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I am using an automatic transcript service as it is not possible for me to do it on my own and I cannot afford human transcription at the moment. The service claims to have about 95% accuracy, which means there will still be some mistakes, so my apologies for having a less than perfect transcript, but I hope I can afford human transcription soon and I will solve this problem. However, the service is pretty good, and the transcript is almost perfect.
Transcript
Welcome to a new episode from English plus podcast. In today’s podcast, we will talk about professional English and we will focus on marketing and talking about marketing strategy. We will talk about marketing strategy versus marketing plan, and we will talk about developing the, getting planned, using the stages known as the a O S T C or analysis objectives, strategies, tactics, and control.
[00:00:32] And we will finish our episode by listing some important questions. Every marketer needs to know about when he or she wants, he wants to prepare the marketing plan, the summary of the marketing plan, what is known as the execute of summary. So without further ado, we have a lot to cover Ben and I will talk about this and we will explore as much as possible from the topic of marketing strategy so that you can understand it better.
[00:00:58] And maybe you can use it in your own life. And of course, Hopefully that will add to your professional English skills. So Ben, let’s start with the differentiation between marketing strategy and marketing plan. What’s the difference between these two? When we say marketing strategy and marketing plan.
[00:01:16] Well, a company’s marketing strategy describes how it will position itself and the product itself or the services it provides in the competitive marketplace. The strategy includes a discussion of target markets, product and pricing policies, and proposed marketing and promotional initiatives. The company marketing plan is a little bit different.
[00:01:40] Of course they are related and they affect each other. They’re not separate, but the marketing plan is the written document, which details the marketing methods selected like advertising, price, promotions, et cetera, and specific marketing actions or marketing activities. For example, a back to school promotional offer.
[00:02:00] And a company’s marketing plan also examines the resources needed both financial and human to achieve specified marketing objectives, such as an increase in sales or a successful product launch over a given period of time. Okay. So that is in a nutshell, the difference between marketing strategy and marketing plan.
[00:02:21] Now let’s jump right in and talk about developing the marketing plan, because obviously this is more detailed and you can get actionable items from this plan. The strategy might be important as a guideline, of course, but the real juice is in the marketing plan. That’s right now, you can develop a marketing plan using the stages known as a O S D C, which stands for analysis, objectives, strategies, tactics, and control.
[00:02:50] So that is another fancy abbreviation. Yeah, you can call it a fancy abbreviation, but minnow, I understand that some people use fancy abbreviations and sometimes not in right contexts. They talk about the Swope. They talk about smart. They talk about. The USP, they talk about the four PS, four CS, et cetera.
[00:03:12] You know, it’s not just about being fancy. I know marketing and professional English is littered with those abbreviations. And you might argue that these are just fancy ways. Why don’t you just say analysis, objectives, strategies, tactics, and control. Well, first of all, obviously this is shorter. But the more important thing is that these are easy to remember.
[00:03:34] So when we talked in an earlier episode about the SWAT analysis, it’s a lot easier to remember swollen than to remember strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. You see? So these are not just a fancy way to talk about business English, but it’s an easy way to talk about business English. But it is very important to point out some of those pretenders that just go around and use these abbreviations, usually in the wrong context, as we said earlier, and they kind of overused them.
[00:04:05] Yeah. I’m not with that at all. I’m not saying that this is a cool thing, especially when you’re talking to people who might not know the meaning of Swope or a O S D C or the four PS or smart objectives or whatever, you know what I mean? Yeah, of course. I mean, uh, all workplaces are full of these pretenders.
[00:04:24] You find them everywhere, but that’s not our topic for today. Of course, let’s focus back on our marketing plan and using the stages known as the a O S T C or analysis objectives, strategies, tactics, and control. Let’s start with analysis. Okay. Analysis has different things to consider. Now we need to consider the current market situation and here we need to know information on the competitors and the marketplace.
[00:04:51] We need to have a competitor analysis, and that is the competition in the marketplace. You will also need to include information on their positioning. That means how they control the way the customers see the products or services. We need to know that when we are in the analysis stage of developing a marketing plan, we also need to consider product and service analysis, what you sell or provide and your unique selling point.
