The following diagram illustrates the critical components of the marketing foundation and how that foundation provides the base for all of the marketing programs you may want to execute.

Marketing Plan Framework - 8 Step Process

Lay the Foundation

Before you can determine what your marketing strategy is, you need to understand your vision and goals. All marketing activities will be chosen based on whether they will achieve one or more of your goals. When you have a clear understanding about what you are trying to accomplish with your business, you can then determine how you will get there.

Now you need to look at the market and analyze whether the market you wish to serve wants what you can provide. You should sit back and think about your business and determine your focus. By evaluating your business from the perspective of client need, you will be able to focus your efforts on initiatives that are key to the success of your business.

Understanding your competition from both a business and marketing perspective helps you determine how you are different from them. Your marketing plan should emphasize how you are different so that you stand out from the crowd. This differentiation will be the basis of your core marketing message.

Identify Your Brand

Your brand is the image you wish to portray to the world and is one of your company’s most valuable assets. It communicates your corporate personality and shapes the internal and external clients’ perceptions of who you are as well as the expectations and promises you extend to your customers in terms of quality, service, reliability and trustworthiness. A strong brand helps the audience differentiate you from your competitors and can positively influence their purchasing decisions, directly impacting your profitability

Also, identify your personal brand. If you are an independent professional or partner in a service business, you are your brand.

Identify Your Marketing Strategy and Budget

The marketing strategy outlines your plan of action to achieve your marketing goals. It is how you take advantage of the various marketing activities to build awareness and educate your prospects. If one of your marketing goals is to double traffic to your web site, what activities will you use to drive more traffic to your web site and in what timeframe and with what budget? Think through each of your marketing goals and identify the key activities that will help you achieve success.

Create Your Sales Tools

Your sales tools are the last activity you should undertake before you launch your marketing campaigns. Until you know what types of marketing you will do, you don’t know what materials you will need to support them. Using the brand identity and messages developed earlier, combine them to create the sales tools that help you communicate with your target audience. A good first impression makes selling that much easier, and a consistent set of materials – Web site, brochures, newsletters, advertisements, business cards and other materials – with a strong identity and a compelling, powerful and enduring message, gets you noticed and remembered.

If you can do only one thing well because of budget or resource constraints, be sure your Web site is the best you can provide. It is most likely the first impression your prospect gets of your company, and how useful, informative, and simple it is to use will impact their decision to do business with you. I cannot stress this point enough – a bad Web site can ruin your entire marketing effort by turning away prospects before you even know they are there.

Build Upon the Foundation

Now you are ready to execute the plan. You have a roadmap for your business, a budget for your activities, and an understanding about how you will reach your prospects. By building your foundation first, all of your programs will be consistent, targeted, and more likely to succeed. You can be assured that no matter what type of programs you choose, you will consistently communicate your value to your prospects, raising your awareness, attracting ideal prospects, and increasing profitability.

Why a brand?

A good brand communicates clearly, artistically and creates credibility. It enables you to provide customers with an image that can provoke emotion or feelings about your company, having a powerful impact on whether someone wants to do business with you. A good brand image projects a unique, provocative, and memorable image to your prospects and clients.

When someone looks at your business card, Web site or marketing piece, what does your image project? Does your brand leave a positive, powerful, successful, or reliable image in the minds of your prospects? Or does it project a light, airy, fun, or exciting image? What image best fits your company? Remember, you have to be able to project your image in every aspect of your company – from your materials, to your attitudes, to the way you answer the phone, to the way you conduct yourself in public.

How do you determine your brand?

Most likely you have a brand even if you do not have a logo or creative image. Ask customers the first words or images that come to their mind when your business is mentioned. If they consistently respond with an emotion or feeling that fits your business, then your brand has been developed. When responses are inconsistent, ambiguous, or refer to non-image attributes such as cost, it is an indicator of a weak brand image.

If you have a weak brand image, you need focus on marketing programs that help build awareness around your brand. Remember that your brand is developed through an entire customer experience and needs to be reinforced consistently through your Web site, sales tools, promotional items, customer service, word-of-mouth and other aspects of doing business with you.

