CONTENT

p.3 p.7
HELLO YOU STEP 3: DO YOUR RESEARCH

An introduction to grow your business with a Understanding internal and external data are
well founded marketing plan. at the basis of your marketing plan.

p.4 p.11
STEP 1: SET YOUR GOAL STEP 4: MARKETING STRATEGIES

Have a clear quantifiable goal that is aligned Your marketing strategies aim to reach your
with the purpose of your business. initial quantifiable goal.

p.6 p.13
STEP 2: BUYER PERSONAS STEP 5: SET YOUR BUDGET

Address the right consumers and pinpoint Define a budget to make the most effective use
USP's that spark their interest. of your marketing efforts, time and resources.

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HELLO processes. For example when creating
cross-sell opportunities in your mobile app.

YOU, And because of its potential impact on your

business, it is imperative to create a solid,
fact based marketing plan before you get
started on anything.
Let's face it. Marketing is one of the main
Ready, Set, Go!
accelerators of growth in any business -
You have downloaded this guide because
including yours. If you want to achieve
you are already convinced you need
higher profits, you need marketing. It's that
marketing to grow your business. But
simple, right?
perhaps you're new to marketing or simply
want to reassure you're on the right track.
On the contrary. Over the past 15 years I
met many business owners, managers and
Either way, you have come to the right
marketeers who struggled with getting the
place.
best results out of their marketing efforts
and growing their customer base, revenues
In this free guide you will learn how to:
and profits. Often, the lack of having a
marketing plan in place - and instead
Write a marketing plan in 5 steps
launching the very first marketing campaign
Understand the basic principles of
that comes to mind - is the cause of
marketing
mediocre results and an ineffective use of
Grow your business successfully
time, effort and money.

Having a well founded marketing plan is

essential to effectively grow your business
and outperform competition.

Whether your goal is to increase sales by

adding a new digital sales channel to the
distribution mix, transform to a new
business model by launching a new online
service or turn consumers into loyal
customers with a recurring spend.
Marketing is the key.

Understand however that marketing

touches most, if not all, of your business
processes - from sales and customer
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service processes to complex back-end IT

