PROCESS OVERVIEW
1. INSIGHTS - Business, customer, competitor and relevant data
Havaianas Quantitative Research
Insights help you understand your current market situation. Once you know where you are, it's alot easier to create a vision for where you want to be, and most importantly where growth will come from. Market insights start with the CEO's vision, including the key business drivers, opportunities and significant challenges from within the business itself. Customers are next - Who are the current and future customers? What are their user journeys? What is the lifetime customer value? What do they think of your brand and your competitors? How are you different from your competitors.
BDS Cannabis Intelligence Briefing
To really gain insights it is essential to dig deep into all relevant internal and external data sources including Headset sales data, BDS Analytics, customer research, Google Trends and Google Analytics. Depending on the history of the business and problem to be solved, other useful resources can include social listening tools, user testing, online research, internal workshops and employee surveys.
2. STRATEGY - Brand strategy, go-to-market planning and storytelling.
Brand positioning concepts for Thunder Hill - a sustainable lumber company - designer credit LTD
Strategy phase answers the 'how'. How do you take your company from your current situation to where your future growth potential lies? A fundamental requirement for any marketing strategy is a highly differentiated brand strategy. Brand strategy essentials include articulating your promise, purpose, key storytelling pillars and a robust visual identity.
Once the brand strategy framework is in place the marketing plan outlines how you are going to achieve the company vision. This includes who, what, when, where and the how much. Depending on the insights this can be in the format of a go to market strategy, customer segmentations, product roadmaps, pricing strategy, promotional and channel specific tactics with expected results.
After the creation and execution of a content and social strategy traffic and conversions rose 500% on Aflac’s Small Business Blog.
From articulating the plan to internal audiences to connecting with customers, storytelling is critically important for engagement and relevance. All marketing plans need fully developed story and content calendars by channel and type from lightweight content (social), to middle weight content (blog) to heavy weight content (video) and the expected results or KPIs.
3. EXECUTION - Implementation across multiple channels
Now you have the insights, the brand and marketing plan, the next challenge is to implement the plan. Discipline and focus are essential for marshaling staff, controlling budgets and engaging the right resources to deliver to the right people at the right time to achieve the right results. In cannabis, trade marketing is critically important. Educating budtenders and ensuring that sales reps have the right tools to sell in and display products are essential to increasing sell through. Every business will have its particular channel focus but generally I recommend a hearty combination of earned, paid and owned media channels. Earned media deliverables include the PR plan, social media playbook & influencer outreach plan.
Pleasantrees Mural Hamtramck Michigan
Kin Slips awarded top in Innovation and Packaging in Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top 100 Cannabis Brands.
Owned channels can be the most valuable in delivering business outcomes as they are focused on your existing fans and high value customers. Owned deliverables include user focused website & apps, email, retail point of sale and creating custom brand events.
Paid channels have historically been very limited for cannabis brands, but these can be an important way to target new customers including digital content syndication, print, out of home, native content and paid search.
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