Evolving your brand

Although you may have a brand, your brand needs to evolve with your business. As your business matures, so should your brand. Evolving your brand does not mean changing your brand. It means you should consider refreshing, updating, or clarifying the image you use and the emotion it projects. If you have had the same logo for several years, talk with a designer to see if you can update its look without changing the overall image it projects. If you don’t have a logo, consider having one developed. Brands take time to develop, so you should not “re-brand” your company unless you truly believe you need to (because your brand has been associated with a negative feeling). But if your brand is weak, maybe a little evolution is needed before you embark on a new marketing campaign.

Naming is an important piece of your brand and critical to its success. Not getting it right the first time can cost your company a lot of money and effort later if you have to change the name because it is not appropriate or in violation of someone else’s trademark. Plus, you probably wasted a lot of effort and time branding and building awareness around the original name. Now that entire effort is for naught.

If you are not certain that you really like your name, or you don’t think it will work for your product or company, get help from an objective third party. Assemble a group of business colleagues or friends for a naming party. Have a thesaurus, dictionary, and access to WHOIS for domain name searching handy. Set the ground rules of what image you want to project or other criteria for the name you want to try to achieve, then brainstorm for a couple of hours, keeping the following in mind:

• Stay away from names that combine terms that are overused such that it makes it hard to differentiate you. Also, try not to use terms that limit your name’s longevity. Some names can really date your company or product. Any name ending in “Link” is early 90s. Cyber, net, or .com is the mid- to late 90s.
• For a company name, try not to pick a name that limits your ability to expand in the future. But on the other hand, try not to pick a name that is so generic that you cannot be easily found. For example, go to Google and search for “Computer Services, Inc.”. Stop when you get tired of paging through the list.
• Combine real words in a way that is catchy and can be easily branded. If descriptive as well, you’ve hit the jackpot. Besides making the name memorable, the combined words may make it easier to trademark and get the domain name. “FogDog® Sports” is good, but Turtlewax® is better.
• Make sure the name is easy to pronounce, pleasing to the ear and memorable. Also, make sure the name you choose is not offensive to any culture, or translates into a negative word or slang in another language.
• Keep the name as simple as possible – one-word names are the best, two word names are fine. Three short words if you must. Keep the syllables to a minimum. Use the technique described above to arrive at a memorable name.

Coming up with an appropriate name and getting the domain name to match is a challenge, but with some thought, brainstorming, and creative thinking, you can create a short, catchy name and a domain name that works and can be trademarked. Getting it right from the beginning makes building awareness and brand recognition more effective. Don’t get discouraged. You will arrive at a name that can become a great brand.

This tip is just the beginning of our coverage of naming. Stay tuned for more.

The Myths

• We can design our brand ourselves;
• We can’t afford to have a professional brand developed;
• We don’t need a brand.

We can design our brand ourselves

We have all experienced the effects of a do-it-yourself brand. The owner creates something either themselves or they buy a template on the Internet. What do you think when you are handed a black and white perforated business card? What happens when you get to a web site that looks home made or you’ve seen the design before? Would you trust the company could provide the solution you are seeking?

We can’t afford to have a professional brand developed

It certainly is true that having your company brand and marketing materials designed by a professional firm costs money, but it may cost your business more than a few thousand dollars if you do not have a high-quality, custom brand identity professionally designed. How can you command respect or be taken seriously if you don’t take your brand seriously?

We don’t need a brand

A brand identity is a basic business essential that is central to your marketing effort. This myth is aligned with the myth that your business doesn’t need marketing. No brand is almost as bad as a do-it-yourself brand. Not having a brand makes your business look less than professional. Be objective – would you call your business looking for services if you saw your brand identity?

The Benefits

1. Makes your company look bigger

When someone sees your business cards, materials or web site, what you want them to think is that you are a company that deserves their business. Prospects look for a company that has the resources to help them succeed. They will also expect to pay more for a larger, more established company. If you hand them a home made business card, they will see view you as small and not worthy of their business or the fees that you feel you deserve.

