Module 6

Marketing Research
and Planning
INFO 6119 – Healthcare Marketing and Reporting
Professor Graf
Strategy or Plan?
Marketing Strategy:
• outline how the business is positioned,
• who its target audience are,
• what it’s route to market is,
• what its core mission, vision and values are and how that informs the marketing messaging. 
• should include the overriding objectives of what the marketing activity needs to deliver.

Marketing Plan:
• the blueprint of how the marketing strategy is going to be implemented.   
Why do you need a plan? (Fail to plan; plan to fail!)
• Makes you think – hopefully as a team!
• Provides focus to set measureable goals
• Lets you manage resources effectively and efficiently
• Provides transparency – allows you to see how each part of the plan is performing
• Enables you to be proactive, not reactive
• Ensures consistency – measures over time; not just peaks and valleys of business trends
• Provides clarity – Top performing businesses have employees that have absolute clarity of what
they are doing, what is expected of them and how they are performing (what impact their effort is
having).
• With the correct focus at the beginning of the planning process, it should improve customer service
Steps in creating a marketing plan
Conduct situation analysis
Define your target audience
Write SMART goals
Analyze your tactics
Set your budget
MEASURE!
Conduct Situation Analysis

SWOT analysis – never do this in isolation

Strengths – what are your strengths – people, product, etc
Weakness – what internal factor presents the greatest risk to you
achieving your goals
Opportunities – Current market gaps? Internal process improvements?
Threats – What are the factors that pose the greatest risk to your
success?
Define your target audience
Who are they?
How do you define them (age; socio-economic; geographic)?
What do they need?
What is the benefit of your service?
Who do they trust?
How can you build community around your target audience?
Write SMART goals

Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound

• Include Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) – how will
you know you are achieving your goal?
• Look at different models/tools for measure
Analyze Your Tactics

Brainstorm – in a group preferably

• Design tactics that will help achieve these goals
• Behaviour
• Approaches
• Products
• Communications
• Include cost and resource estimates
Set Your Budget

Based on the tactics and resource weighting of your tactics

• Helps manage your costs
• Helps sequence deployment of your tactics
• Keeps you focused on your marketing goal
MEASURE!
One of the critical pieces of any plan – ask the question:
Am I doing what I intended to do?
Return to your Key Performance Indicators
Marketing Plan Development
Business Summary
“Tombstone Data”
• The company name
• How it is structured – more about the company
• Mission, Vision, Value statements
• How does it fit into a Provincial structure?
Identify Business Initiatives
• Segment the various goals of your department
• Be careful not to include big-picture company initiatives
• Outline the projects that are specific to marketing, their
goals, and how these goals will be measured
Customer Analysis
Demographics – age, gender, family status, income
level, geographic location, etc. You are making an effort to
Psychographics – lifestyle, interests, political
get to know your clients and,
affiliation, personality type, needs, wants, purchase by extension, get an
behavior, etc.
appreciation of wants/needs.
Business-to-Business – type of business, the size of
business, industry, job title, geographic location, Look to determine how well
etc.
the community is serviced.
Competitor Analysis
• Survey the competition landscape
• Get to know what your competition does well
• Get to know gaps in service and where you might fit in
 Internal/External (IE) Matrix

https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/12/20/swot-analysis
Strengths – Key questions
What do your customers love about your company or product(s)?
What does your company do better than other companies in your
industry?
What are your most positive brand attributes?
What’s your unique selling proposition?
What resources do you have at your disposal that your competitors
do not?
Weaknesses – Key Questions
What do your customers dislike about your company or product(s)?
What problems or complaints are often mentioned in your negative
reviews?
Why do your customers cancel or churn?
What could your company do better?
What are your most negative brand attributes?
Opportunities – Key Questions
How can we improve our sales/customer onboarding/customer support
processes?
What kind of messaging resonates with our customers?
How can we further engage our most vocal brand advocates?
Are we allocating departmental resources effectively?
Is there budget, tools, or other resources that we’re not leveraging to full
capacity?
Which advertising channels exceeded our expectations – and why?
Threats
Will fall out of the analysis you have done to date and are
likely obvious
Keep them specific
Always frame them as “threat to…” or “threat of…”
Marketing Strategy – 4 Ps (a review from Mod 3)
4 Ps of Marketing
Product - a bundle of attributes (features, functions, benefits, and uses) capable of exchange or use, usually a mix of
tangible and intangible forms.
may be an idea, a physical entity (goods), or a service, or any combination of the three. It exists for the purpose of
exchange in the satisfaction of individual and organizational objectives.
Price - the formal ratio that indicates the quantity of money, goods, or services needed to acquire a given quantity of
goods or services; the amount a customer must pay to acquire a product. 
Place (or Distribution) - the act of marketing and carrying products to consumers. It is also used to describe the extent
of market coverage for a given product.
In the 4 Ps, distribution is represented by place or placement.
Promotion - tactics that encourage short-term purchase, influence trial and quantity of purchase, and are very measurable
in volume, share and profit ( coupons, sweepstakes, rebates, premiums, special packaging, cause-related marketing and 
licensing).
Budget
Describes how much money the business has allotted the
marketing team to pursue the initiatives and goals outlined in
the elements above
Could be based on one or multiple years
Make sure it is an itemized budget (listing marketing
expenses) with sufficient detail
Develop and schedule a measurement plan
Measure, measure, measure!
Ensure harmony between your outcome and intent
How are you going to measure?
How are you going to present this info?
How often are you going to measure/report?
What will you do with the information?
References
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/marketing-plan-template-
generator
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2158244011418
380
https://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/news/2017/06/08/comp
onents-of-a-smart-marketing-plan.html
https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/12/20/swot-analys
is
An older version of a very high level SWOT for Starbucks