An easy way to think of marketing is as the process of getting your customers to climb the loyalty ladder.

As they ascend the ladder, your customers become more loyal and their value to your business increases. They start off as Suspects and your objective should be to eventually turn them into Raving Fans.

On the bottom rung of the ladder are all the people who fall into your target market.

You can reach these people through various forms of promotion such as advertising, flyers, inserts, mail-outs, in-store promotions, etc. They are suspects because they may or may not be interested in the product or service you offer.

Suspects take a step up the ladder and become Prospects when they respond to your promotional material. They do this by phoning for more information, walking into your store or interacting in some other way. They have expressed an interest in your product or service by taking action.

When Prospects buy from you, they become customers and move up to the next rung of the loyalty ladder.

Converting a Prospect into a Customer is the purpose of the sales process. It can involve supplying information, making value added offers, giving discounts and guarantees, providing testimonials, etc.

Getting new customers is expensive – it costs six times as much to get new customers as it does to get existing customers to return. So you need to get your existing customers to come back over and over again. You want your customers to take another step up the ladder and become members.

You turn Customers into Members by giving them very good service and providing incentives for repeat business. Various methods can be used to give customers a sense of belonging, eg, giving customers cards like AA and Foodtown.

When Members become Advocates, they start telling their friends about you and why they should also use your product or service.

You get Members to take that step up the loyalty ladder by going the extra mile for them. You have to under promise and over deliver, ensuring your customers’ experience is beyond their expectations.

You create Raving Fans by delighting your customers — getting close to them and anticipating their needs.

The great thing about raving fans is that they do your marketing for you, saving you substantial costs while enhancing your reputation.

It is generally accepted that a well thought out strategy will take a business to the next level and beyond. And that failure to plan in business is like planning to fail.
But many business owners don’t do strategic planning because they find planning concepts confusing. This article gets around that problem by comparing Strategic Planning to something you can all relate to : building a house.

Building a House
Imagine that, for your new home, you will have a house built and that you have already bought a section. Your challenge is to ensure that you move into a house that satisfies the family’s requirements and does not have any building defects. The process for ensuring that this happens can be divided into 4 steps:

• Review Requirements
• Conceptual Design
• Detailed Plan
• Build House

Step 1 involves visualising how the house would be used. You need to look at the house from the perspective of different stakeholders – partners, children, the bank (who will be providing the finance) etc. The result is a good understanding of required specifications – number of bedrooms and bathrooms, configuration of living area, and so on.

Only after doing this are you able to give your architect the information needed to do a Conceptual Design (step 2). During this step, options are explored and your initial thinking is clarified. But the thinking is still focused on what the house will look like and how it will fit together –the number of rooms, layout and style.

Step 3 is the Detailed Plan, which specifies exactly how the house will be built. It provides detailed instructions for the builder to follow and, provided that it is followed correctly, will result in the desired outcome.

This simple process should deliver the house of your dreams. But it is very important that each step is successfully completed before moving on to the next step. For it to work, no steps can be left out and the sequence of these steps must not be changed. If the process is corrupted in this way, the project will most probably not deliver the desired outcomes – a comfortable home and a happy family.

Built into our house building process are the basic rules of project management, and they are just as applicable to Strategic Planning.

Strategic Planning
When doing Strategic Planning for your business, you need to go through a similar thought process as you would for building a house. The steps are :

• Explore Business Vision
• Set Strategic Objectives
• Tactical Action Planning
• Take Required Action

Each step is similar to the corresponding step in building a house. Compare these steps as we move through the process.

Exploring the vision you have for your business (step 1) is a lot like reviewing your requirements before building a house. It involves considering all the outcomes you want from your business, from the perspective of different stakeholders – the owners, customers, staff etc.

An effective way to do this to ask the question “If this business was a stunning success, what would it look like?”. For example, the business owners might want profitability, having more time for themselves and maximising the saleability of the business. Staff might be mainly concerned about career development, sharing in profits and flexible hours.

Your business vision is the foundation on which Strategic Objectives are built (step2). The Strategic Objectives, when they have been achieved, will turn your business vision into reality. Setting Strategic Objectives clarifies your thinking on what you need to do to achieve your business goals. It is like telling the architect what the key success criteria for your new house are.

Step 3, Tactical Action Planning, involves planning in detail what has to be done to achieve your Strategic Objectives, based on the use of appropriate tactics. It is like the detailed plan an architect does before building starts.

The final step is taking required action (step4). If all these steps take place successfully and in sequence, your strategy will be turned into action. Success in your business will inevitably follow…

If you think it could do better, maybe your business is under-performing for one (or more!) of these sneaky reasons.

- Lack of strategic business focus
- Intense competition
- Not enough time in the day
- Lack of profitability
- The team isn’t working well together
- You’re just not having any fun!

These reasons for a business not achieving its potential are very common. And if one or more of them apply to your business, it simply means that your game plan is not working properly.

The Business Building Challenge

Maybe your business game plan doesn’t take all the important issues into account. Like the condition of the ground you are playing on. Or maybe you need to better understand the other teams so that that you can can outwit them. And maybe the tactics you are using are just not appropriate.

What you really need is an innovative, robust and inspiring plan for building your business. And you need to start from the beginning. You need to make business plans that, firstly, lay a solid foundation. And then you have to follow the plan, and build your business from the bottom up.

Business Building Resources on this Website

Read all about a very powerful Business Model for building your business into the success it deserves to be. It show you how to move through the process of creating your Strategic Business Plan, and then put it into action.

From the Your Strategy section, get ideas on Business tactics that could make that elusive difference to your business. Key areas to look at include Marketing, The Internet and Goal Setting.