2. Creates an identity that is bigger than you

Many independent professionals that offer consulting or coaching services end up building a brand around themselves rather than the business. In some cases that may be fine, but if you ever want to grow or sell the business, consider developing a brand for the company. A unique brand will be one of the assets that come into play during the sale or acquisition.

3. Helps you stand out from your competition

One of the ways you can separate your business from the competition is to have a unique brand that projects your unique value to your clients. If you provide quality services with attention to detail, your lack of attention to detail in your brand will send a conflicting message to your prospects. Make your brand better than your competition and be sure it projects what you want your prospects to think and feel when they see your materials.

4. Conveys stability in your business

You may be the best, most experienced person in your field, but no brand or a self created brand conveys an impression that the company won’t last. A brand helps you develop an image that says “I’m here to stay” for your business. A brand used consistently in everything you do will project a long term feel to those who see it regularly. It will take a lot less time to develop that stable image with a quality brand than it would without one. Eliminate any question about your viability by having crisp image and clear marketing materials.

5. Ensures consistency in your materials

Developing a brand image will drive consistency with your materials. Once you have a timeless logo and set of marketing materials designed, you can use them for years to come. Any time you need to develop new materials, you know what they will look like. You don’t need to start over and design the new versions of the materials. It saves you time and saves you money. Establishing a clean, high-quality, and consistent look and feel to your materials makes it much easier to gain the trust of potential clients and getting them to pay you what you are worth.

6. Attracts more clients

Let’s face it – people do judge a book by its cover. A quality brand increases the likelihood of someone contacting your business for more information. Unless your brand is black and white for a reason, people are attracted to color, design, imagery, and style. If you want to attract clients, make sure your brand is memorable. If just a couple of new clients call you because they felt your company offers the quality of products or services they are seeking based on the image your logo and brand identity package creates, then your brand will pay for itself.

7. Puts more punch into your marketing programs

If you are going to spend money on marketing, you want to be sure your marketing materials don’t sabotage your efforts. When your marketing program does get a prospect to execute the call to action, don’t risk them bolting for your competitor because your brand scares them away. And, once you have a strong logo, creating consistent, targeted marketing pieces and programs becomes easy. 

8. Shows commitment and personal pride in your business.

Investing in a unique and memorable brand identity shows that you are committed. Handing a business card with your unique, professionally designed logo and brand identity will create an impact on your business and enable you to sell your products or services with confidence.

• Corporate identity is concerned with the visual aspects of a company’s presence. This includes your visual image such as logo, web site, and collateral. When you establish a corporate identity, you are trying to achieve an image that can be associated with your company to make it easy to remember you. A visual image makes your company more memorable.
• Brand identity is the total value proposition that a company makes to consumers. It may consist of features and attributes, benefits, performance, quality, service, support, and the values that the brand possesses. The brand identity could be described as your positioning statement with a personality and a set of values.  Brand identity is everything the company wants the brand to be seen as and the position it occupies in people’s minds.
• Brand image expresses the way a customer thinks about the brand and the feelings the brand emotes when the consumer thinks about it. Your brand image is developed based on the experience a customer may have with your brand. Depending on whether this experience is good or bad determines your brand image. If the customer experiences a negative experience, you have to work really hard to change the perception of your brand in the minds of that customer. If the characteristics being placed on your brand are positive, you can build customer loyalty and a very strong competitive advantage for your brand.

The most important task for your company is to ensure that your brand image, or how your customers perceive you, is aligned with brand identity, or how you want to be perceived. Customer perceptions of quality, service, and the intangible associations that come to the fore when the brand name is seen or heard is one of the most valuable assets a company can have.

Let me share an experience I had recently. There is a book store to be left unnamed that I have frequented, mostly for the atmosphere. Its brand image was very positive and I have been there quite a bit. It really isn’t much different from its closest competitor. But to me, it was the place I like to go browse. One day I had a negative experience with one of the managers over a meeting I was trying to conduct with a client. Amazing what that experience has done to my brand loyalty! The competitor has gained a potential customer all because I was inconvenienced. Think about that the next time you are dealing with a client. You have control over whether their experience gives your competition an advantage or not.

