By M. Isi Eromosele

In addition to its fundamental task of acquiring new customers, marketing plays the lead role in the design of strategies and tactics that form growing ongoing, long-term relationships with customers.

In implementing high performance marketing strategies, a company must research and segment the market and develop targeting and positioning strategies for each segment. It would need to define and introduce new products that match customer requirements and create sustainable competitive advantage for the firm.

Finally, there is a need to develop pricing and distribution channels for these products as well as create communication strategies to build brand awareness, generate interest and motivate purchase. New standards of implementing marketing are emerging, driven both by the advent of enabling technologies and the imperatives of the one-of-one marketing concept.

In implementing a high performance program, a company needs to consider the following principles of marketing:

• The marketing process is cyclical, involving planning, program development, program execution and post execution analysis and reporting
• The marketing process is more iterative and interactive and less linear. As such, market planning involves ongoing interactive processes that cycle around objectives, strategies and tactics
• The marketing implementation process always involves a logical workflow and project management process that may or may not be precisely enabled by software

The development of a high performance marketing plan necessitates that all the components of a company’s marketing activities, communications and interactions with its customers work in synch to create a strong and consistent brand impression as well as high value long-term relationships with its customers. To develop a complete high performance strategy, a company needs to take the following actions:

• Ascertain the business and marketing objectives and determine the role marketing will play in achieving these objectives
• Perform a detailed market environmental analysis that would include examining the segmentation of the market, customer attitude, attributes and behavior and how each segments responds to marketing
• Establish budget levels and overall allocation plans
• Develop specific objectives, strategies and tactics for each communication medium

To implement the process in a precise manner, the company must acquire customer characteristic information from each market segment it is in or have targeted. The capability to perform advanced customer analysis and forecasting has greatly improved with the advent of sophisticated analytical software and tools, predictive modeling tools and marketing campaign management tools.

With these tools, a company is empowered to pursue a rapid-cycle, fact driven process for developing and optimizing their marketing campaign. An integrated communications program would be the backbone of implementing a high performance marketing campaign.

The integrated communication program would require taking the following actions:

• Analyze - Utilizing analytic tools, unearth how frequently various segments of the company’s market buy and use their products
• Predict - Estimate the sale potential of the marketing program designed to capture the targeted group of customers
• Plan - Develop promotional targeting tactic that is based on an assessment of past campaigns
• Optimize - Analyze responses from past marketing campaigns, run the results through predictive forecasting tools and use the detailed outcome information to propel the oncoming marketing strategy

The result of the above would be high performance campaign management solutions and complete customer information that is dynamically linked to all customer touch points.

Please Read Part II 

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

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