| PAGE 4
STEP 1:
SET YOUR
GOAL
How satisfied are you with the
performance of your business? Do you
receive excellent ratings from your
customers and are you well able to retain
them or is your churn rate going up year
over year? Is your business doing an
excellent job at acquiring new customers at
a good value? Or are you in a heavily price
oriented market that forces you to
continuously lower your retail prices
resulting in lower profit margins?
Perhaps all of the above does not apply to
you: your business is doing well and
perhaps even flourishing like never before.
Yet you do wonder whether there are new
opportunities to exploit and further grow
your business.
No matter what situation your business is
currently in, to kick off your marketing plan
successfully you need to be very clear
about what it is that you want to achieve.
Make sure you have a clear quantifiable
goal in place. Simply make your goals as
SMART as possible. SMART stands for:
Specific, target a specific area that you
want to improve
Measurable, establish a set of KPIs.
These are the performance indicators
of the progress you're making.
Measuring your KPIs proactively and
continuously is required to monitor
how well you're on your way to achieve
your goal
Assignable, specify the roles and
responsibilities of those involved in
your marketing plan (a.k.a. your team
members and stakeholders)
Realistic, shoot for the moon but be
realistic about it. Although I am a fan of
a good old BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious
Goal), if the moon really is your end goal
you should try to reduce your journey
to smaller sprints and milestones. By
doing so you'll have the agility to
respond to changes while on your
journey to the end goal you have in
mind. Thus, state what results can
realistically be achieved, given the
available resources
Time-related, specify when your goal
will be achieved. Don't be tempted to
set your goal in stone for the next 5 or
10 years. There are simply too many
external factors, e.g. new legislation and
technological innovations, that may
require a re-evaluation of your goal in
the meantime. So try to formulate a
goal that you aim to reach within the
next 12 months instead.
Not sure what goal to set? It may help to
revisit your mission statement and live
through the purpose of your business again.
Going back to your purpose helps you to
more easily reset, regain focus and set a
clear goal that is in alignment with the why
of your business.
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STEP 2:
BUYER
PERSONAS
Knowing your ideal customer is
fundamental to effectively marketing your
products and services. Your marketing
efforts go down the drain when you're:
Not talking to the right consumers
Not aware of your customers (latent or
manifested) wants and needs
Communicating via channels that are
not used by your ideal customers
Not speaking the same language as
prospective customers
In effect, your business growth slows down
and the sales costs per customer become
unnecessarily high. When writing and
implementing your marketing plan you
want to make sure to spend your marketing
efforts, time and money addressing the
right consumers and pinpointing USPs that
attract their attention and spark their
interest, all while using the right tone of
voice. It's a delicate balance, to say the
least.
That's why it's important to identify the
target market and buyer personas you want
to attract in order to attain the goal you
have set in the previous step. Your target
market is a description of the overall
audience you're targeting.
So what is a buyer persona? Buyer
personas are also descriptions of whom you
want to attract, but they reflect smaller
homogenous groups of your business's
(potential) customers within your target
market.
Describing your ideal customers
Provide insight in your target market and
buyer personas in this second step of your
marketing plan. The profile of your ideal
customers includes:
Demographic profile, such as age, sex,
location and purchasing power and so
on
Psychographic characteristics by giving
insight in a.o. the lifestyles, personality,
attitudes, values of your ideal
customers
Psychographic characteristics that
influence buying decisions. Understand
the perceived barriers, decision criteria
and buyers journey of your target
market and buyer personas. Knowing
what newspapers are read, which
websites are visited and what social
media platforms are used, helps you to
pinpoint exactly where to advertise.
Positioning your brand message,
products and services such that all
decision criteria boxes are checked and
perceived barriers are diminished
makes your business stand out and
distinguish itself from your competition.
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I BELIEVE LUCK IS
WHEN
PREPARATION
MEETS
OPPORTUNITY. IF
YOU HADN'T BEEN
PREPARED WHEN
THE
OPPORTUNITY
CAME ALONG,
YOU WOULDN'T
HAVE BEEN
LUCKY.
OPRAH WINFREY
| PAGE 7
STEP 3:
DO YOUR
RESEARCH
A deep understanding of your business
results, the feedback your customers are
giving and overall market trends are at the
basis of your marketing plan. These data
will help you define fact-based marketing
strategies in the next step. So in this third
step, you need to do some research and
provide a clear situation analysis of your
business.
Crunch the numbers
Have a closer look at your sales numbers
and conclude what you see. Keep in mind
that an increase or decrease in sales may
not always be a sign that your business is
over- or underperforming.
There could be a specific seasonality effect
that you should take into account when
interpreting the data. For example,
businesses that sell solar panels to
consumers are likely to generate lower
sales and revenues in the 4th quarter of the
year as consumers generally start their
orientation from January onwards all the
way through spring.
And a candle shop is likely to generate most
of its sales from October onwards, while
dealing with significantly lower revenues
throughout summer as consumers are less
likely to light candles in-home.
Now that you understand your sales
numbers, you should do the same with
regard to your churn rates and recurring
purchases. Are more and more customers
cancelling their subscription or are you
experiencing difficulty converting a one-
time purchases to recurring purchases?
Identify where your customers go to. If
they switch to your competitor, find out
why they left and why they switched to
that particular competitor.
As for timing, look for specific identifiable
moments in your churn development and
trace back whether for example a
competitor ran a sales campaign that
affected your customer base. Or perhaps
there is a correlation between the
downtime of your online service and the
churn rate of your customers.
Love your customers' feedback
What your customers say about your
business is one of, if not the most, valuable
source you can utilize to grow your
business successfully. Word of mouth is still
one of the most powerful marketing tools,
so you want to do whatever it takes to
create a positive customer experience.
In case you don't have any feedback tools
in place, you are basically running your
business in the dark. So make sure that you
implement these asap and start collecting
data.
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Start delving into your customers' feedback
and extract overall conclusions from the
feedback customers give you.
While doing so, especially pay close
attention to the open answers that were
given. There might be a hidden gem
between them that you were not aware of
before.
Understanding customers' opinion about
your products a/o services is a valuable
method to identify the root cause behind
the sales and churn development of your
business. For example, customers
complaining about the quality of your
product can be a strong indication of why
your churn rate is going up. And receiving
feedback on when customers start their
orientation about renewing their
subscription or switching to a competitor is
an effective approach to optimize the
timing of your renewal campaigns.
Understanding market trends
It is now time to sharpen your view of the
outside world and understand what major
developments are happening right now, are
coming your way in the near future and
how they may affect your business.
First, investigate how consumer behavior is
developing throughout the next 5 years and
how technological progress, such as smart
home innovations, might influence this
behavior. There are many expert views
available that can be a great source of
information, such as Gartner and Ericsson.
Second, investigate how the market you
operate in develops. Is competition in the
market place growing as more and more
businesses enter your market or is the
market place you operate in consolidating?
Either way, evaluate how market place
developments affect your business.
Does your brand still stand out from
competitors or are competitors rapidly
catching up to your brand and unique
selling points thereby making the consumer
indifferent?
You're all set
By putting all these data together you will
find connections that explain why and how
your business performance has recently
been going up or down. In addition, you will
be able to indicate how these trends will
evolve based on market, behavioral and
technological developments.
Does your brand st ll
stand out from
compet tors or are
compet tors rap dly
catch ng up to your
brand and un que
sell ng po nts thereby
mak ng the consumer
nd fferent?
| PAGE 9
| PAGE 10
STEP 4:
MARKETING
STRATEGIES
Now, you will include your marketing
strategies. Your strategies are all derived
from and based on the analyses from the
steps you just completed and all aim to
reach your initial quantifiable goal.
Overall, most marketing strategies include
one or more of the following main
strategies.
(Online) content marketing strategy
A content marketing strategy is a great
method to push your brand message to
your target audience and buyer personas,
using offline a/o online media. A content
strategy should mention:
What kind of content you'll create, such
as expert views, testimonials,
whitepapers, e-books and more
The channels on which you'll distribute
the content. Think of social media
platforms, display advertising through
3rd party website or using Google Ads
to push your content on Google and
YouTube. Offline media includes direct
mail or newspaper ads
Product leadership strategy
This strategy focuses on product
development, innovation, superior quality,
short time to market and high margins.
Apple is a great example of this strategy.
Business development strategy
This strategy could involve entering new
target markets, for example by merging
with or acquiring another company or
entering the international market.
On the other hand, this strategy could also
aim to increase conversion in your current
target market by reducing lead times and
improving customer journeys within your
business.
Operational strategy
In this strategy delivering standardized
products in high volumes is essential.
Organizations choosing this strategy
operate highly cost efficient and focus on
streamlined operations and supply chain
management. A great example of a
company that has an excellent operational
strategy is IKEA.
Retention strategy
In this strategy you focus on how to retain
more customers and turn them into loyal
customers, for example by means of a
loyalty program.
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A retention strategy enables your business
to grow a loyal customer base at lower
costs compared to building a customer base
by acquiring new customers.