Of course, you need to stay consistent with your brand identity and not do something that can hurt your image in the market. But you can step outside of your comfort zone and be different without conflicting with your brand. Being bold can help you cut through the clutter and stand out from your competition.

Some ideas to help you be different:

• Position your business differently – Take a look at how you are positioning yourself to your marketplace. You need to differentiate your business from your competition to get the attention of your prospects and customers. If all of your competitors say and do the same things, figure out what is unique to your business and present that difference in a way that gets attention. Effective differentiation can make your
  business the yardstick that all others are measured against.
• Look different – Your marketing materials – web site, brochures, business cards, and logo – should project your brand identity in a way that stands out from all the others. If you are going to advertise, be sure your ad is different from all the others in the publication. Don’t simply go black and white because of the cost. Try adding one color to the ad to make it stand out. If the publication offers four color advertising, make sure you create an ad that catches the eye. Don’t be a little afraid to create an ad that has a standout image with very crisp and very brief content.
• Try something different – If all your competitors are implementing the same marketing programs, try
  doing something else. If your competitor’s web site is purely informational, add some interactivity to yours. If no one is advertising, try doing some very targeted ads or try implementing some pay-per-click advertising. Look at your competition closely and see what you can do that they do not.
• Offer something different – Include a guarantee, a free consulting session, a year of support services
  or some options that your competitors cannot. Make it compelling so that it can not be overlooked.
• Say something different – When you talk with prospects, talk about what you do that no one else does. Don’t lead with the same messages everyone else talks about. Take the time to figure out your key differentiator and lead with that message in everything you do.

Figure out what you do that is different from your competition and communicate it clearly and throughout all of your materials. If you don’t know what that is, you may need help from some outside party to listen to you talk about your business and point out things you do best. Many times, business owners do not see the value in
some offerings because they seem “simple”, but it may be your key difference over your competition.

If you are going to spend money on marketing, you should be sure that you do what you can to tastefully and effectively get your target’s attention.

Before we talk about brand, be sure you read the Cultivate Market Perception article on positioning. To build your brand, you need to have your positioning nailed because you need to know who you are before you can get to where you want to be. By understanding your positioning, you can ensure that your brand is unique, defensible, credible, and motivating.

This article will explore the idea of branding in greater detail, and give you a framework to help think about what you want your brand to stand for.

What’s a good brand worth?

BusinessWeek, in conjunction with Interbrand, recently looked at the value of some of the largest brands in the world. This annual ranking – which studies financial forecasts, brand strength, and the role of the brand in the business model – found over 100 companies whose brand was valued at over a billion dollars. Yes, that is billion with a ‘b’. Companies like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s derive the majority of their value based on the equity of their brand. According to the BusinessWeek/Interbrand analysis, more than 80% of McDonald’s $30B+ market cap is attributed to the value of their brand. 
Clearly good brands provide tremendous value for companies like these, but I’m willing to bet that most of you have companies far smaller than McDonald’s. But that should not stop you from developing a strong brand for your business. In the book, “Brand Warfare”, David D’Alessandro makes a point that consumers need good brands as much as good brands need consumers. For the consumer a good brand:

• Saves time
• Projects the right message
• Provides an identity

This is true regardless of size. For many small businesses their brand stands for unique products, fair prices and excellent service. For example, I bought flowers for my wife’s last birthday at Lavender Fields Flowers and Gifts, a florist I had not done business with before. The bouquet was stunning and drew comments from everyone in her office. Now, whenever I need flowers (like the morning of my anniversary when I forget to get something), I know this brand is a safe bet and projects a great identity.

What does your brand stand for?

In “The Myth of Excellence”, Frederick Crawford’s book on why great companies never try to be the best at everything, Crawford breaks every business transaction into five attributes – Price, Service, Access, Experience and Product. He makes the case that no one company can be excellent at all five, and in fact will fail if they try. According to Crawford, companies should align resources and efforts to dominate on one attribute, differentiate on a second, and reach market acceptance on the others. While most of his examples are large companies – Wal-Mart, which dominates on
price and differentiates on the breadth of products; or Starbucks, which dominates on the experience of a fresh latte and differentiates on customer access – many of the principles apply for much smaller companies as well. 