[00:05:19] And here we have another fancy abbreviation, and that is you as speed. USP stands for unique selling point. Now here, when you think about analyzing the product or the service. You need to think about what you sell or provide your unique selling point. That is what distinguishes your product or service from others on the market.
[00:05:39] And then you will have to think about the target market he’ll customer groups or segments, for example, teenagers, business people, et cetera. Okay. So to recap in the analysis, we need to think about the current market situation, competitor analysis, product analysis, or service analysis and the target market.
[00:05:57] That’s right. Okay. So that was the aim, the analysis. What about the, Oh, the objectives? Well, when you want to think about objectives, you need to have marketing goals. And obviously what you want to achieve in terms of image and sales. You need to write that down. You need to know that beforehand, because it’s very easy to lose your way or to deviate from the plan.
[00:06:20] If you don’t have a clear marketing goal. And then talking about objectives. It’s very important to set smart objectives and here we have another acronym, but to be honest, this is one of the most important acronyms and it can be used in a lot of things. Not only in marketing now, smart is an acronym. So the letters stand for words.
[00:06:40] So the S stands for specific M stands for measurable, a for achievable R for realistic and T for timed. The first one, the specific, when you want to set objectives, it’s very important to be precise about what you are going to achieve. You need to be specific, and then this objective needs to be measurable.
[00:07:01] You need to quantify your objectives. It cannot just be floating in the air with nothing or no way to measure this objective. Then it needs to be achievable. You need to ask the question, are you attempting too much or too little? You need to be realistic. Do you have the resources to make the objectives happen?
[00:07:20] The manpower, the money, the machines, the materials, the minutes. Do you have that? You have to be realistic about your objectives. And finally, it needs to be timed. The objective needs to be timed. When will you achieve this objective within amongst the, by February, 2030, whatever. So here, if your objectives can be specific, Measurable achievable, realistic and timed.
[00:07:44] We can call them then smart objectives. S M a R. Okay. So I can see the smart objective idea can work for a lot of things, even for personal objectives. That’s right. Even want to think about something that is completely personal and not in the business world. It helps. When you think about it this way. It doesn’t mean that you can’t dream and you have to be realistic or whatever, but it is important, at least even within the scope of your dream to have steps to get there, you need to define some steps, some milestones.
[00:08:19] And to get to these milestones, you need to have a vision. You need to make this milestone realistic for now and later on, you can fly and become whoever you want, but there are some milestones that need to be specific, measurable, achievable. Realistic and most importantly time. All right. We talked about analysis.
[00:08:38] We talked about objectives. What about strategies? Well, strategies that is the approach to meeting the objectives. Now you have your objectives, you have your smart objectives. Now what about the approach? What is your strategy to get there? And here strategies here. We’re not talking about the marketing strategy that we talked about at the beginning of the episode.
[00:08:58] That’s different here. We’re talking about the strategies, the approach that you have, or. You want to take to meet the objectives that you just created, which market segment do you want to target? How will you target the segment? How should we position within the segment? That’s very important. These are very important questions.
[00:09:16] We need to ask ourselves if we want to create an effective marketing plan. So these are the strategies. And then we move on to talk about the tactics, the strategies, that’s the approach. That’s the guideline. And then we have the tactics. We have the specifics, we convert the strategy into the marketing mix.
[00:09:35] We talked about the marketing mix earlier in this podcast. And to remind you what the four P’s are. These are the product, the price, the place. Promotion. So product price, place, promotion. These are the four PS of marketing the market. And finally we have the control. What do we mean by the control after we’ve worked on the analysis, objective strategies and tactics, what is control?
[00:09:59] Well, simply control is tracking how the success of the marketing plan will be measured. It’s very nice to create a marketing plan, to create an impeccable marketing plan that has taken into consideration everything. You have great smart objectives. You have the approach written down very clearly. The tactics written down to the minute details, everything taken into consideration, but there is a very important stage after you start to implement this marketing blend, how the success of the marketing plan will be measured.
[00:10:32] How each marketing activity will be assessed if it is just a perfect marketing plan. And there’s no way to assess this marketing plan, or you have no plan to assess the plan. You will never know if your marketing plan works because remember the most important thing about creating a plan is be willing.
