Developing and Implementing a Marketing Plan
Develop marketing objectives (Step 7): Marketing objectives translate the company’s mission and business into long- and short-term goals. Marketing objectives are usually quantitative and include sales (both in units or dollars), market share, and profitability. They may also include qualitative factors such as quality, customer satisfaction, and social responsibility (Kerin & Hartley, 2017). Knowing exactly where you want to go is essential in deciding how to get there. The objectives have to be measurable, specific, and have a set time limit.
As a marketing team, you need to decide on the marketing objectives for your target market before you develop your company’s marketing strategy. Marketing objectives translate the company’s mission and business into long- and short-term goals. Marketing objectives are usually quantitative and include sales (both in units or dollars), market share, and profitability. They may also include qualitative factors such as quality, customer satisfaction, and social responsibility (Kerin & Hartley, 2017). Knowing exactly where you want to go is essential in deciding how to get there. The objectives have to be measurable, specific, and have a set time limit.
Marketing objectives should be challenging but achievable. They are mainly quantitative (with some qualitative ones), and they should be precise and focused.
Using figures from your own market research, please include your projected annual…
1. growth percentage
2. market share percentage
3. sales (in both units and dollars)
4. average unit price
5. profitability percentage
6. customer satisfaction
7. CSR outcomes
8. employee satisfaction rate
Be sure to include a time frame. Also, presenting the figures in a table in the end would look professional.
Conduct an STP (Step 8): Conduct segmenting, targeting, and positioning of your market and product. Be sure to conduct the STP analysis using real market information, and do not just explain what they are! Remember, segmentation should be done using geographic, psychographic, demographic, and behavioral criteria; while the targeting should be specific e.g., which regions and size of customers.
Transcript
Segmenting, Targeting, and Positioning
Transcript
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Segmenting, targeting, and positioning is the bedrock of marketing.
The way I like to look at it is, segmenting and targeting belong together, and then positioning really belongs more with branding.
A segment is a group of consumers who have characteristics in common. The characteristics can be demographic, geographic, lifestyle, interests. The customers are already there, maybe they bought something from you. That’s what they have in common. You’ve just discovered that and you gave that a name. There is your segment, so that naturally leads us into targeting.
Now, we target certain segments because as marketers there’s never enough money in the budget to go after every single segment. And let’s face it, some segments are going to be more valuable than others. So we have to have priorities, that’s targeting.
So now let’s talk about positioning. Positioning has to do with a much broader set of decisions and it has to do with how you establish your brand and the mind of your customer against all the other brands in the marketplace. Here are a couple of questions that we commonly ask when we think about positioning.
• Where would your brand fall on the pricing spectrum against all your other competitor brands in the market?
• Where would your brand fall on the quality spectrum?
And we could actually graph this placing your brand and all your competitors on a single graph. And that graph would be called a perceptual map because it would be from the perception of your customer. So branding is a small part of the positioning decisions that you make about your brand.
Segmenting, targeting, and positioning.
• Segmenting refers to breaking the market down into homogenous groups.
• Targeting refers to selecting the customer group or groups that you will focus your marketing efforts on. The appropriate segmentation variable is dependent on the needs and wants of customers.
• These decisions are directly tied to your value proposition and require extensive marketing research on the customers. Once the segmentation variable is determined and the target markets selected, you need to develop a positioning strategy, which refers to the way you want the customer to view the product or service relative to the competition.
Describe the market research you would conduct to analyze and segment the US market. Explain how you would select your target markets and explain the process of positioning the company’s products or services relative to the competition.