Introduction
Planning for a business is critical towards laying the foundation for success. Thus, it is imperative for a proposed business to have a comprehensive marketing plan that captures the basic ideas and implementation path. Among the elements that should be part and parcel of a business plan include strategic marketing channel and promotion.
Besides, the plan should incorporate possible competition and the general business environment level. This analytical paper will explore the above elements as a prerequisite for the successful establishment and sustainability of the Novel PR Company, which is a web content developer. The company targets the business community who depends on the internet to increase online presence.
The business will offer excellent online content development services to individual consumers, small and medium businesses, and institutions. Since the company targets to introduce unique web content services, it will not face much competition as most of the businesses in the region do not have affordable specialized web content services.
Market Segments
Marketing strategy is essential before actualizing projections of a blue print. As a matter of fact, this plan functions on the margins of informed decision making after comprehensive research on viability and sustainability of a product.
In order to achieve desired margins in sales and total revenues generated, a proper marketing plan should integrate entry strategy, comparative advantage, and market segmentation since in most cases, there is always a strong competitor or competitors that passing might prove challenging due to existence of consumer perceptions and household names.
The targeted market is subdivided into the consumer, small and medium business, and institutions segments. These segments have unique needs that must be addressed by the company in order to ensure business sustainability.
Small and Medium Business Segmentation
This market captures small food outlets, hotels, motels, and retail businesses within the targeted region. Web content development services destined for this market are often expensive, and lack the value addition component of free hosting. Sometimes, quality and relevance are compromised due to the small volumes of delivery for this market.
Novel PR Company intends to introduce the customized web content development services to this market promising diversity in types, lower price, and free hosting. As an incentive, the company will offer free content modification to loyal customers. Therefore, this segment is influenced by competitive pricing, creativity and customized services, and free hosting for optimal benefits.
In order to attract this segment, the company will offer free after sales services, delivery on credit, and series of discount on the basis of the number of web content services. Since it will be properly implemented, the company is positioned to counter competitors’ strategy of reaching the customers through proxy web content marketers (Bowden 70).
Institutional Segmentation
The targeted region has several schools, government institutions, collages, hospitals among other establishments with online programs to support their services. These institutions are strategically located and uniformly spread across the accessible market. Nearly one hundred percept of people found in these institutions are customers who have access to the internet.
With properly drawn partnership and memorandum of understanding, the market is within the Novel PR’s influence.
Specifically, the customized and relevant content element will give the Novel PR’s services a competitive age in learning institutions and hospitals which have embraced online services for their customers. Also, the competitive pricing will facilitate its sustainability in the highly differentiated market (Kotler and Gary 35).
Consumer Segment
This is the largest segment for the web content development services offered by the Novel PR Company. This segment comprises of households who use the internet to market their services or products. Since the web content development service comes in customizable packages, the segment is influenced by differential quantification, competitive pricing, and free online support.
Therefore, Novel PR Company will come up with a special web support service to position itself in this segment. The company will merge the strategy with advertisements, since this group of consumers has access to social media. Due to exposure to information sources such as new papers, television, radio, and magazines, product announcement through these avenues will enable the company to double its market base (Kotler and Keller 41).
As forecasted in the market research, this strategy will be successful towards dominance as it offers a variety of options to consumers while at the same time maximizing benefits of economies of scale to the company.
Creating Value for the Consumers and the Organization
Choosing Value
In order to increase credibility and maintain professionalism, the Novel PR Company’s business channel will encompass processes and features that flawlessly facilitate a healthy lifetime relationship between the business and its client. Among the new development elements that will be incorporated include trust, reliability, distribution, fair retribution process, and passing accurate information to target audience to restore confidence.
Reflectively, value in the context of this business will include the aspect of an engaged audience supported by high quality and relevant online content, which will help businesses to transform their web traffic into engaged audiences.
The second aspect will be online referrals through which the Novel PR Company will get more referrals via Electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM). Lastly, the aspect of sales funnel will increase the number of prospects entering the sales funnel from online sources (Rhim and Lee 160).