[00:10:50] To change, be flexible about this plan. This plan is not set in stone. You have a plan today and after you use this plan in the market for a month or two, or even for a week or two, you might figure out that there are some things in your plan that are not exactly the things needed. In the market now, so you need to change, you need to adjust your plan and that’s very important.
[00:11:13] You cannot just depend on anybody’s expertise to create the plan, because the plan is about the market. The market is people, people change. So plans should change with them as well. But to know if your plan is working or not, so that you can decide whether you want to change it or not. You need control, you need a way to track your plan, how the success of the marketing plan will be measured.
[00:11:37] That’s very important. All right. So that was awesome. A O S D C the analysis, the objectives, the strategies, tactics, and control. And these are very important stages that we need to know about when we develop a marketing plan. Now, before we move on to the last part of this episode, I would like to remind you that you can find a lot of resources on our website.
[00:11:59] English plus podcast.com. So take the link. You will find in the description of the episode and go there and take your English with it. To the next level we have interactive activities. We have a PDF downloadable worksheet, anything we find suitable for our episodes, so that you can practice and improve on the things we’re learning here in our podcast.
[00:12:17] And of course, if you like the content we’re creating and you would like to support us, there’s another link that will take you to our Patreon page. You can become our patron and support English plus podcast, help us create more content and reach more people. Now, with that being said, let’s get back to our very last part.
[00:12:34] And this part is very important to be honest, because we will talk about some brainstorming questions and this is very important. Because sometimes yes, you might have, or you might have an idea what you need to do, but it might help. If you have a set of questions, a set of brainstorming questions that will help you create the marketing plan, a summary of the marketing plan.
[00:12:56] And that is known as the execute of summary. So Ben, what is the execute of summary? Well, as you just said, the execute of summary is a summary of the marketing plan and it is included at the beginning of the document, which is the marketing plan document. Now, here I have prepared a list of questions that are very useful as brainstorming questions.
[00:13:17] These will help. You with your marketing plan with your execute of summary, because I find it a very useful tactic to ask yourself questions. Even if these questions are kind of obvious to you since you’ve been here or you’ve been working in this company forever, it doesn’t matter. You should always ask the questions.
[00:13:35] You should always ask key questions because as we said, Things change, even if you’ve been working in the company for a very long time, or you’ve been working on a product for a very long time. Yes. You know, a lot of things, but people change, demographics, change people’s needs change the marketing channels, change a lot of things change.
[00:13:55] So you need to keep up to date and ask yourselves these questions all the time. All right. So shall we start with the questions? Sure. The first question is how can I best define my business? What kind of company are we? That is a very important, very good question to ask at the beginning, because as we said, that might change over time, depending on the circumstances, then you need to ask yourself, are my objectives smart.
[00:14:22] Now we talked about smart objectives. But you have to remind yourself because it’s very easy to create objectives that are not smart. It’s very easy to fall in this trap. Keep asking yourself this question are my objectives smart. And then you can ask a question. Should I focus on repeat business?
[00:14:41] Thereby keeping the customers we’ve got, or should I focus on gaining new customer? And that’s a valid question. Where do you want to focus? Of course you want both now every company in the world, whatever their product is or their service is, they want the repeat customers. They want to keep their own customers and they want to get new customers.
[00:15:01] And that’s fine. But what do you want to focus on? Should you focus on repeat business or on gaining new customers? That’s a very important question because you cannot focus on everybody. And another question, do my customers share any patterns, habits, or repetitive behavior, for example, do they all shop in the same kinds of shops?
[00:15:22] That’s very important because if you already know which customers you want to focus on and you know, the patterns or habits or repetitive behavior, Of these customers that will make it easy for you to know how to market or where to place your ads, for example, for these customers. And the next question, are there any market segments or groups of consumers that are underserved, that means not provided for enough or at all?
[00:15:47] If you can find an answer to that and you know that there are some groups of consumers that are underserved, you might want to include a special thing for this group of customers or market segments. And then you should ask yourself, is the product or service viable? What does that mean? Will it make a profit?
[00:16:06] It’s very important to have a great idea to have a great product, but it is not viable. It will not turn in a profit. And of course, since we’re talking, talking about business and not a charity, that is a very important, yes. Valid question is the product or service viable. And the next question, is it accessible?
