Develop a three -year marketing plan

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Like in any business you cannot just start and hope everything is going to go well. You need to establish financial and marketing plans.

Compare and determine your incentive business of the past (if any), and set a target of where you want to be in the next 3 years. Segment your targets by country of production and type of business: incentives, conferences, company meetings. Setting up targets will help you to compare your actual situation with that of the past and will serve as a yardstick for your performance.

Your targets should not be based only on turnover, but also on expenses and profit, as well as the client portfolio you want to obtain. Your marketing plan should analyse your strengths and weaknesses, the client needs, the industry trends, today’s realities and develop short and long term plans to reach your objectives.
In your short-term marketing plan you can include objectives such as:

Staff education
Networking
Marketing intelligence
Product awareness
Product development based on client needs
Creativity
Quality standards
Target marketing focused on profit
Product cost versus profit
Bottom line results

In the long-range planning you could include objectives such as:

Progress through professionalism.
Progress through technology.
Geographic spread.
Strategy of positioning.
Persistence in objectives.

In your marketing plan and budget include your full calendar of promotion trips and trade shows. Do not wait to decide about them at the last minute.

Each staff member in the company should be attributed a sale target to achieve within a given period. f staff knows what is expected from them they get more involved in the general efforts.

The reaching occasionally the targets should fired. The staff targets should be realistic and used only as a way of measurement of individual efforts towards a global team effort and company target. These are only some guidelines as of course the needs and objectives can vary from one company to another.

In the next issue: Corporate profile Brochure

© Tasso Pappas CITE
Tasso Pappas is President of the Site Greek Chapter and served as President of Site Intl. in 2000. This article is an extract from his book “To be or not to be a DMC” which he wrote in 1996 as his thesis for the certification CITE (Certified Incentive Travel Executive).