Acquiring new customers is more expensive

than retaining existing ones and it's been
proven that your odds of selling to an
existing customer can be at least 10 times
higher than selling to a new prospect.

Customer intimacy strategy

An excellent customer service, smooth
customer journey and the focus on long
term customer relations are at the basis of
the customer intimacy strategy. Here, on
time delivery and exceeding customer
expectations are key elements. This
strategy could very well be combined with
the previous mentioned retention strategy.

Planning & KPIs

Each strategy and their separate tactics
should be accompanied with a detailed
planning that mentions important
milestones and a description of the KPIs
you will use to measure results. For A retent on strategy
example, when it comes to an online
content marketing your KPIs can include enables your bus ness to
social media traffic, email traffic, organic
traffic and conversions. grow a loyal customer
base at lower costs
compared to bu ld ng a
customer base by
acqu r ng new
customers.
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STEP 5:
SET YOUR
BUDGET
Marketing can be as cheap or as expensive
as you make it to be. And so in order to
make the most effective use of your
resources, it is imperative that you define a
budget and KPIs to monitor your expenses
and conversion or results.
The easiest way to start is by specifying all
expected costs per strategy that you
formulated in the previous chapter. Your
marketing budget generally consists out of
(at least) one or more of the following out
of pocket costs:
Paid (online) advertising & sponsorships
Remarketing to increase conversion
Any physical (branding) material, such
as magazines or event-related materials
Freelance fees for activities you don't
have in-house. You might for example
need a graphic designer to develop for
your campaign, website or new product
launch
Frontend development for your
website or mobile app
License fees to access 3rd party
software or a technological platform
An (external) customer service center
or outbound callcenter
The next step is to set your total costs off
against the results you expect in terms of
conversion, number of sales, revenues,
profits and/or customer lifetime value.
Lastly, evaluate whether the results and
your return on investment is in line with the
goal you specified in the very first step of
your marketing plan.
As I mentioned, KPIs will help you monitor
your expenditures. When it comes to
campaigning and advertising, however,
there is another method you can apply to
avoid spending your complete budget all at
once and not getting the results you want.
And that is by using an iterative approach:
First, keep it small and launch a test of
your add or any other marketing
expression
Then optimize based on the test
learnings. Pull the plug if testing and
optimizing does not give you the results
you desire
Are the results of the test and optimize
phase satisfying? Scale up to reach your
entire target market
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ABOUT
SHANTI

Shanti Presentacion is the Founder of De Marketingformule, a Dutch based marketing agency

that specializes in helping businesses grow through unique marketing strategies, propositions
and customer experience.

As a marketing expert with 15 years of marketing experience, Shanti has received excellent
reviews from A-list companies. At the beginning of her career, Shanti got her start in marketing
at Capgemini Consulting. She then went on to KPN, market leader in telecommunications and
the largest ICT enterprise in The Netherlands, to innovate and launch new products, rollout
successful sales campaigns and develop customer loyalty strategies; before taking on several
management level roles; before founding her own marketing agency in 2016.

Shanti’s philanthropic efforts include her participation as a guest entrepreneur at JINC, the
foundation that teams up with businesses and high schools to fight for a society in which your
future is no longer defined by your background.
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