Questions to Assess Your Marketing Plan
How do you assess your school store marketing plan? There are many ways you could approach it, but the basic elements include: determining what audiences you’re reaching, assessing the competition, clarifying your positioning and message, and assessing the marketing channels and resources. You can then use this information to create promotions and goals for the upcoming year.
Spirit Box makes marketing and school-store business simple. Every Spirit Box solves many common problems faced by school store teams, while also delivering real-world business experience before students graduate.
Ready to assess your marketing plan? Let’s dive in!
Are you reaching your target audience?
Your marketing plan should help your team reach the right people, at the right time, with the right message. When it comes to assessing your marketing plan for the past few months or years, it is important to track your plan’s effectiveness in reaching the people you were trying to reach. For example, let’s say your plan was designed to attract student customers, but you discover that 70% of your customers are actually teachers. That should raise the flag that maybe some aspect of your product mix, pricing, messaging, or some other aspect of the business is resonating more with one segment than another.
Piece out whatever information you can about your customers to identify patterns that could help you identify the segments best reached by your business. Also, consider the demographics of repeat customers. Don’t draw conclusions too quickly–be sure to assess other aspects of your plan first.
Has the competitor landscape changed?
During the past few months, have there been changes in the number of competitors competing for the same customers? It could be that a new competitor entered the market or perhaps another went out of business.
The most likely competitor for a Spirit Box would be the vending contractor for your school. These contracts often limit what a Spirit Box team can sell and where they can procure products. Some Spirit Box teams have implemented a “vending takeover,” where the team will compete for the school’s vending bid to become the sole vendor for the school. Some schools have been successful, greatly impacting the competitive landscape. If Spirit Box is the only vending option, it can have positive effects on the business.
Consider how competition has changed over the last few months. Learn more about competitive research here.
Has our positioning changed?
In light of changing competition in the area, consider how your “position” in the market has changed. Perhaps your competitor had offered lower prices with more varieties of product options. And you see your business lost customers since it opened. Or maybe your business was the only place within walking distance of the school that offered snacks, but now a small coffee hut or cafe opened on the corner with convenient snack options.
Each of these factors can sway sales. Understanding what unique offerings your business can bring to customers can help maintain your position in the market and keep customers coming back time and again.
What can your business offer that competitors cannot? Convenience, unique products, lower prices, etc. Learn more about competitive advantage here.
What marketing channels have we used and what has been most effective?
There are many ways to market your business, but you don’t need to invest time and energy into all of them. Some channels will be much more effective than others, depending on the target market you are working to reach. Make a list of all the ways your team has marketed the business in the last quarter or year.
Maybe you did paper or printed banners or posters, social media channels, word of mouth, flyers, and/or other channels. Some of these methods will be easier to track than others. Most social media platforms, for example, have metrics for engagement such as comments, shares, etc. This is much more clear than trying to track the effectiveness of a print sign, which you cannot track directly. If you used signs throughout your school, you could estimate how many people would pass by it every day based on the location, and how many times they likely saw it for the duration of its use.
Whatever channels you choose, work with your team to get as many metrics as possible to compare which were most effective in reaching the people you wanted to reach. This can help give you insights into where you can adjust your time and resources for the next term.
Is our messaging clear and compelling?
When a business features a clear and compelling message about what customers can expect or purchase, it can only help—if there is actually a market for what you are selling. Consider a scenario where you are looking for an iron and approach two stores side by side. One features a sign outside that says, “Home items to make life simple.” The other store sign says, “Small home appliances and more”. It seems like the two sell similar kinds of goods, so you decide to go to both to do some price shopping.
You go inside the first store, which said you’d find home items. Instead of kitchen wares and other goods like expected, you find a variety of smart home systems that allow you to change the temperature, lighting, security, etc. from your phone. Technically, they are home items, and they do technically make some aspects of life simple. But you are looking for an iron, not a security system, so you turn around and walk out the door, slightly frustrated. You go to the other store next and find what you were looking for in the first place.
Clear messaging can help ensure customers maintain a great experience with your business and also that you reach the people looking for what you offer.
If someone had no idea what your business was about, what might they expect from your marketing messages?
Do we need to increase/decrease marketing time or budget?
As you consider all of these factors, it may have become apparent that your team invested time and/or energy into things that worked very well and things that did not. In assessing your target markets, messaging, competitors, channels, and more, consider where you might want to focus in the next quarter or semester. Perhaps if you invested more into a particular social channel, it can expand your reach. Or perhaps you want to focus less on social media in order to build more local school connections.
Make a list ranking your marketing channels by effectiveness with your team. There may be some lively debate about which are most effective, and that’s okay!
What offers do we want to promote for the upcoming year?
Once you assess these elements of your marketing plan, you can start thinking about what new or current promotions you’d like to highlight throughout the semester or year. Maybe one promotion your team thought would take off ended up falling flat, and another you never expected was really successful. With these details and sales data in mind, brainstorm a simple list of promotions your team might want to implement. You can refine this list as your marketing plan for the next phase continues to take shape.
What are our updated goals and objectives?
An assessment is only valuable if it leads you to new insights and new actions. Once you’ve gathered all of this information and assessed it with your team, you can then start discussing the concrete goals and objectives for the next phase. For a refresher on how to set actionable goals, see this blog post.
Conclusion
When it comes to marketing your business, creating a regularly scheduled way to assess your efforts can help to be sure your work and effort are channeled to the right places. To make it simple, we’ve made a worksheet to help you jumpstart a discussion with your business team. You can either complete it together as a group or ask each person to complete one separately and compare findings at the end.
As always, if you need assistance with your school store, the Spirit Box team is here to help! Spirit is a turnkey entrepreneurial solution that delivers real-world business experience to students before they even graduate. Contact us with your questions or apply to bring a Spirit Box to your school.
Marketing Plan Assessment
Which markets were you able to target most successfully? Which did you not reach very well?
What competitors have entered or left the market?
How has your positioning changed in light of new competitors (if it has)?
What marketing channels have you used and what channels have been most effective?
Is your messaging clear and compelling? What would make it more impactful?
Where do you need to focus more/less time or budget in the marketing plan?
How many repeat customers do we have and why?
What promotions or offers were the most effective this year? Which were the least effective?
What ideas do you have for updated promotions, goals, or objectives for this year?