A marketing plan for your business is the first step toward achieving your goal in advertising. You need a clear vision of where you want to go and how your going to get there. Below is a plan for one of our clients that reviews, looks long term and then looks at the immediate steps to be taken for the upcoming month. Your plan may be very different but you must have a plan.
Marketing Plan
This is an over view of our marketing strategy for 2011
The purpose of the plan is to give Cook’s Lobster House a competitive edge going into the 2011 season. We will accomplish this with a multi pronged approach in four marketing arenas
1. Online Social Media: We have developed a strong presence online with 1325+ Facebook fans, a great website with good search engine results bringing an average of 430 hits a day or 157097 hits for the 2010 year. We have three active blogs that bring new and useful information linked directly to our website and our other media sites. The first one dealing with what is happening at Cooks. The second one deal with local walking trails and sites within close proximity of Cook’s. The third is a hotel, Campground and Inns of the Maine Mid Coast blog with links to all of their sites. These three blogs along with our website provide compelling reason to visit Cook’s Lobster House. Email campaigns will continue to be used aggressively to stay in contact and promote Cooks to Motels, Marinas, Cook’s Club Members and friends of Cooks.
2. Off line marketing: Face to face promotion will continue to be front and center in our campaign to bring Cook’s Lobster House to everyone’s mind. We will continue to represent Cook’s by being on the board of directors for the HBA. We will continue to be on the Marketing committee for the regional chamber of commerce. We will become more involved with the CVB of Portland, the Maine Restaurant Association and the Maine Tourism Association. Cooks Club will continue to be a major focus of our off line marketing. With about 600 members in this rewards based loyalty program and growing. Building facial recognition and name recall are crucial to the program and its basic foundation of “Making the Guest Feel Important”.
3. Traditional Advertizing: We will continue to advertise in the paper and on the radio but doing so in a more reasoned and thoughtful approach. Trading Gift Certificates for air time on the radio is a cost effective way to get our name out to a broad audience. The newspaper ads will be tracked for ROI by a means of coupon returns and then doing a comparison to determine most beneficial placement.
4. Non Traditional: Air plane banners, Participation in events like Harvest On The Harbor, Cooking contests and charity functions are areas that can bring great brand recognition and good will. We will attend and use all forms of brand recognition advertising that is deemed useful to our overall mission of being the best of the best in Mid Coast Maine.
March 2010 Marketing Plan
Online:
Website: All links fixed and relevant
New pictures added to pages for more appealing look
Expand Lobster bakes and weddings pages
Social media sites: Stay engaged adding new content daily.
Emails: Cooks Club Members, Motels, Friends of Cooks, Marinas and Tour Groups.
Offline:
Face to Face: Attend more of the HBA, SMMC and CVB meetings and participate in events. Hotel visits will be an important part of the DAY TO DAY offline promotion. Trade shows should be taken advantage of in order to present ourselves to the groups that might use us in the future. AAA travel show ($150 for the SMMC to distribute 1000 of our brochures and must be committed now if we are to participate. Bus Tours New England, etc. Trade show would however take resources and a commitment. Attending these types of shows takes planning and money. The need to evaluate the ROI would need to be looked at closely. There needs to be more investment into the search for new tour boats to dock on our docks. A whale watching tour would draw interest and attracting a dinner cruise from Portland or Bath might be a good match between Cooks and the tour boat company. Again this is not a quick do. Time and resources must be made available with no guarantee of a ROI.
Radio: WBLM gift certificate giveaway. One other Radio gift certificate give away station.
Newspaper: 1/8 -1/4 page add in Harpswell Anchor, Coastal Journal, Times Record, Lewiston Sun and Bowdoin Orient. To be determined by a # of factors. Holidays, School breaks, Weather.
This is a basic breakdown of our March Marketing Plan.
