In this episode you’ll hear me answer a question about the 5 things you should have in a marketing plan.
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Transcript:
Question
Hi Orren Michelle here having a sales and marketing plan and budget is clearly important when starting out what would be your top five must dues or must-haves in that plan for a start-up in Adelaide?
Answer
That’s a great question so I’m just assuming based on what you’ve given me that you are a startup that is pre-revenue not actually making any money someone couldn’t take that as the assumption for your question so the one thing that I’ll be checking yes sorry I’d be looking at currently with that position is I would be concentrating on a business model rather than a business plan and basing this on all of the work done by Steve Blank so in the lean startup and startups really are searching to find a correct business model and then companies then trying to execute on that business model and companies the ones that are creating plants and from all my experience that work with startups over probably the last five six seven years now is that a lot of them have gone in with a lot of thinking around what a plan is and I should just really be looking at a higher level model so I’m really gonna start kind of with that assumption and what I would do is break it into two sub categories of what are you selling and how are you selling it so in terms of what are you selling I’ll be looking at what places like McDonald’s and Hungry Jacks do so there’s kind of a infamous case study that floats around the internet that costs and I’m not going to get the figures right but a cost McDonald’s let’s say $1 to acquire a customer and what a customer does it does is they come in and they purchase this dollar product usually a burger and you can see you know particularly in Australia Hungry Jack’s does all the time you notice every time you go past 200 Jack’s they’re gonna have a big banner ad out the front of their physical locations just saying you know $1.00 those or whatever so they’ve got these $1 offers to entice you to come in and then when you come in you spend the dollar but they basically make no profit off that and then what they do and if you notice they’re like especially Hungry Jack’s to say would you like that in a meal so they try it up solely to the meal and then next minute you know you’ve got chips and you’ve got a coke and if there’s someone sitting next to you they’ve got a meal and then you’ve got the family meal and you’ve got dessert and then you drive out forty dollars later so they make all of their money in their profit particularly after that initial sale so I’d really be concentrating on what you offer in terms of things like that so what are your upsells from what you are initially selling you’ll probably only find that by going and actually out and talking to real people and seeing where they currently are in life so what the goals are to get from where they’re currently up to something in the future and also that kind of pain point or that need where they’re currently out and then finally in the future what are some of those fears if they don’t actually get that and what are some of the dreams if they do so you’ve kind of got if you’re picturing an axis of the timeline going on the x-axis and then on the y-axis you’ve got positive and negative you’ve got kind of four quadrants and be really worth going out and talking to who your customers are I’m working out whether I currently what my future looks like both in terms of positive and negative and you’re gonna really find out what they want now in terms of what you’re selling again I would also be looking at that progression in a logical order so when they purchased the burger what’s the next thing that they want and you kind of want to have chips because they’re delicious and then you don’t have a drink to wash it all down and then once you’ve had that you’ll want to finish it off with a dessert like this is nothing new you know if you look at potato is half the world has moved on potatoes because they’re super cheap you know Russia USSR living on you know millions of people living on potatoes you look at a soft drink all it is literally water, flavouring, sugar and then just a ton of profit in there so just looking at what that logical progression is to get whatever that person a once now currently and whatever they want in the future and how can you speed that up or automate it or make getting that desire result much quicker or with less effort in terms of how you’re going to be sewing and how you communicate that the main thing I really want you to think about is what is your hook or how are you different than everyone else at a marketplace so a really great book called the blue ocean strategy is really about creating a blue ocean in an ocean full of competitors were all the shark eating all of the fish so having thoughts about who you competitor desert sort of competitors are what they are offering and positioning yourself different to what they are putting out to the marketplace so really having a look at we competitors doing and competition is fine in my opinion it means that people have a need in people of wine but differentiating yourself from those people but also when you differentiate them make sure that there is a clear line in people’s minds what you offer compared to what they offer so the next thing I would be looking at is the customer journey so really smart guy named Eugene Schwartz wrote a book breakthrough advertising and in the breakthrough advertising book and came up with a model called the market awareness model and it goes through five stages go through someone being unaware that they have a problem then becoming aware that they have a problem then the third step is once they’re aware that they have a problem being aware there are actually solutions out there to create the change and then for stepping now that they know there are solutions and obviously hopefully one of those solutions is yours they become aware of that solution and they become product aware particularly of your solution and then once they become product aware and I like your solution and they become most aware because they’ve got the solution and they’re most aware of how it works because elves the consuming it or using it so within that model you can’t really go to most aware from unaware there’s who accept exceptions or examples where you can do that but a lot of people before they actually buy from you they’ve got to you know that I have a problem they need to know you can solve it they need to like you and then once they’d like you they really need to trust you and then when all those factors are there they’re going to purchase so what I would be really looking at is how that bits in with that kind of McDonald’s example that I gave you one of the easiest ways to get people to either know that they have a problem or know about you even if they know they have a problem it is giving them some sort of revelation or some sort of notification so that revelation could be I’m getting them aware that they have a problem and once they’re aware that I have a problem which is notifying that hey you are someone that could potentially solve it and in terms of getting them to like you just helping them is a really good way for someone to like you and once they like you they need to trust you and way you build trust is you make a connection and that connection lasts over a matter of time and they able to see that you make a promise and then that you deliver on that promise and you keep your promise and then you repeat it over and over again and they can trust you and that takes time that takes a relationship and that takes connection and then they are open to you selling what you are currently doing so I really think about how you can get people to know they have a problem know you like you and then trust you before you can go out and sell and then basically on that point of selling what I would be doing is going to people in real time so not necessarily online or offline but I wouldn’t be automating this process and I’d be going out and talking to people and trying to go through that whole process again just know you like you and trust you and then selling to them in person or online but in real time that way you can actually have a conversation with people it doesn’t matter if it’s email or as text or its phone or you go to a cafe but at least you can have a conversation with them back and forth to way so you can really work out what they respond to and what they don’t respond to only at that point then I would start automating things I see that trap with a lot of people they just go straight to automation and unless you’ve been doing marketing sales for a long time will be selling your product for a really long time you may or may not know what is sticking on what is not what some objections people have and what some objections they do not have and also really working out what they really, really want and you can only really find that out through a real time conversation what I would also be doing while you’re trying to go find those people to go sell to them is a big component while you’re trying to solve those people in person it’s really just going out and finding those people and I’d really suggest going to your initial network because they already know you they already like you and they trust you but beyond that really figuring out who has the problems that you’re trying to solve currently which I talked about before but also in the future and working out what the common denominators are in terms of their demographics are who they are where they’re located and so on their psychographics who their interest in their beliefs and then also the behaviours that they that they display based on those psyche graphics and those demographics so really find out who those people are that could potentially use your solution in other words who has that problem currently now that they want to get out of and have some dream to get some different place in the future that if they don’t get that they then potentially fear some implication of that so really that’s probably all I have got off the top of my head and I think and I have been counting but I believe we’ve got two five or the top five things that you asked for so hopefully that helps go out and try it and see what happens.