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Effective marketing organisations must be driven through sound business strategy. Fulcrum produce marketing strategy that is always well embodied by your business strategy.

The best marketing strategy does not start with creative, it starts with a marketing process.

The Fulcrum Marketing Strategy Development Process is a thorough problem solving and marketing strategy development program that focusses on solving your growth challenges and maximising the return from your company’s marketing operations.  It is particularly useful for innovating within a market or creating a position of market leadership.

Overview

Indentifying key sources of growth, challenging the current business operations and identifying key growth creating activities are crucial for businesses which want to grow.

The process looks at your whole business with the aim to maximise the potential by focussing on:

• reviewing your market conditions
• reviewing your current market challenges and capabilities
• identifying and maximising competitive advantage
• creating and amplifying market positioning
• developing new revenue sources
• maximising market communication techniques

Action Orientated

Fulcrum works alongside senior management to develop achievable and actionable strategies and build the company plans around them. Real results are achieved when your management team have consistent and ongoing interaction with the Fulcrum team. At the end of the process, you must own the strategy and be able work the plan yourself. You are left with a growth system which is repeatable over time to achieve consistent growth. Companies effectively implementing this program often achieve more than 25% ongoing growth per annum.

Your Challenges

Business owners, senior executives and managers are frequently facing growth related issues such as: – Turning around a declining sales trend – Identifying and entering new markets – Launching new business and product lines – Identifying emerging growth opportunities – Managing the risks of growth If you have any of the above issues, then the Fulcrum Marketing Strategy Development Process is for you.

Approach

The process considers what could be rather than only what is. Whereas, a regular marketing strategy process might simply consider what a customer tells you and respond, Fulcrum considers how a customer might react when given a slightly or radically different proposition to the one currently in the market.

Benefits

Each strategy generates actionable tasks to achieve medium and long-term revenue and growth targets. Brief but highly strategic plans are created that drill down into action items. You are then lead through specific actions to implement, or the Fulcrum team implement them for you.

Development Process

Experience the Fulcrum Marketing Strategy Development Process. It is a tailored program designed to provide companies with the highly-focussed strategy development and implementation resources necessary to address specific growth challenges and opportunities.

1. Seek and learn.

Information Gathering – The first step is to gain an understanding of the market in which you are participating; target audiences, competitor offerings, current pricing and more. Review the business realities – Gain an understanding and commitment to potential resources available to make it all happen. Review the market realities – What limitations might we be dealing with and how far can we push the market potential?

2. Set the hypothesis.

Hypothesis development – Develop the potential strategic alternatives and understand what would need to happen for them to become reality. Reality test – Review the strategies for practical application, decide which are practical now and which could be left for a future date and understand what resources are necessary to make these alternatives. Solidify strategy – Make some strategic decisions to understand which alternatives provide the growth desired, build an understanding of the risks involved, ensure all strategies can work together and consider the reality of them working within the business.

3. Set the course.

Key strategies – Articulate the strategies and provide means for measurement and communication. Plan action – Develop broad and specific actions stemming from the strategies.

4. Build a foundation.

This stage involves developing a compelling ‘marketing tool box’ that clearly defines your value to the target audience and creates appropriate messages and triggers to sale.

5. Implement and educate.

The stage after the plan development involves completing agreed actions and driving deep engagement and understanding throughout the company, whilst developing the ongoing implementation activities, including allocation of resources.

Business-to-Business Marketing Strategies

What do business professionals think about marketing in the business-to-business (B2B) environment? We examined survey results and reports* that compiled data on the topic, and created a list of eight B2B marketing strategies commonly recognised as successful regardless of industry.

• Referral Programs
• Word of Mouth Plus
• Trade Shows
• Online Advertising
• Remarketing
• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
• Content Marketing
• Inbound Marketing

Choosing the Right Marketing Agency: Marketing Execution Vs Marketing Strategy

If you pretty much know what marketing you need to do and how it is going to be accomplished then most likely you need some type of marketing agencyto do it for you. Depending on what the activities are, you will choose a different type of agency. For example, if you are more likely to be doing TV, radio or magazine advertising you will likely need a traditional advertising agency. If it sits more in the digital realm, with a lot of Google AdWords or YouTube commercials, then a digital advertising agency is probably for you. Alternatively, you may simply need a graphic designer to bring your ideas to life.

