Breakthrough Marketing Plans

Almost every company creates a marketing plan each year, and many spend hundreds of employee hours researching, preparing and presenting their tomes to senior executives. But most marketing plans are a waste of time; they are too long, too complicated and too dense. They end up sitting on a shelf, unread and unrealized. Breakthrough Marketing Plans is an essential tool for people who create marketing plans and people who review them. The book provides simple, clear frameworks that are easy to apply, and highlights why marketing plans matter, where they go wrong and how to create a powerful plan that will help build a strong, profitable business.

Almost every company creates a marketing plan each year, and many spend hundreds of employee hours researching, preparing and presenting their tomes to senior executives. But most marketing plans are a waste of time; they are too long, too complicated and too dense. They end up sitting on a shelf, unread and unrealized. Breakthrough Marketing Plans is an essential tool for people who create marketing plans and people who review them. The book provides simple, clear frameworks that are easy to apply, and highlights why marketing plans matter, where they go wrong and how to create a powerful plan that will help build a strong, profitable business.

Trusted advice on successful consulting from the authors of the bestselling Guerrilla Marketing series Consulting is entering the era of the guerrilla client-buyers with a glut of information at their fingertips and doubts about the value consultants add. Guerrilla Marketing for Consultants is the first book to reveal how guerrilla marketing can transform today's challenges into golden opportunities for winning profitable work from the new breed of consulting clients. Packed with information, this step-by-step guide details the 12 marketing secrets every consultant should know, the anatomy of a marketing plan, Web sites, sources of free publicity, direct-mail marketing, winning proposals, and more. Jay Conrad Levinson (San Rafael, CA) is the Chairman of the Board of Guerrilla Marketing International and the author or coauthor of more than 30 books, including the bestselling Guerrilla Marketing series. Michael W. McLaughlin (Mill Valley, CA) has been a partner with Deloitte Consulting since 1994.

WARNING: Do Not Read This Book If You Hate Money To build a successful business, you need to stop doing random acts of marketing and start following a reliable plan for rapid business growth. Traditionally, creating a marketing plan has been a difficult and time-consuming process, which is why it often doesn't get done. In The 1-Page Marketing Plan, serial entrepreneur and rebellious marketer Allan Dib reveals a marketing implementation breakthrough that makes creating a marketing plan simple and fast. It's literally a single page, divided up into nine squares. With it, you'll be able to map out your own sophisticated marketing plan and go from zero to marketing hero. Whether you're just starting out or are an experienced entrepreneur, The 1-Page Marketing Plan is the easiest and fastest way to create a marketing plan that will propel your business growth. In this groundbreaking new book you'll discover: - How to get new customers, clients or patients and how to make more profit from existing ones. - Why "big business" style marketing could kill your business and strategies that actually work for small and medium-sized businesses. - How to close sales without being pushy, needy, or obnoxious while turning the tables and having prospects begging you to take their money. - A simple step-by-step process for creating your own personalized marketing plan that is literally one page. Simply follow along and fill in each of the nine squares that make up your own 1-Page Marketing Plan. - How to annihilate competitors and make yourself the only logical choice. - How to get amazing results on a small budget using the secrets of direct response marketing. - How to charge high prices for your products and services and have customers actually thank you for it.

Pt. I. The planning approach. ch. 1. Introduction. ch. 2. Planning. ch. 3. Undertake effective communications -- pt. II. Information gathering and assessment. ch. 4. Analyze your past planning efforts; market the new planning. ch. 5. Collect information for the plan. ch. 6. Assess the business and IT environment. ch. 7. Determine alignment of IT and processes to the business -- pt. III. Develop the plan. ch. 8. Develop issues and opportunities for the plan. ch. 9. Define objectives and constraints. ch. 10. Create strategies and action items. ch. 11. Create strategic IT and process plans for business units. ch. 12. Build and market the plan and planning method -- pt. IV. Implement the plan. ch. 13. Perform strategic resource allocation. ch. 14. Implement the plan - short term. ch. 15. Implement the plan - long term. ch. 16. Measure planning results and update the plan. ch. 17. Conclusions and actions to take. ch. 18. Planning example - Irish farming organization

Here Calkins shows business how to create and maintain a defensive strategy including: how to understand and get competitive intelligence; how to determine if your brand or company is at risk; how to create a defensive strategy; limiting risk and preventing a trial; understanding your own IP as a weapon - and much more.