The following exercise is interesting to try, either by yourself or with outside help. Take the following five attributes and evaluate your company on whether you want to
dominate, differentiate or compete:

• Price – Overall cost of the product or service along with pricing model. Note that customers often care more about fair and honest pricing then they do about lowest price. Be sure to consider special pricing models or payment terms that might be an element of how you differentiate.
• Product – Quality, depth and breadth of product(s) offered.
• Service – How customers feel about a company after a transaction.
• Experience – How customers feel about themselves as a result of a transaction.
• Access – Ease with which a customer can interact with the company. For a retail company this may mean physical location and store layout, while for a service provider, this may mean ease of reaching the provider
  and scheduling appointments.

Using this as a framework for discussion provides interesting insight on what you want your brand to stand for. For example a small company making hand made gift solutions will most likely focus first on the quality and uniqueness of the product, and
secondarily on customer service. A health spa offering a wide variety of services wants customer experience to always come first, and may secondarily focus on the breadth of offerings in order to be a one-stop shop for customers.

During this process, do not ignore or dismiss the voice in the back of your head – or across the table – that disagrees. There very well could be gaps between what you want your brand to stand for and what others actually think it does.

Watch out for those gaps

Understanding your own desires for your brand is a big step, but certainly not the last one in your journey. Once you’ve focused on the key elements of what you want your brand to mean, look at any gaps between reality and your desires. If, for example, you want your brand to be associated with unique high quality products, but you produce a commodity, you probably need to go back to square one. On the other hand, if excellent service with a unique all-inclusive pricing model is the key aspect of your brand, yet customer complaints are on the rise, it is time to focus internally and fix the underlying source of the complaints.

What comes next?

Assuming you’ve gotten this far – and by no means is this an easy process to go through – you need to ensure that your marketing messages, collateral and programs are consistent with your branding efforts.

‘How do I do that?’ you might ask. Good question, and one we’ll tackle in a future article.

Your brand is meant to be a reflection of your company, not just a projection of what you want it to be. It should communicate clearly and create credibility, provoking feelings about your company that makes your target market want to do business with you. Your brand should be developed through consistent use of your message throughout everything you do and say and then living up to the message you project.

Your brand is important and you should spend time and marketing dollars on ensuring you develop it correctly. Doing it right from the beginning is the best option, but rebranding can be done successfully. I have personally rebranded two software companies, but both times, the names didn’t change and the rebranding was done while the company was small and before any major milestones were established.

When should you change your brand?

There are times that justify some change, although in most cases change still should be minimal. Consider updating your brand if your brand is:

• Associated with a negative feeling
• Weak, poor quality or non-existent
• Out of sync with your identity

In these cases, your brand is not benefiting your business. It is inconsistent, ambiguous, or projects something you don’t want to be associated with. Develop a strategy to update your brand and then focus some marketing efforts to help build awareness around your brand. Remember that your brand is developed through an entire customer experience and needs to be reinforced consistently through your Web site, sales tools, promotional items, customer service, word-of-mouth and other aspects of doing business with you. Use the new brand as an opportunity to develop new client relationships while re-connecting with your current clients.

Take small steps

When changing your brand, take small steps to enable you to transition from the old to the new. Refresh the design by keeping key elements that still work and eliminating those that don’t. Keep your name or alter it only slightly. The key is to update your look without losing its recognition by those who have bought into it.

Giving your image a subtle facelift does get people to notice that something is different and may stop to look at what you have to offer. Note the subtle changes to the logos to the right. Adding dimension updates the look without changing it drastically. A little evolution of your look may be beneficial before you embark on a new marketing campaign. The majority of the time, however, you should resist changing your brand at all as there is value in your name and image. Like all things in marketing, just because you’ve gotten bored with your look or message, doesn’t mean your customer or prospect has.