Making Marketing Plans Happen

A marketing plan is paramount for achieving business growth. The purpose of a marketing plan is to assess the current market position of your business and develop marketing strategies and actions to undertake to meet your business objectives. Putting together a strategic plan that develops your business around your competitive advantage, and ensures that you are in a position to take advantage of your strengths, is a key to continued business prosperity. Of course, once you have the plan, making it work is the next step.

Developing an Annual Marketing Plan and Marketing Strategy

Make your business New Year resolution to start the year with an integrated marketing plan that clearly outlines your business objectives and the marketing strategies and tactics you plan to use to achieve them

An annual marketing plan helps keep businesses on track with goals and objectives for the year and ensures that marketing opportunities and budgets are maximized. Developing a marketing plan that you revisit every year is the key to success year after year.

A solid annual marketing plan should be structured with a disciplined approach to reaching your business goals and objectives, yet flexible enough to adapt to changing market conditions and business opportunities throughout the year.

Start Annual Marketing Planning by Reviewing Previous Year Marketing Performance

Before you begin the annual planning process for the coming year’s marketing efforts, you’ll want to take a close look at how you performed over the current year. Even if you did not have a structured marketing plan in place previously, you should be able to review past marketing activities and results.

Here are some questions to ask when evaluating the performance of a previous annual marketing plan or year’s activities:

• Did you achieve desired results from your marketing efforts (such as improved brand recognition, X number of leads generated or sales/revenue figures)?
• Which specific marketing activities were effective?
• Which specific marketing activities were not effective?
• Should you reallocate resources to better performing targets, markets or marketing tactics?
• Has your target market, audience or geographic area changed over the year?
• Were you able to stay within a marketing budget at the end of the year?
• What areas of your marketing budget do you need to cut costs in for the coming year?
• What areas of your marketing budget do you want to invest more in for the coming year?

The answers to questions about your previous year’s marketing plan will play a big part in building an annual marketing plan for the coming year. Each year adjustments should be made to your marketing planning efforts that incorporate learning from the past – what works or what doesn’t work.

Develop Essential Components of an Annual Marketing Plan

A marketing plan is a written document that contains a business’ marketing strategies and tactics. The first step in developing an annual marketing plan is getting organized. Make a list of all the marketing components or categories that are important for your business.

Typical components in a marketing plan include:

• Advertising (print and/or online)
• Branding and Graphics (promotional giveaway items, photography, video production, graphic development)
• Collateral (sell sheets, brochures, business cards)
• Events (trade shows, webinars)
• Direct Marketing (email, direct mail, list generation, promotional incentives/contests)
• Public Relations (press release distribution, PR agency)
• Research (focus groups, surveys, marketing reference books)
• Social Media (social media networks)
• Website (search engine optimization, web development/hosting)

Of course the actual components for your business may vary depending on your business, industry and marketing budget. The important thing is to identify all the potential components in your annual marketing plan so you can decide how you plan to address those components for your business. Even if you do not plan to allocate budget for a category – like social media – it should be included if you have any marketing efforts planned for the category so strategies and tactics can be outlined in an integrated planning approach.

Define Marketing Plan Strategies, Tactics and Budget

Once marketing components are outlined for the business, all potential strategies and tactics should be defined per category or component.

Here is an example of defining strategies and tactics for the “advertising” category:

Marketing Category: Advertising
Strategy #1 – Drive traffic to website via online advertising
Tactic # 1 – Google Adwords
Tactic #2 – Banner ads on industry association website
Tactic #3 – Internet yellow pages ads

Each tactic will also need to have an allocated budget, if applicable. The marketing plan should include fields to capture your allocated budget, actual spend and budget variance so that you can track throughout the year and make any adjustments needed. For example, if you are tracking under budget in one category you can shift funds to another category where you may be tracking over budget.

Flexibility to adapt an annual marketing plan throughout the year is important to adapt to a changing business environment and be “opportunistic” in marketing efforts. Be sure to take advantage of tracking mechanisms for marketing efforts whenever possible – such as unique 800 numbers or website analytic reports – so that you can make adjustments to maximize performance of campaigns (or dump marketing efforts that are not producing desired results). Goals should also be set for all areas of a marketing plan so that you can measure the performance of marketing tactics against business objectives.

Personal selling is a promotional method in which one party uses skills and techniques for building personal relationships with another party that results in both parties obtaining value. Personal selling occurs whenever an individual salesperson sells a product, service or solution to a client.

Sales methods

There are many different sales methods that can be used to complete a sale and form the required relationships. Determining which sales method is more effective depends on what you are selling, who you are selling to and when you are selling it.