3.1 Build Strategy Objectives and Proposals

Now that we've built a foundation for our marketing plan, it's time to get to the heart of the matter. We've built an executive summary, studied the macro-market environment and explored our competition. But now it's time to make proposals for our own market entrance. This is perhaps the most time-consuming part of creating a marketing plan. Much of the other work involved is data gathering and research designed to create a clear understanding of the market. But building strategy is you saying exactly how you will compete. You'll set big picture goals for success and craft objectives to help you along the road. And you'll tie it together with a series of proposals to help kick-off the marketing plan. Let's get started. I'm working in the project proposal template from Envato Elements here. I'm building a marketing plan for Everylytics, a new firm designed to bring analytics to everyone. The template has three slides really designed to help me bring my marketing strategy to life. This one is the first, the Goals slide. Think of goals as really big picture ideas of the future reality of your business. In other words, what are you trying to accomplish? These could be ideas, financial goals, employee goals and more. They're truly up to you. And don't take them lightly, goals are what define the company. My top goals for Everylytics is to bring analytics to everyone. I believe that a world of data exists out there that we need to tap into so that we can make the right business decisions. For a catchy phrase, let's call that Make Analytics Universal. I'll key that in to this first box as you're seeing me do here. In the box below, I'll type a brief description of what this goal means. Knowledge is power, and data insights help get you there. We believe that the power of analytics should be available to, and used by anyone. Then I can repeat these steps in the other boxes. Let's say my other goals are deliver spectacular service, capture 75% of global analytics market share, and create a winning work environment from my employees. It's great to set goals across a broad spectrum of ideas, including maximizing employee happiness. The next slide deals with objectives. Objectives are the building blocks to help us accomplish those goals. In this presentation, I'll list an objective to support each of the four goals we just talked about. Remember our first goal, make analytics universal. To do that, we need an objective. When designing objectives, it’s best to determine what will helps your goal come true. Here, I think the objective is two-fold, market and deliver value. I’ll give that title to the objective. Then, in the description below, I’ll give some details. In essence, strong marketing is needed to educate and inform customers about analytics. One of the challenges about analytics is that not enough people know how powerful it can be when used to make business decisions. Then we have to convert them by delivering value in both monetary and feature terms. If we don't make it usable for everyone, it won't catch on. As we did before, I'll build out additional objectives. As you can see, each one directly supports a goal with a plan of action. Goals are wonderful, but they need a firm foundation to stand on to get people to believe in them. Last but not least the least, the Scope of Work slide offers the opportunity to make direct proposals to investors and customers. In a marketing plan, this may primary deal with funding. Proposals are what you need immediately to begin pursuing objectives that lead to goal fulfillment. For Everylytics, the challenge is indeed funding. I want to accomplish this with a two-stage venture capital process, and I need to clearly capture the details of that in this slide. Now, this may spin off into a pitch deck that we create later to really show it off to investors, but it's a good idea to capture these in your internal marketing plans as well. I'll start off by renaming the slide Funding Proposal. Then I can start rearranging this text here on the left. I'll give it a descriptive subtitle and then briefly describe the structure of my funding proposal. This is designed to clearly communicate to investors the exact sums I'm looking for while outlining future returns. More detail will come later in the presentation. Finally, I can use these two placeholders to detail elements of both funding rounds. For example, I may want to raise 1 million upfront to be split between HR and advertising budgets. This is a healthy mix that encourages investors. The human element will be used to hire talented people, while advertising will be used to attract customers. My second round is longer term and more robust. The next 5 million will be used for product development, the creation of a global support center and more. As you build these proposals out, think back to your goals and objectives. Your proposals should be designed to directly support your vision in order to bring it to fruition. Again, you might go external with parts of this marketing plan and build a pitch deck later, and capturing these ideas on the frontend internally is a great idea to start. Thanks for watching.