Navigating the Strategic Planning Process by Insights In Marketing
Strategic planning is a powerful process that your company can use to gain profound insights on its clients, target market and competitors for the sake of creating an unbeatable competitive edge.
There are several key components to strategic planning and all of them come together, one atop the previous to give you a highly effective mechanism for knowing your customers expertly, knowing just how to sell to them in a way that creates loyalty and beating other companies in your niche at their own sales game.
The Foundations of a Strategic Plan
The foundational building blocks of strategic planning come together in asking yourself some probing questions that come to the core of what your company and business are all about. Once these questions have been answered, you can then move onto even more specific competitive improvement strategies.
Five key questions you need to ask yourself about your company consist of:
- Where does your business currently stand with meeting customer needs, sales and dealing with competitors?
- What are some core goals your company wants to fulfill?
- What is your picture of near perfect success and how might you reach it?
- How could you plan your time, activities and resources for reaching your ideal image of success?
- What steps in this direction have you taken so far and how are you measuring your advancements?
These questions will in turn lead you into creating a strategic planning checklist that will let you plan your customer acquisition and sales growth strategy.
Some key aspects of this checklist are:
- Sales figures and the growth trends you can extrapolate from them
- Analysis of your competitors and customers
- Different kinds of customer information such as preferences, buying habits, demographics, hobbies and perceived needs
The Creation of your Consumer Information Roadmap
The most absolutely vital part of your strategic planning process will be getting to know and understand your customers at a deep level, as we’ve already mentioned in the last bullet point for your strategic planning checklist.
Getting to really know your customers means gathering together all the information you already have on your consumer base and adding to it as widely as possible on a regular basis, and then applying this information in sales and promotional testing.
What are some key consumer information data points to continuously investigate?
- The different types of customers you have, their segmentation in other words
- Browsing and ad viewing habits
- How they’re finding your brand message and promotional material
- How they’re using your products
- How your message is being delivered to customers
- How they perceive your brand and products
- How much awareness your target market has of your brand
- Customers shopping and buying habits
- What promotion mediums reach them best and convert highest
- What actions on your part will trigger customer psychology into reacting with desire (A/B testing needs to be done with this)
- What your customers psychological makeup is like
The more information you gather and collate together into a comprehensive picture, the better for your sales and loyalty building efforts. This process of knowing your clients and playing to their positive emotional reactions needs to become ingrained into your company as part of an overall consumer insights culture.
If you can develop it effectively, you are well on your way to crafting the perfect value proposition for the perfect customer and really nailing your customers’ fondness of your brand in a way that makes competition with others in your niche on price and other factors much less important.
If you really want to understand how to implement strategic planning and want to incorporate it into your company for maximal gains against the competition, then go ahead and check out the ebook this summary is covering. It’s full of rich information and completely free, from the people at Insights in Marketing, here.
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