Project: Get Ready to Market

Make a copy of this Google doc template or download the PPT template from the resource section of this project. Make sure to complete each section. When you are ready, save your file as a PDF and submit it.

  • Option 1: Imagine that you have been tasked with creating a campaign for the Magnolia Coffee Company. To get started you will first read the background provided on the “Get Started” page.
  • Option 2: Use your own company’s background and marketing and sales goals for this year. Where are you currently in the pursuit of those goals? You will create a campaign in order to get closer to your marketing goals.

You will be providing your answers in the template for this project to help you get comfortable using slides for presentations.

Step 1: Marketing Plan

Write a Marketing Plan for your company or the Magnolia Coffee Company that includes the primary marketing objective and associated KPI. Your marketing plan should include:

Marketing Overview

Target Market: In one to two sentences that cover key statistics (provided?) for your target market. This may include key demographics, age, gender, income levels, etc.

Ideal Customer Profile: In a sentence or two, clearly identify your ideal customer.

Competitor Profile

Identify a typical competitor for your business in two to three sentences. It is best and will be easier to use a real company, but if you cannot identify an existing competitor you can create a fictional competitor. You may look to include the marketing mix they use or identify gaps in marketing strategy or customer engagement. (Identifying more than one competitor is a standout suggestion).

SMART marketing objective and KPI

In one or two sentences summarize a key marketing objective. Your objective may be to increase sales, build brand awareness of your product or service, or build engagement with online customers using touchpoints of the customer journey. Since you will not be creating an actual campaign you can make your marketing objective as lofty as you like, just remember to make your objective SMART. SMART objectives are: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timebound.

Competitor Analysis

In a paragraph or two, expand on the previously identified competitor – including market, market share, value proposition, and at least two of the following items: product, price, position, size, strengths, threats, opportunities, and weaknesses.

S.W.O.T. Analysis

Provide two to three bullet points for each of the following: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats

Step 2: Customer Persona

Throughout the course you will be using the customer persona you are creating now to keep you focused on who your customer is while you are writing content, building campaigns, and auditing sites.

Create an Empathy Map To create your customer persona you will first need to interview potential customers and create an empathy map. As you’ve learned in this course, an empathy map is used to understand and summarize customer research. Most empathy maps have four quadrants broken into Thinking, Seeing, Doing, and Feeling.

Interview Potential Customers You will be interviewing a minimum of 2-3 potential customers to collect information for your empathy map. After you interview your potential customers, you’ll prepare all of the information you gathered onto sticky notes and place them in one of the four quadrants: Thinking, Seeing, Doing, and Feeling.

List of potential questions

As much as possible, list the actual words and phrases your customers say, the applications they use, and the websites they visit.

Once you have your empathy maps, you’re ready to create a persona.

Construct Customer Persona

The customer persona is a fictional character that summarizes and communicates the key characteristics of your target customer. When creating the persona, you will use the information from the empathy maps to inform what characteristics your fictional person will have.

To describe your persona, you will use the template provided in the deck. Your target customer persona should include:

  • At least three demographic data points
  • At least two psychographic qualities
  • At least one barrier/pain point

It is a good idea to give your persona a descriptive name and add a picture of what they may look like.

Step 3: Customer Journey Map

Create a Customer Journey Map to include different stages and touchpoints of the customer experience along with associated or recommended content types and channels at each stage.

Identify the Purpose of the Customer Journey Map – Review your SMART Marketing Objective and KPIs to help develop your Customer Journey Map – Provide a single sentence on the purpose of the journey map.

Reflecting on the Empathy Map and your Target Customer Persona created Step 2, Identify at least three Customer Stages (sometimes referred to as phases). Make sure that each stage appears in the correct order in relation to the other identified stages.

For each stage:

Name the stage of the customer journey (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action, Post action)

Identify the marketing goal for the company at this stage of the Customer Journey (this goal should support the marketing objective).

Describe at least one touchpoint or milestone your target customer uses to interact with your company’s product or services at this stage.

Describe the most appropriate marketing channel for this stage.

Describe how the Target Customer Persona feels or what you want them to experience during each identified step and/or touchpoint and why.

Determine any points of friction or resistance your Target Customer Persona has within the customer experience. Identify at least one potential gap in marketing to the customer. For the identified gap:

At what stage(s) can customer engagement be better served?

What milestone or step can be added to remedy this?

Step 4: Summary of Marketing Plan and Value Proposition

Now that you’ve chosen a marketing challenge, you need to articulate the value proposition for the product you’ve chosen. This will help to ensure that you and the client are aligned on potential customers, product/service value, the competitive landscape, and the differentiator. For this section, you will be using Geoffrey Moore’s template as a guide to creating your value proposition.

Provide a snapshot summary of the marketing plan that is easy to read and simple to follow. Include the product or service being sold from Option 1 or Option 2.

Create the Value Proposition & Marketing Strategy aligned with your company’s primary marketing objectives. In 2-3 sentences, identify a specific marketing strategy that Magnolia Coffee Company can take to help achieve one of the identified KPIs, including the channel(s) to target, along with the customer persona/touchpoint being targeted in the customer journey.