Providing Value
The Novel PR Company will align its services with the needs of the target market by actively participating in series of corporate social responsibility initiatives. All aspects of the firm such as sales, purchases, marketing, management, and operations will be aligned to appropriate and sustainable technology to ensure competitive advantage.
Therefore, value will be provided to business through content optimization for search engine listing (SEO), market research, and a fast turnaround. Specifically, this proposed system in Google will consist of a multi tab page that will serve different areas and services to online customers.
When implementing SEO in the Google search, it is necessary to revise the algorithms constantly for the search result of the Novel PR Company website to remain at the top. This can be achieved through revising the content to ensure that all the information in the website pertains directly to the needs of potential clients (Tynan and McKechnie 512).
Communicating Value
Communication is the epicenter of sustainability. Communicating the value for the Novel PR Company will be achieved through sales letters, SEO ranking reports, and social media presence analysis. Under the sales letters, each prospect will get a sales letter delivered via email discussing the benefits of outsourcing content creation.
The SEO rankings reports will be communicated through creating a platform for each prospect to get an SEO ranking report developed using online web ranking resources from alexa.com. Lastly, social media presence analysis will be achieved through generation of free report of online presence.
For instance, the Novel PR Company website will carry out a link reference promotion where the website user with the highest number of referral links is rewarded with a free consultancy service or gift hampers. This will create a long term loyalty among clients. The potential of the referral link approach is that it will improve the visibility of the Novel PR Company website across the globe (Rhim and Lee 163).
The advertisement message will be presented in two channels, that is, below-the-line and above-the-line. Under the below-the-line approach, the web content services will be marketed directly through the print and visual press besides the numerous local radio channels.
Under the above-the-line approach, the advertising message will be presented via the social media to appeal to the customer segment consisting of the technological gauchos and digerati. The use of social media to advertise the Novel PR Company was informed by the need for customer retention and loyalty building.
Properly modified Novel PR Company website and the twitter fun page will reassure the customers on quality of the application and its compatibility with computers around the targeted region.
Through massive recruitment of Novel PR Company fans in the twitter page, the company will not only benefit from an increased traffic of online compliments, but also record high rates of customer loyalty as most customers are influenced by reactions from other clients (Bowden 73).
Marketing Strategies
Consumers are generally influenced by two factors: internal influences and external influences. Internal influences are personal feelings and thoughts that include self-concept, motivation, attitudes, emotions, and perceptions.
These factors generally influence perception, purchasing patterns, and attitude customers develop towards a product or a service offered by a business. The marketing strategies for the Novel PR Company will incorporate the elements of product, pricing, distribution, and promotion as discussed below.
Product
Product development entails the innovation process aimed at modeling the existing product or improving on it to balance with the changing preferences of the customers. As a result, the older version will be phased out of the market as preferences change. The concept of web content development is an innovative idea to deliver unparalleled experience to target customers.
The product developed by the Novel PR Company is for distribution to companies seeking to expand their web presence is written content in the form of articles, website, white papers, and social media post. The website content will be in the form of the text used on the corporate or business website of a company. On the other hand, the article content will be used as blog posts or as articles for online distribution by interested companies.
The social media post will include one-liners that may be used in social media outlets such as Face book and Twitter. Lastly, the white papers as part of the product content will consist of information packs written in essay format containing useful information that would assist readers to make decisions regarding a particular product or service.
The primary feature of the product content for the Novel PR Company will operate on the SEO specs. The content will be created around the premises of excellent grammar, informative content, and user friendly handle (Kotler and Gary 35).
Specifically, through product development, the Novel PR Company will be in a position to optimally exploit opportunities available in the innovation market segment and gain a significant share in the web content development sector.
Pricing
Through generic pricing strategy, the company will be in a position to offer premium pricing for its customers. In order to implement the generic pricing strategy, the company will opt for value pricing as perceived by the potential customers. The value of high quality content is very high for any business seeking to create traffic and to convert it to an engaged audience.
