Designers trace (copy) high-quality banners to increase the variety of designs. For marketers as well, by tracing companies’ excellent marketing strategies, they can strengthen the thinking skills required of marketers.
This time, we will introduce marketing tracing, which is effective for strengthening marketing skills.
Reference site:
Marketing Trace/Marketer’s muscle training｜Yuki Kurosawa｜note
Reference book:
Marketing thinking skills training
Abilities and skills required of marketers
The abilities and skills required of marketers are extremely wide-ranging, and they must acquire a combination of diverse abilities and skills such as those listed below.
- Analytical ability, thinking ability, judgment ability, IT technology
- communication skills
- creativity
- management ability
- The ability to see things from a bird’s-eye view
When planning marketing strategies and tactics, it is necessary to perform segmentation to subdivide the market and identify needs, targeting to determine targets from the market, and positioning to determine your company’s position within the segment.
The skills required for these are analytical and thinking abilities, and marketing tracing is effective for strengthening them.
What is Marketing Trace?
Marketing tracing is training that involves tracing (copying) a company’s excellent marketing strategies while imagining them. We put a company’s products and services into a marketing framework, analyze them, and verbalize and diagram marketing strategies.
Just as web designers trace (copy) websites and banners to improve their design skills, marketers trace and output marketing strategies for products and services to improve their analytical and thinking skills. .
Marketing Trace identifies two types of thinking that marketers should train: “one-shot thinking” and “three-sided thinking”.
①Thinking all at once
Specifically, it is “the ability to think about strategy, tactics, and execution all at once and connect them to results.” For example, when a web person in charge has this kind of thinking, they can create discussions by linking each marketing measure with upstream strategies and tactics, feed back marketing data acquired on site to upstream strategies, etc. Marketing strategies and tactics for the entire company will be optimized.
② Three-sided thinking
Good for the seller, good for the buyer, and good for the public.As the phrase “Sanpo Yoshi” is known as the management philosophy of Omi merchants, it refers to “the ability to realize a three-way good situation for the market, organization, and customers.”
Marketing trace steps
We will introduce the steps to actually conduct marketing tracing. First, select the company you want to trace. There are three criteria for selection:
- It is a profitable company
- Unique marketing strategy
- Products and services you are interested in
After choosing a company, we will take six steps and begin marketing tracing.
① Get an overview
Write down an overview of the target company’s business, products, and services.
②Framework analysis
We incorporate business content, products, and services into a basic marketing frame and analyze them from both macro and micro perspectives.
It would be best to use the following four marketing frames to analyze the market environment.
PEST analysis
Analyze the external environment from four perspectives: Politics, Economy, Society, and Technology and use it for product/service optimization and crisis management.
3C analysis
Objectively understand a company’s market position, strengths, and weaknesses from three perspectives: Customer (market/customer), Company (your company), and Competitor (other companies).
SWOT analysis
Develop strategies by simultaneously analyzing internal factors (the company’s strengths and weaknesses) and external factors (opportunities and threats)
4C analysis
What kind of value do customers perceive in the products and services we provide, from the perspectives of customer value, cost, convenience, and communication? Perform deeper analysis from the customer’s perspective than 3C analysis, such as how much cost and time it will take to obtain the product.
③ Analyze in more detail
After analyzing the market environment from a macro and micro perspective, we will analyze the company’s actual marketing measures and communication strategies.
The following two marketing frames are used to analyze marketing strategies.
STP analysis
Analyze the three elements of Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning to analyze customer classification, target setting, and sales methods.
4P analysis
What kind of products, at what prices, through what distribution channels, and how to promote them from the four perspectives of Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. We will analyze this from the company’s perspective.
④ Linkage with marketing strategies of other departments
Marketing alone for BtoB products and services does not lead to overall business growth. Collaboration with other departments such as sales and customer success is essential. Analyze how your marketing strategy works with other departments and how to maintain consistency.
The following marketing frame is recommended for analyzing the linkage with other departments.
VRIO analysis
Analyze the competitive advantage of management resources from four perspectives: Value (economic value), Rareness (scarcity), Imitability (difficulty of imitation), and Organization (organization).
In addition, you can use Business Model Canvas and BSC Balanced Scorecard to deeply analyze a company’s organizational structure.
⑤ Verbalize the learnings from the analysis results and organize the success factors
We will verbalize the learnings obtained from the analysis results in ① to ④. Based on this learning, we will organize the success factors in corporate marketing strategies.
⑥ Improve your hypothesis skills
After verbalizing what you have learned and sorting out the factors for success, you can put yourself in charge of marketing for that company and put together a future marketing strategy, honing your hypothetical skills.
Improve framework utilization with marketing trace
Marketing Trace uses many frameworks. If you simply apply researched information to a marketing framework, you will end up with a strategy that is nothing more than a theoretical theory, and you will end up being complacent.
It is important to select an appropriate framework according to the situation, use that framework to derive an appropriate strategy, and then share that framework within the organization to link strategy to execution.
Marketing Trace not only increases the number of marketing strategies, but also improves the utilization of the frameworks necessary to create appropriate marketing strategies.
summary
- The skills needed to plan marketing strategies and tactics are analytical and thinking abilities, and marketing tracing is effective in strengthening them.
- What is marketing trace? Analyze a company’s products and services into a marketing framework, and verbalize and diagram marketing strategies.
- Select companies to trace based on whether they are profitable, have unique marketing strategies, or have products or services that interest you.
- Marketing trace not only increases the number of marketing strategies, but also improves the use of frameworks necessary to create appropriate marketing strategies.