[00:16:24] Is it easy for the audience to get or start using the product? If the answer is yes. Perfect. If it’s not, well, you have to work on that. And then you need to ask yourself how well did previous marketing methods work. If you’re talking about a product or service that you’ve already created marketing campaigns for.
[00:16:42] How well did our previous marketing methods work, we can learn from the things we did in the past. That’s very important. It’s not about every time we need to create something new. Yes. We need to be creative and create new ways to reach more people, et cetera, but we can get very good use of the lessons learned.
[00:17:01] Distinct work distinct didn’t work. Maybe this thing that didn’t work in the previous marketing campaign was because of a mistake or something wrong we did, and we know about it. So at least we have lessons learned of the things we should and we shouldn’t do, we should do it this way. We shouldn’t do it this way based on data based on real.
[00:17:21] Data, not just on some ideas in someone’s mind. And we all know that we have a lot of genius people around in the company, specially when it comes to talk about marketing, everybody knows everything. Anyway. So the next question is which marketing mediums or communication channels are best for my audience.
[00:17:39] Now that you know, your audience, you know, the marketing segment and all that, you need to ask yourself which marketing mediums or communication channels are best for my audience. And then you should ask yourself, should I use a cross-section of media or should I just focus on one medium? That depends on the market.
[00:17:58] That depends on the audience that depends on the consumers you want to target. Is it useful to cross section or should you focus on only one media? Then the next question is, do I have a clear marketing message? One that is easy for the audience to understand? Do I have that? If I don’t have that, I should work on that.
[00:18:17] The message, the marketing message should be clear, should be easy to understand. Not for me, not for me as a marketing manager or as the marketing team. Yes. The marketing team understands that very well because they know the product, they know everything, but ask somebody who’s never heard of the product, especially if you are marketing for new customers, ask somebody who doesn’t know as much as you do about the product and see if the message, the marketing message is clear or not.
[00:18:44] Then ask another question. How can I ensure the same look and feel across all my adverts and marketing efforts to preserve the branding? Do I have a strategy for that or not? You cannot leave that for later and you cannot leave that to the pure creativity of designers, because if you don’t set rules for designers to follow.
[00:19:05] They might follow their creative ideas and that will lead you to inconsistencies in your advertisements and other marketing efforts. So it’s very important to have a clear idea of the brand, how it should look like certain images, the colors, et cetera. And then. Ask yourself. Can I time my marketing campaigns to coincide with seasonal sales or product launches?
[00:19:28] Say for example, black Friday or certain product launches within the company. Can I time my marketing campaigns to coincide? And if I do that, will it help or not? And then the next question, how much is the cost compared to sales? Are we making enough money to cover our costs? Of course. Remember if it’s not profitable, it is not useful.
[00:19:49] No matter how good your ideas are. You need to make enough money to cover the costs. And then how much is the cost per consumer? You need to calculate that you need to know how much per consumer, how much will it cost to company to get one consumer. That’s very important number to calculate or to think about at least.
[00:20:10] And then do I have clear objectives so that I can measure the results that is also like the smart objectives, but also you should ask that about all objectives throughout your marketing campaign and how can I get feedback from my audience, which kind of market research should I carry out? Remember, as we said, you might have the perfect plan, but if you don’t have ways to assess your plan, so you have no idea if it is working or not.
[00:20:37] These are some of the questions. I’m not saying these are all the questions you should ask yourself, but these are just example questions. That you can ask yourself when you want to write a marketing plan or marketing strategy, et cetera. Well, I guess that was a comprehensive plan and thinking about all these questions beforehand, or even during working on a marketing strategy or a plan, I guess it’s super useful.
[00:21:01] So that will be everything we wanted to share with you today. Thank you very much for sticking around. And we would like to remind you again, that we have our website ready for you to take your English to the next level. We have activities, PDF downloadable worksheets, the show notes. The transcripts depends on the content of every episode, but we have a post custom made for every single episode we create.
[00:21:22] So go to our website and take your English to the next level. And don’t forget to support us on Patreon, become our patrons and help us create more content and reach more people with that being said, this is your host, Danny. I would like to thank you very much for listening to another episode from English plus podcast.
[00:21:38] I will see you next time.
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