Since the product content for the Novel PR Company can deliver this type of value, then potential business owners would be willing to pay a premium for it (Bowden 79). In setting the price for different product content, it is important to review the pricing objective, cost of production, demand, and competition.
Basically, the pricing objective for this product is to locate the premium pricing point that is acceptable and competitive among small and medium size business owners. Since the demand for this product is recurring, it is projected to be relatively stable and skewed towards creation of business opportunities for the company.
The only major cost of production is just the time needed to develop the different content. This makes the business sustainable. Lastly, the business is likely to face competition from content farms and freelancers. However, the competition will be minimal since the product content proposed by the company is very unique.
Distribution
The distribution strategy used for marketing will have both push and pull elements. Online purchasing behavior usually follows the pull pattern because internet users look for information they need on their own. Push is still necessary because people don’t know about a service or product until they interact with it. Lastly, the distribution will be supported via the e-commerce platform.
This means that all transactions will take place online. Customers will make orders and the content will be delivered online. In order to effectively market the web content product, the distribution channels that will be used include organic search, paid search, and emails.
Under organic search, the company will create a platform with searches driven by search engines such as Google and Bing. After building an email list, it will serve as a medium of product distribution. Under the paid search platform, the company will pay for online listing of search results in order to receive more traffic (Tynan and McKechnie 514).
The company will hire three vehicles fitted with loud speakers to announce the product across different regions where the target market is easily found. These automobiles will also be fitted with visible posters of the company web content product.
The targeted clients will be advised on the exact procedure of buying the web content from the company website. In order to successfully implement this strategy, the Novel PR Company will have to hire five marketers on a temporary basis to accompany the marketing entourage.
Promotion
Through timely appeal to emotions and self prejudice, the Novel PR Company will increase their advertisement in the social media, newspaper and broadcast media, and billboards for the online web content product.
The Novel PR Company will succeed in implementing this aspect of ‘jumping the queue’ ahead of other competitors through visible signs of the web content product all over the targeted region. These advertisement erected signs will endeavor to cue the visual mental aspect of the targeted customers into the product (Kotler and Keller 26).
Marketing the product will be carried out through interactive marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, personal selling, and direct marketing. Under direct marketing, the Novel PR Company will identify potential clients and make contact either via phone or email. The interactive marketing will entail taking calls over Skype and building real time chat facilities into the company’s website.
Personal selling will be executed through sales representatives and other company personnel who will be involved in direct selling of the products through their online accounts and social media presence.
Lastly, the word-of-mouth marketing will be rolled out through referrals from satisfied customers (Kotler and Keller 19). The objective of the promotion exercise is to position the company as a reliable content provider. Thus, promotional communications will rely on online platforms through the internet.
Conclusion
Properly researched brand and product management plan determine the success and sustainability in penetrating market with a new product. To increase credibility and maintain professionalism, product processes and features should flawlessly facilitate a healthy and lifetime relationship between the company and its clients.
A properly designed brand and product management plan should be practical in presenting brand knowledge, awareness, penetration strategy, and passing information to target audience. Generally, these concepts will be applied in the Novel PR Company brand.
The concepts will be designed as flexible to market dynamics and embrace alterations where necessary. Basically, the company will heavily depend on referrals from satisfied customers as a reliable promotion channel.
Works Cited
Bowden, John. “The Process of Customer Engagement: A Conceptual Framework.” Journal of Marketing Theory & Practice, 17.1(2009): 63-74. Print.
Kotler, Philip, and A. Gary. Marketing-an introduction, New York, NY: Pearson, 2013. Print.
Kotler, Philip, and K. Keller. Marketing management. 14th ed. 2012. New Jersey, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall. Print.
Rhim, Hosus and Conrad Lee. “Assessing potential threats to incumbent brands: new product positioning under price competition in a multi segmented markets.” International Journal of Research in Marketing 22.1 (2005): 159-182. Print.
Tynan, Caroline and Sandra McKechnie. “Experience Marketing: A Review and Reassessment.” Journal of Marketing Management 25.6 (2008): 501-527. Print.