Top Six Data Sets That Matter Most in Developing a Strong Marketing Plan for 2012.
1. Know What Your Customers Want. If you have done a survey in the last 6 months, you need to get one going now. Use Survey Monkey or Zoomerang. It's too cheap. Ask customers what they want, what drives their purchases, why they purchased from you and how likely they are to refer you to their friends and family. Ask them if they'd be willing to do a 1:1 call and call 20 customers who responded and ask them deeper questions. Take the aggregated data from the survey and the anecdotal data from the survey and combine with the next 4 ways to execute on the right tactics.
2. Analyze what makes up 80% of your sales in both products and categories. Analyze what keywords bring you the most traffic, what products are most viewed and what pages are most viewed. Finally analyze what phrases/terms are most searched inside your site. Combine this data into a 1 sheet Marketing Tactic Plan with #1.
3. Analyze the Cart and Checkout Exit (not abandonment) Rates. Meaning for the customers on the Cart page, how many exited from that page. Same with the Checkout page. If you have the data, analyze what entry field the customer stopped at on the Checkout page.
4. Pull together the Revenue, Gross Profits, Advertising, Gross Gross Profits (Gross Profits less Advertising) for last 3-5 years into your Marketing Tactic Plan.
5. Pull in the company's vision, mission statement and strategies for the year. Anything that allows you to tighten the marketing tactics to fit within a vision or a specific strategy.
6. Have someone pull the top 3-5 competitors and notate the competitors pricing strategy, product selection (# of products and type of categories), free shipping offers, other offers, return policy, homepage merchandising, overal SEO exposure and any cool functionality or loyalty programs.
7. Pull % of traffic, revenue and (if you can) gross profits by marketing channels to include SEM, SEO, Email, Affiliate, Offline (seperate if you need to), Direct, etc.
Five Steps To Get To Your Best Marketing Plan
1. Pull this information together in a 1 pager document (2 if needed) and review with a large team of people that span many departments in the company as well as outsiders if you can. Start with the highest level data including Company Vision/Strategies and Last 3-5 years of Revenues, Gross Profits and Gross Gross Profits.
2. Let them interpret the data and ask questions and provide thoughts. Document everything - tape record the meeting if you can. Put the people into 3-4 groups and let them develop some ideas for the marketing team. The ideas must be proven to support customers, company and the data provided.
3. Each group takes a leader to present the ideas and puts them up on a wall with each idea on a sticky note.
4. Go through each idea and grade it either 1. High Impact/Low Cost (also meaning time), High Impact/High Cost, Low Impact/High Cost, Low Impact/Low Cost.
Prioritize in the following ways:
High Impact/Low Cost
High Impact/High Cost
Low Impact/Low Cost
Low Impact/High Cost
5. Develop a Who/What/When on the Plan and get started. Follow up with a meeting each month on updates. Don't be afraid of a little healthy conflict if the plans aren't going as planned. Exposing issues allows for creative healthy solutions with the right people in the room.
Contact me anytime at heartlandgirl21 on yahoo mail if you need further assistance on executing on your marketing plans.
1. Know What Your Customers Want. If you have done a survey in the last 6 months, you need to get one going now. Use Survey Monkey or Zoomerang. It's too cheap. Ask customers what they want, what drives their purchases, why they purchased from you and how likely they are to refer you to their friends and family. Ask them if they'd be willing to do a 1:1 call and call 20 customers who responded and ask them deeper questions. Take the aggregated data from the survey and the anecdotal data from the survey and combine with the next 4 ways to execute on the right tactics.
2. Analyze what makes up 80% of your sales in both products and categories. Analyze what keywords bring you the most traffic, what products are most viewed and what pages are most viewed. Finally analyze what phrases/terms are most searched inside your site. Combine this data into a 1 sheet Marketing Tactic Plan with #1.
3. Analyze the Cart and Checkout Exit (not abandonment) Rates. Meaning for the customers on the Cart page, how many exited from that page. Same with the Checkout page. If you have the data, analyze what entry field the customer stopped at on the Checkout page.
4. Pull together the Revenue, Gross Profits, Advertising, Gross Gross Profits (Gross Profits less Advertising) for last 3-5 years into your Marketing Tactic Plan.
5. Pull in the company's vision, mission statement and strategies for the year. Anything that allows you to tighten the marketing tactics to fit within a vision or a specific strategy.
6. Have someone pull the top 3-5 competitors and notate the competitors pricing strategy, product selection (# of products and type of categories), free shipping offers, other offers, return policy, homepage merchandising, overal SEO exposure and any cool functionality or loyalty programs.
7. Pull % of traffic, revenue and (if you can) gross profits by marketing channels to include SEM, SEO, Email, Affiliate, Offline (seperate if you need to), Direct, etc.
Five Steps To Get To Your Best Marketing Plan
1. Pull this information together in a 1 pager document (2 if needed) and review with a large team of people that span many departments in the company as well as outsiders if you can. Start with the highest level data including Company Vision/Strategies and Last 3-5 years of Revenues, Gross Profits and Gross Gross Profits.
2. Let them interpret the data and ask questions and provide thoughts. Document everything - tape record the meeting if you can. Put the people into 3-4 groups and let them develop some ideas for the marketing team. The ideas must be proven to support customers, company and the data provided.
3. Each group takes a leader to present the ideas and puts them up on a wall with each idea on a sticky note.
4. Go through each idea and grade it either 1. High Impact/Low Cost (also meaning time), High Impact/High Cost, Low Impact/High Cost, Low Impact/Low Cost.
Prioritize in the following ways:
High Impact/Low Cost
High Impact/High Cost
Low Impact/Low Cost
Low Impact/High Cost
5. Develop a Who/What/When on the Plan and get started. Follow up with a meeting each month on updates. Don't be afraid of a little healthy conflict if the plans aren't going as planned. Exposing issues allows for creative healthy solutions with the right people in the room.
Contact me anytime at heartlandgirl21 on yahoo mail if you need further assistance on executing on your marketing plans.
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