How to Create Office Max Business

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Office Max: A marketing plan is a plan that outlines your full marketing strategy for the coming year.

It will include who you are marketing to, how you will market to them, and the strategies you will use to connect with customers and attract sales.

The goal of the marketing plan is to outline how you will present your products and services to your target market.

Conducting a Situation Analysis

Consider your Business’s goals.

The goal of a situation analysis is to look at your company’s current marketing situation.

From there, changes can be identified and made.

Begin by looking at your company’s mission and goals (if your company doesn’t have one, then, this has to be clarified before you start).

And determine if your company’s current marketing plan is helping to meet those goals or not.

• For example, you may own a snow plowing and winter maintenance business and may have set a goal to grow your overall revenues by 10% by adding more contracts.
• Do you have a marketing plan that outlines how you will attract those additional contracts? If so, is it working?
  

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Examine your current marketing advantages and challenges.

What is attracting customers to your business now?

What is attracting customers to your competitor’s business?

Chances are your strengths are attracting customers to your business, and knowing these strengths is an important marketing advantage.

• Come up with concrete, definitive strengths and advantages that customers will find when they work with you. These are called internal characteristics of the company, and they’re what determine a customer’s level of satisfaction.
• Potential strengths could be low cost, excellent customer service, user-friendliness, or speed.
• Distinguish yourself from the competition.
• This may be tied with your strengths, or it may just be a fact of doing business with your company. But if you want customers to choose you over your competitors, you’ll need to figure out beforehand why they should do that.
• You should also be aware of your company’s potential weaknesses and shortcomings, as these are also internal characteristics that matter to consumers. Once you’ve identified weaknesses you should begin planning ways to address those issues. If you don’t, those weaknesses could end up being a competitor’s strengths.

Research your target market.

It is important to know precisely who is selling in order to market to them.

Knowing your target market and their needs allow you to determine where you should advertise and how you should advertise.

If you do not intimately know your target market.

You cannot effectively communicate how your products and services meet their needs.

Conduct demographics research.

You want to know the age, gender, location, and even income of your customers.

You also want to know the psychology of your customers.

If you run a snow removal company, for example, and your customers are large businesses, what are the things they value most from a snow removal service?

Think of their intent when they would most likely be searching for what you offer.

Which sites, apps, podcasts would they most frequently visit?

The more detailed you can be here, the better!

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• Utilize official government data on both the market and industry. You may want to look at economic indicators like price and cost indices, as well as employment statistics in your state, county, and city.
• If your budget permits it, you may want to consult with trade groups or institutions that conduct their own research and analysis of markets and industry trends.
• You should also research your competition.
• The only way you will be able to offer customers something that the competition can’t is by knowing what, exactly, your competitors’ appeal is.
• Do they offer better prices? Quicker turnaround time?
• If so, how do they offer those features? Are they cutting corners someplace else in their business plan? Knowing the competition’s strengths and weaknesses is one of the best things you can do to help position your business for success.

Educate yourself on external opportunities and threats.

These are the external characteristics of your company.

And they are determined by your competition.

By fluctuating market factors, and by customers or clients.

Your goal here is to look at the various factors that could affect your business.

So that you can adjust your marketing plan accordingly.

• Begin by analyzing market trends, such as observable shifts in what consumers want/need, and what they expect from a company like yours.
• Look at financial trends that may affect you, like the rise in virtual payment methods or current inflation rates.
• If you own a snow removal business and cater to large public sector institutions (like government buildings) you may be aware that tight government finances are making your clients more concerned about cost. Your business strategy (and marketing plan) should focus on how you can provide the lowest-cost quality service.

Researching Your Strengths and Weaknesses

Send surveys through the mail.

If you have a broad and dedicated client base, you may want to consider sending out surveys.

This will allow you to poll your customers on your strengths and your weaknesses.

You can then build your marketing plan around your strengths (and know what assets of your business to really emphasize).

