We like to deliver value right from our first interaction, so when we are engaged to grow a business, we always start with a Primary Growth Plan.
But those plans are designed to have a short lifetime, around three to six months. They are very useful at exploiting available opportunities and building sales momentum quickly, but they usually lack a foundation of strong market and competitive intelligence because they are built in a single day using you and your team’s collective insights.
We like to partner with our clients to drive profitable growth over the long-term. To do that, we need to develop and then execute a Strategic Marketing Plan.
Here is how we do it…
We lead with Market Intelligence
While your Primary Growth Plan is being implemented, it is time to learn more about your market and your competitors.
What new and profitable opportunities exist in your market? Are you targeting the right audience with your value proposition? Is your proposition unique and compelling in the eyes of decision-makers and decision-influencers? Where do they go for information about products or services like yours? What’s important to them in their user experience? Do they know your brand? What do they think of your products or services in comparison to competitive offerings and substitutes?
There are, quite literally, hundreds of questions you could ask your customers and prospects that will generate new and profitable insights. Up-to-date market intelligence is an often-overlooked source of real value creation. That’s why, when developing a strategic plan, we lead with a market intelligence effort.
We pair it with Competitive Intelligence
What are your competitors’ key products or services? How do they promote them? Are they targeting the whole market or only a segment? Where do they advertise? How do they influence the market? Where are their weak spots and their strengths?
Competitive Intelligence can reveal much about how other players in your industry are positioned, and how they can be beaten by more effective marketing. There are many ways in which Competitive Intelligence can be gathered, either in-person or at arm’s length, but no matter the collection method, the value of the insights cannot be understated.
We add Business Intelligence
This is an inward-looking effort designed to expose your core strengths and weaknesses, so we can factor them into the strategic plan. During the development of your Primary Growth Plan, we will have conducted a SWOT and TOWS analysis, but this deeper effort will see us engaged at a different level in your business.
We need to understand things like the underlying profitability of each product or service you provide, the deep skills of your management and production teams, product options that can add extra value, slight product changes that could open up new markets, and so on.
Using what we discover, we may even ask you to reimagine or redesign your product or service offerings to better match what we now know about your market, your competitors and your strengths.
And we create a Unique Value Proposition
Ultimately, we want to answer this question:
“what does your market want, that your competitors either cannot or are not shouting about, that you know you can deliver profitably and sustainably?”
When we have gathered the right intelligence from the previous stages, the answer will become apparent, and your unique value proposition (UVP) will be created. It will sit at the centre of your sales and marketing conversations from this point on and is likely to have a profound impact on lead generation and sales results. The best result we have ever seen from a UVP’s correct application was a 329% growth rate inside 18 months, adding millions to the turnover of a client.
Your UVP completes the development of new competitive advantage. Now it is time to exploit it by creating and implementing a Strategic Sales and Marketing Plan.
Building your Strategic Marketing Plan
While your Primary Growth Plan contains a number of Quick Win items, and has a maximum lifetime of 3-6 months, your Strategic Marketing Plan is a different beast.
It will link directly to your overall business plan and the personal goals of the owners of the business, and control how a percentage of anticipated sales turnover (somewhere between 3-5% for established businesses and up to 15% for newer entities) will be invested to grow the business over the following 12 months. The insights provided by market and competitive intelligence will mean the messaging is sharper, delivered more effectively and more likely to drive sales and increase profits.
This is where serious gains in the scale of your business and return on investment are to be anticipated.
As with your Primary Growth Plan, we will be on hand to either guide you and your team in implementing it, or run the whole thing for you.
To ensure increasingly better results, we measure the outcomes of sales and marketing activity and create a feedback loop for continual improvement and focus.
FAQ’s
“What kinds of marketing do you do?”
This is a common question. The simple answer is: we are experienced at specifying and implementing all kinds of marketing activity, but what we will do is specify and implement the right kind of marketing for your business. We will make data-driven decisions, influenced by our experience of what does and doesn’t work, to generate higher returns for you in the shortest time period.
Some companies specialise in a certain kind of marketing activation. In fact, many marketing companies actually only specialise in digital marketing. We take a more agnostic approach. By understanding your market and your competitors, we can design and implement the best-fit combination of marketing activations to reach your target market cost-effectively.
Here is a short list of all the marketing actions we undertake for our clients every day.
Market and Competitive Intelligence
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- Gathering intelligence on current / lapsed clients or new prospects, often uncovering new sales opportunities
- Data and insight generation and analysis
- Identify new product opportunities
- Competitive intelligence gathering
- Brand and marketing material reviews and recommendations
- Feasibility studies for new products and new markets, including entering Australia for our overseas clients.
- Market Segmentation
- Project management
Marketing Strategy and Planning
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- Business Planning (as distinct from Marketing Planning)
- Marketing objective and strategy setting
- Marketing plan development
- Target Profiling and Persona development
- Unique Value Proposition (UVP) development
- Pricing and Promotional strategies
- Packaging of products and services
- New product / service initiatives
- Project management
Marketing Execution Management and Measurement
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- Brand identity development and refreshment
- Brand asset creation and refreshment, including photography
- CRM selection and enhancement for Marketing, Sales and Management functions
- Advertising in all mediums
- Content marketing
- Direct marketing – real world and purely digital
- Marketing automation
- Digital and online marketing including SEO
- Website design, development and refreshment
- Social media marketing
- Corporate and brand collateral creation and production
- Promotional marketing
- Events and PR
- Sales selling materials
- Print Design and management
- Measurement planning, reporting and continual improvement
- Project management as plug-in Sales and Marketing Directors
What kind of returns can you expect when working with us?
It’s not unusual for us to deliver increases of 30% to 50% in sales growth, and similar increases in profit. We are careful not to make promises to achieve a particular number because every business and market is different, but our past history of success across many different businesses and industries should give you confidence.
What industries have we dealt with?
We have worked in a huge variety of industries, from security screens, to health to information technology, training and so many more. We have worked with well over 200 companies over the past two decades, including several well-known household brands. Our team members all have senior management experience in national or multinational companies.
What’s different about Corporate Momentum?
The key point of difference between us and other marketing companies is our end-to-end delivery model. We can deliver deep insights, turn them into a well-structured plan that has clear budget and responsibility assignments, then roll up our sleeves and execute the plan with you, or for you. We can be your entire marketing department or your fractional sales and marketing director. Not many marketing companies can successfully do all that.
For objective, straight-talking advice from marketing experts with 20+ years of multi-industry experience, call 1300 36 20 27 or fill in this form.
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