As an SME in Nigeria, market planning frameworks are vital to the success of your business. They help to plan, prioritize, and visualize how every aspect of your business will fit together. To understand the types of market planning frameworks, it is important to have an understanding of the framework itself.
What is Market Planning Framework?
A marketing framework is a template of instructions that aids the execution of your marketing plan as a business owner. The framework ensures that your products and services are delivered to the appropriate audience.
TYPES OF MARKET PLANNING FRAMEWORKS
The Growth Framework
These are market planning frameworks that determine your growth as an SME in Nigeria when the growth should happen, and also the metrics to be tracked for such growth to take place. Growth frameworks lay down workable steps for your business to follow so as to grow. The growth framework has a pyramid called the Startup Pyramid. This Startup Pyramid provides businesses with game plans, these plans are dependent on the stage such business is at every point in time.
The Startup Pyramid consists of three different stages –
- Product Market Fit
The product-market fit refers to a product that is highly essential to the general public, i.e. one that is a must-have. As an SME in Nigeria, ensure you don’t waste your resources growing and building a product that is not needed by people.
- Transition to Growth
Offering a product wanted by people will lead to a growth transition. In this stage, you need to understand how valuable your product is to your audience and what makes it so. In addition, you should figure out how to get more people to experience such value.
- Growth
Having implemented the aforementioned steps, growth becomes inevitable. In this stage, you are finally ready to test all necessary channels and analyze the performance. Once this is done, you should take it a step further by optimizing the channels that are performing highly.
Pirate Metrics
With the Pirate Metrics, business owners are guided on the acquisition and conversion of customers. Some elements of the Pirate Metric include:
- Acquisition
This involves how customers discover your business in the first place. It could be from a couple of avenues such as ads, social media platforms, etc.
- Activation
What actions did users take upon landing on your site or discovering your business? Activation varies from business to business and for some businesses, it might be as simple as signing up for your newsletter or ordering for your products.
- Retention
Retention deals with how far you have come in making users active. Do they come back after the first visit? Do they make another purchase after the first one?
- Revenue
This refers to your source of income. As an SME in Nigeria, you should have a way you make money, factors such as customer lifetime value and conversion rate can also be considered.
- Referral
If your customers tell others about your product and services, that’s a plus on your part. Referrals boost your acquisition.
The Bullseye Framework
This framework helps businesses find a particular channel to focus all their energy on rather than beating about the bush.
- Brainstorm
Brainstorming involves you letting go of whatever bias you may have towards a particular channel and delve deeper to discover more.
- Rank
After brainstorming and coming up with several ideas, it’s time to categorize those ideas in terms of their potential rates.
- Prioritize
From your rankings, break them down in order of priorities and determine which one will yield the highest for you.
- Test
It is time to carry out some feasibility studies to determine which of your choices is worth channelling all your resources into.
- Focus
Having established which one to focus on, do everything within your means to ensure the growth of this channel you have settled for.
Behavioral Frameworks
This framework involves ways business owners can influence their users’ behaviour. It employs two models which are:
- The Hook Model
When your customers use your product regularly, it gradually becomes a habit. The hook model makes uses the following cycles –
- Trigger: Something triggers a cycle; customers buy your product after coming across it in one way or another. As the cycle repeats itself, it further triggers the need for your product.
- Action: When your customers find it easy to purchase your product, it becomes even easier for them to do so. Once it becomes a habit, it makes action easy.
- Variable Reward: To encourage your customers actions, you have to reward such effort. This will further motivate them to consume your products.
- Investment: For this cycle to be complete, there has to be an investment. The end result should be to get your customers to invest in your product or service.
The importance of market planning frameworks cannot be overemphasized, frameworks help to give shape to your marketing plans. Putting frameworks to proper use will help in the execution of your marketing strategy.