And you can also make efforts to work on what others perceive as your business’s weaknesses.

• Keep surveys/questionnaires short and simple.
• Your customers may have input, but they won’t want to spend a lot of time and effort giving you that input. Aim for a survey that would fit on an index card or a half sheet of paper, but if you must go longer, make sure your survey comes in under two pages long at the absolute maximum.
  

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• Consider a short-answer format instead of a simple multiple-choice survey. You can certainly incorporate a few multiple-choice questions if you like, but provide open-ended questions, asking specifics like, “What do you like best about our product/service? What do you like least? What would you like to see us improve on?” You may also want to ask a question like, “Would you recommend our products/services to friends or colleagues? Why/why not?” That will help you gauge your existing customers’ level of satisfaction while also gathering information on what your strengths and weaknesses are.
• Include a self-addressed, stamped envelope. You want to make the experience as easy and hassle-free for customers as possible.
• Don’t forget to estimate the cost of printing and mailing surveys (both ways), and factor that into your existing budget if you decide to use this method.

Conduct email surveys.

These may be useful if you have a list of current customers’ email addresses, which you might have collected anyway for contact purposes or for monthly newsletters. If you have your customers’ email addresses, you may want to ask them the same questions as you would in a mailed survey. However, the risk with email surveys is that they might be relegated to the customer’s spam folder. There’s no way of knowing how many of your emailed surveys were actually received by your customers and no way of guaranteeing that your customers will bother to fill out the survey even if they are received.

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Conduct phone surveys.

This may be a touchy subject for some, as many people feel annoyed when they’re called on the phone at home.

But if your business relies on person-to-person communication.

It may not be out of the question to conduct a phone survey.

You can ask many of the same questions that you would in a written survey, asking customers what they see as your greatest strengths and weaknesses.

And whether or not your customers would recommend your business to others.

• The downside to a phone interview, aside from potentially disrupting or annoying the people being called, is that you won’t have the customer’s responses in front of you like you would with a written survey. If you plan on conducting a survey, you’ll need to have a fast writer/typer to transcribe your customers’ responses over the phone. This may require hiring additional personnel to conduct the interviews and write down responses, which will then need to be compiled into a spreadsheet or catalog of feedback.
  

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Conduct personal interviews.

This doesn’t have to be anything too thorough.

You can simply chat with customers as you’re ringing out their orders or assisting them as you normally would.

But face-to-face communication could be a great way to poll clients and learn what they’d most like to see improvements within your business.

• Much like the phone interview, a personal interview will still require you to make some written account of what your customers said and what feedback they offered. This doesn’t make it an ineffective or impossible plan to implement; it just means you’ll need to plan ahead if you decide to go this route.

Brainstorming Your Marketing Plan

Gather your information.

Review any surveys you’ve conducted, and determine how you’d like to grow your business.

Compare this with any real-world obstacles, including current and projected market trends, forecasted expenses that might arise in the near future, what geographic region and demographics you have had the most success with, and any competitors who also operate in that region or target the same demographics.

Assign roles.

As you move forward with your marketing plan, you’ll want to assign specific roles to everyone responsible for the marketing of your business.

Determine who would be the best fit for each role within your marketing plan, and define what that role’s responsibilities will be.

You should also determine how you will measure success for each role’s responsibilities.

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Declare your marketing goals.

What do you hope to achieve by building a marketing plan?

Is your end goal to broaden your customer base, to let existing customers know about new services/promotions.

To expand into a new region/demographic, or something else entirely?

Your goals will guide the creation of your plan.

• Your marketing goals should fit within your larger business goals.
• When developing your marketing goals, make sure your goals are tangible and measurable. Otherwise, it will be difficult to interpret your sales, and you may not be clear on what approaches and strategies were effective.
• Use outcomes like increased sales dollars, increased number of units sold/manufactured, increased public awareness, or a number of new accounts with clients.
• For example, your goal may be “Increase new contracts by 10% or increase social media presence”.
  

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