Digital Marketing

Develop a Successful Marketing Plan: 15 Key Factors for Business Success

Every marketing plan should include an analysis of the industry. Why? Because it is vitally important to understand the industry in which you operate and to identify and track your performance on Key Business Success Factors (KSFs) for your organization.

Understanding your industry and identifying your KSFs will help create a successful marketing plan; one that is based on measurable progress and results. A key success factor is one element of a whole that affects your company’s ability to perform well in its market.

Most companies focus on three to five of the most important success factors (for their business). From time to time, or year after year, these key success factors may change, as the industry or the market changes.

15 examples of key factors for business success (and this is not a complete list) they are:

  1. Number of new clients per year;
  2. Number of customers lost per year OR the number of customers retained (it is important to understand and measure the lifetime value of the lead for each customer on a regular basis);
  3. Hire and retain excellent employees (measured by employee turnover, job openings, customer satisfaction);
  4. Successful introductions of new products (measured by sales and costs);
  5. Successful promotional programs (measured by sales and costs);
  6. Good / healthy financial indicators: for example, working capital, acceptable ratios (in particular, debt to equity ratios), profit margins, cash flow, accounts receivable and more;
  7. If you are in the manufacturing industry, high utilization of operating capacity;
  8. Strong provider network;
  9. Strong network or distribution channel;
  10. Successful product positioning;
  11. Low cost structure;
  12. Niche Product / Service – Track the number of competitors entering and / or leaving the niche. Is the cost of entering the market high or low?
  13. Market leader, follower or challenger, what is your relative position in the market and why? Are you able to support that position if you are under ‘attack’?
  14. Product differentiation: Do you have technology or service advantages that others cannot easily copy? How unique and differentiated is your product or service?
  15. Time to market – can your product or service be delivered quickly and easily? from the first point of contact to the moment of shipment and subsequent billing?

Once you’ve identified your specific KSFs, strategize around those factors and integrate those strategies into your business and marketing plans to ensure business success. Develop measurement programs that help you track your progress against your success factors. You also need to evaluate your competition and see if your competitors’ key success factors are similar or different from yours (depending on their strengths and weaknesses and your business and marketing strategies, they can be very different). One way to compare and evaluate is to do a competitive strength analysis; Find out what your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses are and develop your competitive strategy accordingly. (A sample SWOT analysis can show you how to analyze the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats facing your business.)

For example, if retaining your existing customers is a key success factor, your business goal should be to increase sales with your existing customers. How do you do that? First, take a customer satisfaction survey to assess how satisfied your current customers are (or are not). Then determine what needs to be changed and what you need to focus on. Make sure you understand how your customers choose between competitors – is it price, service, quality, knowledge, reliability, relationships, or all of these factors? What product or service attributes are most important to your customers? What is the unique difference between your product or service and your competition’s product or service (from your customer’s perspective)?

Once you have identified your key success factors; built measuring devices to track them; evaluated and compared the KSFs of its competitors and those of the industry; incorporated their strategies and objectives into their business and marketing plans (phew!); You have to act! Build your business with these key success factors.

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