Strategic Planning Kit For Dummies by Erica Olsen

Author:Erica Olsen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2011-09-28T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 9-2: Developing your marketing action plan.

Staying Market-Focused

The process of researching, segmenting, targeting, and reaching new customers doesn’t need to be something you do only when you’re focused on finding new customers. In fact, world-class companies have made being market-focused a habit. Being market-focused means taking marketing activities out of just the marketing department and away from initiatives. It means making marketing part of everyone’s job.

In the following sections, I explain how being market-focused works and give you tips on staying in the know.

Gathering relevant information

The key to being market-focused is continuously gathering relevant information about your customers and your market. Most likely, you already gather a significant amount of customer information in meetings and discussions with customers and distributors, from sales reports, through databases, and so on.

When you gather this info, you have to do something with it. Take these tips to heart:

Start collecting the info in a systematic fashion by making a group marketing storage unit, such as a physical filing cabinet or a file on your company server.

Scan the environment for information about government regulation and policies, technological changes, partners and competitors and their activities, and future industry trends. Continual environmental scanning allows you to stay proactive, taking advantage of shifts as they happen, instead of being reactive, and scrambling to keep up.

Sources for info include trade publications, industry events, and your local network. Consider doing this scan quarterly or semi-annually.

Sharing what you know

When you get a bunch of information, what are you going to do with it? The information you gather should be regularly compiled in a usable form and then shared with employees in various ways. These sharing avenues can include

Brown-bag lunches

Company blogs

Company newsletters

Customer and market databases

Forums

Informal meetings

Internal message postings

Staff meetings

Intelligence needs to be communicated clearly, continuously, and appropriately so your staff can strategically respond to the needs of the market.

Responding to what you’ve discovered

Responding to your market is critical to being market-focused. You can generate information and communicate it internally, but unless you respond to market needs, nothing gets accomplished. To be sustainable, your company needs to be driven by the following:

An understanding of what your customers want

The knowledge of how to meet the customers’ needs

The delivery of the product or service customers want

Many of you may already be doing most of these activities. Great job! If you aren’t, that’s okay. Take some action to formalize your process. Studies show that companies that link these activities together achieve greater levels of performance when compared to their competitors. A company that increases its market focus by 10 percent can see a growth of between 17 and 20 percent in overall performance.

Want to evaluate how market-focused your firm is? Check out this free, online assessment tool: www.m3planning.com/survey.

Putting It All Together: Organizing Customer Information

Businesses that succeed do so by creating and keeping customers. Because marketing plays the key role of making that happen, it has a large part in setting the strategic direction of the organization.

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