How to Create a Marketing Plan for Your Business in the Cayman Islands

“It’s not what you sell, but HOW you sell it.” Brian Halligan, CEO-Hubspot

Marketing is the number two aspect of business that takes away the massive chunk of the greenbacks after the salaries of the employees. When creating marketing plans for a business, you have to have a clear vision, well-defined goals, and a list of strengths and weaknesses.

Before moving ahead, let’s understand what a marketing plan is?

What is the marketing plan?

Marketing plans for businesses are the report that details the marketing strategies for the following year, quarter, month, or week.

Generally, a marketing plan will include:

• A rundown of the business’s marketing and advertising goals
• Description of your business’s current marketing position
• Task time frame
• KPI (key performance indicators) that you will be tracking
• Summary of the target audience, their needs, and proposed solutions

Importance of sketching a Marketing Plan

It takes time, the marketing plan is not a magic wand, but it shows its magic slowly and steadily. The task and activities you do on a daily basis help you establish the bigger picture, and eventually, will yield greater returns on the investments made. Money, efforts, and resources, all count towards investments made on a long-term horizon.

1. Provides Focus

Since you already know about the activities and tasks that you have aligned up, you cannot sway from your path. These activities and tasks serve as guides and prevent you from falling prey to distractions and deviations. Having a marketing plan will help you stay focus. A marketing plan assures that the activities conform to the direction in which the business is strategically operating.

2. Helps plan and manage resources effectively

Apart from the money, time and workforce are also essential resources for any company. A marketing plan helps you utilize each of these optimally.

Bye-bye procrastination, an attitude that will deprive any business of its success.

3. No confusion

The marketing plan and the market strategy couple to ensure high returns on investment. And for this same reason, it has a measurable metric, and there is no ambiguity or confusion of any sort.

4. Helps deliver consistency

Often, organizations do not compile a marketing plan (with a vision). Instead, they stick to it to induce a short-term momentum in their current activity, which will take them far by no means.

It may yield good results, but once you focus on the momentary activity, you lose sight of other important marketing plans that can generate the same attention regarding your product and service.

With a marketing plan, you market your business consistently and continuously.

How to create a Marketing Plan for your business in the Cayman Islands

Given the competition, price, and overall inflation, opening a new business will rather be challenging. The benefits of starting up a new business or establishing an already existing one in the Cayman Islands are plenty.

Some of these include :

• Business-friendly government with a sound legal system
• No tax including, corporate, property, capital gains, and profits
• Almost 50 flights take off every day to the US, UK Canada, making it easily accessible.
• Since English is the national language, communication is a cakewalk, and you reap the advantages of a highly educated workforce.

With the right location and the right mix of marketing plans, you can make your business successful.

Following are the steps to create the right marketing plan for your business in Cayman and anywhere in the world -

1. Target Audience

Targeting everybody equals targeting nobody. That's the very reason why figuring out the right target audience is crucial for your marketing plan to be successful.

It applies to all marketing plans, be it online marketing plans, digital marketing plans, social media marketing plans, etc. You can begin by creating a buyers' persona, which is more detailed research consisting of the following parameters -

• Personal characteristics
• Buying power
• Lifestyle
• Interests
• Engagement in social networks
• Professional approach

and parameters to define target audience are -

• Demographics - age, gender, location
• Purpose behind making the purchase
• Purchase interests
• subcultures

It will give you a clear picture about the type of people who will like using your product and services.

2. Marketing audit for your business

The next step after figuring out the target audience is to conduct a detailed audit of your business. A marketing audit will give a good insight into your business and others in the same niche. The marketing audit will detail -

• number of businesses in specific sectors
• average numbers of employees
• average earnings
• The average income per household and more

This data will further highlight market values, potentials, and opportunities. You will be able to analyze the present market standing of your business and decide the forecast the future market positioning of your business.

Other aspects of your business study will include the

• SWOT analysis
• McKinsey's 7S framework - Strategy, Structure, Systems, Staff, Style, Skills, and Shared Values
• Competitor Benchmarking - this will help you understand what the competitors are up to and see through their strategies or plans.

The above valuable information highlights market values, market potential, and both prominent and hidden opportunities. It enables you to understand where your business sits in its market sector and the market share available.

By buying some of your competitors' shares, you can access their latest reports, newsletters and attend annual meetings to hear what other shareholders thought. Many companies do this!

3. Create sustainable objectives: Where do we want to go?

In a world where many companies are number-driven, many do focus on softer objectives. It helps shifts focus from sales to business as a whole.

It's time you inculcate SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, (sometimes agreed), realistic (or relevant) and time-bound, (or timely) objectives for the following -

• What are your sales figure and the number of new clients you want?
• What and how will you improve customer service?
• Bring-in efficiency and work sharp on reducing the costs?
• How can you make your business stand out from the competitor?

4. Segment your customer base

Another critical step in creating an effective marketing plan is setting new goals and successfully achieving them.

Look at some examples below -

• To maintain or to improve a competitive position
• Develop a new product or offer a new service
• Enter new markets
• Develop new products
• Cancel or reduce market spending on a product or service

Once you figure out the above goals you want to achieve, segmenting your customer base becomes easier. Be it B2B, B2C, or a combination of both. Yet another strategy to abide by while customer segmenting is to use the mnemonic SUPERB -

• Size: Is the market large enough for segmenting?
• Unique: Are there measurable differences between segments?
• Profits: Do the expected profits exceed the costs of additional marketing plans and other changes?
• Easy Access: Are the segments easily accessible to your team?
• Reaction: How is the market reacting to your communication, and are they able to do it?
• Benefits: Will the varied segments require various benefits?

Well-established customer segmentation is vital for optimizing your digital marketing plan as well.

5. Target new customers and position your business

You create a marketing plan to garner as many new customers and to position your business strategically.

At this stage, you analyze the existing opportunities in your business, i.e. -

• Market Penetration Strategy - to sell more of your existing products or services to your existing customer base.
• Market Development Strategy - Introduce your present product range to a new customer group.
• Product Development Strategy - Expand or improve the current product offers.
• Diversification Strategies - exploring a new market with a new product offer utilizing the skills within the business.

One cannot undermine the 'pricing of a product or service. Kotler's (1988) marketing mix (look at the table below) describes nine price and quality strategies. You can also gauge which of these strategies your competitors use.

6. It Time to Create a Marketing Action Plan

The marketing action plan needs on-time execution. You can explore the option of outsourcing it to internal consultants or agencies.

A detailed action plan will specify the dates and name the person in charge of that particular task (you can include this option). It will ensure the timely completion of the task without any loose ends.

7. The final stage- Monitor, maintain and improve

Do you want to know the secret to successful businesses?

The consistency and the drive to start today are what sets them apart. It ritualistically follows the marketing plan.

Implementing these habits will benefit your business in the long run. Review the plan regularly, have a brief meeting with the team. You can also conduct a quarterly meeting of what is working and what is not.

In a nutshell,

A marketing plan can do wonders for your business. Yes, it is an everyday effort and tedious, but there is no looking back once you master this craft. Observe your business to reap the fruits of these activities.

Netclues has been helping businesses in Cayman and globally transform their marketing strategies for years now. We have a dedicated team that creates, drafts and monitors social media tasks to online and digital marketing.

A recognized name in the Cayman Islands, Netclues can breathe life into your online presence.

For more information and guidance, get in touch with our experts today.