There are hundreds of ways to market your business. Which silver bullet should you use?
At the heart of a successful business is an understanding of who your customers are, what they want, how they buy, where they are, and if there are enough of them to warrant you even being in business in the first place. Successful businesses also need to have, or be able to build, the core capability to provide what your customers really want, at a profit, and be ready to execute focused and targeted promotions and communications programs to attract and engage potential buyers. Dee Davey, from Creative Ideas Marketing will talk about some of the questions you should be asking within your business about your business’ competencies, customer needs, and market opportunity in order to begin to shape a marketing roadmap that will meet the financial goals of your business, provide focus and direction for growth.
Dee Davey is an Interim Marketing and Service Product Manager with over 20 years experience, helping businesses be more successful by delivering strategic market planning, service product development and service operations improvements. Her interim marketing business, Creative Ideas Marketing, started in 2004 in the UK, helps companies adapt and extend client service offers, helps clients find new sources of revenue and brings ideas for new service products to life. Creative Ideas Marketing helps businesses who want to take the next step in marketing their business, but lack the resource or time to pull it all together.
Dee is also a co-host and The Voice of LA2M. In public she is known for her distinctive hat, and in the background manages speaker scheduling, communications and promotion of Lunch Ann Arbor Marketing.
Learn more about Dee and her business Creative Ideas Marketing: http://www.linkedin.com/in/deedaveycreativeideasmarketing; www.creativeideasmarketing.com
Video of Dee’s session is embedded below. Use the timeline bar to move forward/backward in the video as you wish.
Ingenex works closely with Lunch Ann Arbor Marketing (LA2M) to help the marketing community in Ann Arbor share ideas and drive networking. Today’s LA2M event featured Dee Davey, owner of Creative Ideas Marketing and the Voice of LA2M, as she presented her perspectives on strategic market planning.
By Dee’s count, there are more than 200 different tools and tactics that companies can use to market their businesses, ranging from old school advertising methods to new media technologies. Which ‘silver bullet’ is right for your business? According to Dee, the answer is…that depends.
In order to get a clear picture of which tools are the best fit for your business, you must conduct strategic market planning, a process that takes a deep look at what your business is, who your customers are and how you can best meet their needs. While the final tactics will differ between companies and industries, the overall process applies regardless of whether you’re an established company, an entrepreneur or a worker in transition.
At its heart, strategic market planning addresses the tough questions that will help to provide focus to your business. What is your business? What are you great at? Who are your customers? What do they demand? How can we bring it all together? Strategic market planning serves to align your company’s marketing efforts with your business objectives in order to minimize wasteful spending and maximize return on your marketing investment. This in-depth analysis of your company’s market also helps to uncover new opportunities and address unmet client needs before your competitors do.
Strategic market planning incorporates several key elements of your company’s business. This includes your integrated brand identity, core competencies, customer needs, trends in your market, changes in the business environment, competitive pressures and the overall marketing mix.
The process for conducting strategic market planning is twofold; an internal discovery program will help you to build a persona around your customers’ behavior and customize your products or services so you can deliver something customers truly value. An external view uses primary and secondary research to help your company gather and analyze market intelligence in order to understand the environment and learn from both customers and industry experts. Oftentimes, the most valuable intelligence comes from unexpected sources such as employees who interact with customers on a direct level or experts in unrelated industries!
In summary, Dee’s presentation helped today’s LA2M attendees to learn about how to use strategic market planning to understand customer needs, refine your business model to match those needs and deliver your offerings at the perfect time.
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