"Beloved Brands is a book every CMO or would-be CMO should read." Al Ries With Beloved Brands, you will learn everything you need to know so you can build a brand that your consumers will love. You will learn how to think strategically, define your brand with a positioning statement and a brand idea, write a brand plan everyone can follow, inspire smart and creative marketing execution, and be able to analyze the performance of your brand through a deep-dive business review. Marketing pros and entrepreneurs, this book is for you. Whether you are a VP, CMO, director, brand manager or just starting your marketing career, I promise you will learn how to realize your full potential. You could be in brand management working for an organization or an owner-operator managing a branded business. Beloved Brands provides a toolbox intended to help you every day in your job. Keep it on your desk and refer to it whenever you need to write a brand plan, create a brand idea, develop a creative brief, make advertising decisions or lead a deep-dive business review. You can even pass on the tools to your team, so they can learn how to deliver the fundamentals needed for your brands. This book is also an excellent resource for marketing professors, who can use it as an in-class textbook to develop future marketers. It will challenge communications agency professionals, who are looking to get better at managing brands, including those who work in advertising, public relations, in-store marketing, digital advertising or event marketing. "Most books on branding are really for the MARCOM crowd. They sound good, but you find it's all fluff when you try to take it from words to actions. THIS BOOK IS DIFFERENT! Graham does a wonderful job laying out the steps in clear language and goes beyond advertising and social media to show how branding relates to all aspects of GENERAL as well as marketing management. Make no mistake: there is a strong theoretical foundation for all he says...but he spares you the buzzwords. Next year my students will all be using this book." Kenneth B. (Ken) Wong, Queen's University If you are an entrepreneur who has a great product and wants to turn it into a brand, you can use this book as a playbook. These tips will help you take full advantage of branding and marketing, and make your brand more powerful and more profitable. You will learn how to think, define, plan, execute and analyze, and I provide every tool you will ever need to run your brand. You will find models and examples for each of the four strategic thinking methods, looking at core strength, competitive, consumer and situational strategies. To define the brand, I will provide a tool for writing a brand positioning statement as well as a consumer profile and a consumer benefits ladder. I have created lists of potential functional and emotional benefits to kickstart your thinking on brand positioning. We explore the step-by-step process to come up with your brand idea and bring it all together with a tool for writing the ideal brand concept. For brand plans, I provide formats for a long-range brand strategy roadmap and the annual brand plan with definitions for each planning element. From there, I show how to build a brand execution plan that includes the creative brief, innovation process, and sales plan. I provide tools for how to create a brand calendar and specific project plans. To grow your brand, I show how to make smart decisions on execution around creative advertising and media choices. When it comes time for the analytics, I provide all the tools you need to write a deep-dive business review, looking at the marketplace, consumer, channels, competitors and the brand. Write everything so that it is easy to follow and implement for your brand. My promise to help make you smarter so you can realize your full potential.

Deliver Big-Picture Marketing Plans for Pennies on the Dollar Successful marketing expert and copywriter Robert W. Bly cuts through the clutter of short-lived marketing techniques and trendy gimmicks to reveal the critical steps you need to cross over from business owner to marketplace competitor. Dishing bite-sized lessons, supported by in-chapter exercises and end-of-chapter actions, Bly coaches you in creating an effective marketing plan that produces the results of an expensive marketing consultant without the hefty cost. Learn how to: Develop a clear business vision Position your business and services strategically Research your market and target your ideal client Integrate online and offline marketing Put measurements in place to assess marketing tactics Create an effective implementation schedule Review and troubleshoot for future success and growth Whether embarking on a new venture or reviving your current business plan, this practical handbook provides the next steps toward business success and survival.