your own to solve!

Hope you enjoyed this. Isn’t is amazing how many people — not you, of course — fit these examples? As always, I’d love to have your comments — pro or con or just plain different. Thanks for reading and don’t be shy.

November 25, 2012

Is Social Media a Passing Fad?

I’ve been reading a lot lately about predictions for the coming year. Many of those predictions have to do with social media — whether or not it will stay relevant, whether or not anyone will figure out how to really measure its return on investment (ROI), how many social media “agencies” will survive, etc.

These are interesting questions and remind me of days past when similar questions surfaced and when there were as many answers and opinions — mine among them with this writing! — as there were people brave enough to venture them.

How do you measure the impact of social media expenditures on your bottom line? Do you have real numbers in terms of dollars spent vs. dollars gained or in terms of debits and credits or do you just know that social media is working for you?

Social media has created the biggest self-employment boom in recent history. Virtually anyone can lay claim to being a social media “expert,” as they did with website search engine optimization until Google foiled them and created the current content craze. I have personal and business/company/fan pages on Facebook, Linkedin, Google+, XeeMe, Biznik and several others. I know how to use promotions and advertisements on most of these platforms. My website has all the requisite social media buttons and even uses a WordPress Facebook plug-in for you to leave comments — which I hope you will, by the way — on articles such as this one.

So am I a social media expert? I certainly don’t pass myself off as one, even though I think I know more than enough to be a little dangerous! But what I most certainly don’t know is how I would measure my effectiveness as a social media expert were I to take someone’s money to do social media implementation and optimization work. So I don’t do it. I do higher level strategy work and farm out the implementation to people who have actually helped my business increase its revenues through their improvements to my social media efforts.

Most of my clients are small companies — one to a dozen or so people who have had no formal marketing strategy training r whose marketing manager got the job because he or she knew how to use Facebook and Linkedin a few years ago. I help them figure out who their real target markets are, what messages will resonate with them and what media is most likely to be most effective in delivering those messages to those markets. It may sound simple, but it isn’t. And I normally do recommend that they invest in social media to at least some extent simply because they “have to have a social media presence” in this day and age to be considered a real company.

But am I giving them good advice? I think back to why we attended trade shows when I was in the electronics and software businesses. We had to be there because our competition was there. Until we became successful enough that we could afford not to be there and to let our customers and prospects know that it wasn’t due to lack of money or customers that we were foregoing our future trade show appearances. We were going to use the money for something that would benefit them more than our fancy exhibit booth and lavish hospitality suite. And they respected that.

Trade shows didn’t die, of course. They still have their niches and their purposes. But they have changed dramatically. And I think our fascination or even obsession with social media may become subject to similar pressures in the future. Because if you can’t measure the ROI for an activity, the bean counters are going to make sure that it is severely curtailed if not completely eliminated.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic and will share them with the “gurus” of social media to whom I am connected. Thanks for reading. I hope you found this content useful.

November 15, 2012November 15, 2012

It’s a Small World (After All?)

I 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.

November 2, 2012November 2, 2012

Why, How and What

I had the opportunity recently to view a TEDx talk by Simon Sinek on the topic of how great leaders inspire action and it really got me to thinking about why I do what I do and how the approach Simon describes might work for you as well.

His premise is that most marketing messages describe the “what” of a product — its feature and benefits. The message may also contain information on how the product provides what it provides. And it may even delve into why you are offering that product (or service) but by this time you’ve lost the attention of your audience and actually never really connected to their emotions in the first place.

I’ve often mentioned the need for messages that resonate. By this I mean messages that connect with the target audience on an emotional level. If you follow Cathey Armillos at all, you’ll recognize that she says the same thing. Purchases are driven by emotion and rationalized by logic. So it makes sense, doesn’t it, to start at the center and work outward if we want to be most successful.

Why don’t we do that? Because we weren’t trained that way. Marketing 101 gets us to convert features to benefits, of course, but it doesn’t get us to why we are offering this product or service in the first place or, more importantly, why a prospective customer should care about it.

Simon uses Apple and TIVO as examples of great successes and failures in his talk (which you can find here). Apple inspires enough people to be early adopters of its products to convince the early majority to buy them as well, even though it makes them out of the same materials that any other computer company uses. But it’s purpose is to change the way people interact with technology and it thus positions itself almost as a cause or a movement instead of as a commodity product manufacturer. Whereas TIVO, which arguably produces the highest quality video recording device, has never taken off because people didn’t believe that they needed it. It didn’t cause them to feel special through owing one.

I found that Simon’s remarks resonated with me and, if you watch the video of his talk I hope they’ll resonate with you as well. I know that I’ll think twice about whether my work with clients on markets, messages and media is helping them focus on working from the inside out — why first, then how and finally what — so that they can connect best with their prospective clients and customers.

As always, I’d love to have your remarks and opinions. Thanks for reading.

Scoop.it