E-Marketing Plan for Grid Analytics Ltd

Introduction

Grid Analytics is a fictional data security and Storage Company that helps local businesses with storage, protection, analysis, and management of their information. The company was started as a paper-shredding firm developed a storage business (Mazzarol, 2015). Currently, Grid Analytics also develops data management software. Despite being around for over five years, the company is yet to establish itself as a go-to option when it comes to data analysis, storage, and protection. This e-marketing plan aims to build a strong trustworthy business relationship with its clients. To formulate e-marketing strategies that will improve the company's business, the plan includes a situational analysis, which presents the current outlook of the company including marketing tools in use and SWOT analysis.

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Situational Analysis

Marketing Strategies in Use

Currently, Grid Analytics depends on word-of-mouth, client recommendations, cold calling, and leaflet as its marketing techniques. Word of mouth refers to satisfied consumers telling other potential customers of how much they liked a product or service from a particular company. Client recommendation is similar to a slight difference in that the recommenders are regular customers. Cold calling is the activity of calling old customers who seem to be dormant in their purchases. Finally, leaflet dropping is placing small circulars in targeted areas. A common limitation with all these techniques is the scope of their reach. Because Grid Analytics targets small to medium-sized local firms, these marketing techniques were usually effective. Unfortunately, with increased competition in the local market, the company has lost a significant market share to other businesses. Furthermore, the company wants to develop to a national level.

SWOT Analysis

A SWOT analysis is a powerful tool for evaluating a company's current situation, which considers both internal and external environment.

Strengths

One of the strengths of Grid Analytics is reliability and confidentiality. The two are closely related and are considered crucial aspects of data storage and protection companies. The firm recognizes the importance of ensuring that its clients feel safe and trust that their information is safe, cannot be accessed by unauthorized personnel, or leaked. Because Grid Analytics is relatively small, it maintains relationships with its clients, which has made it possible to maintain reliability and sustainability.

Another strength is the efficient level of response by the company. Being a relatively small company has ensured personalized services for each of its clients. Accordingly, its staff is able to respond to urgent inquiry and data issues as soon as they arise. This is particularly important for data companies because breaches can cause damages in seconds.

Weaknesses

One of the greatest disadvantages to the company is the lack of an online marketing campaign. The internet offers an opportunity for companies to build trusted relations with their customers through communications, which are not only regular but also, personalized while at the same time low-cost. The advantages are reflected by the move away from mass marketing by various companies in different industries.

Another weakness is the inability to penetrate large corporations as clients of Grid Analytics. While small to medium corporations offer sustainable business to the company, large corporations offer a chance for the company to not only reclaim its market share but also increase their customer base.

Opportunities

Data protection is becoming a top priority to all organizations regardless of whether in the private or public sector. Volumes of data that companies need to analyze and store are increasing on a daily basis. Currently, businesses are not only interested in keeping their data safe; they also want to have back-ups available. Grid Analytics can take this opportunity to increase its business.

Threats

Grid Analytics faces stiff competition in its local market, which has caused a decline in the number of clients it serves. Because data analytics is an essential part of every business, more companies that offer the services of analysis and protection have come up.

Large corporations are starting to have their own data analytics departments, which are responsible for analysis, protection, and storage of data. This move is deemed necessary by such corporations, as the issue of privacy of information is becoming a global concern. Internal data departments are also viewed to be more efficient and more reliable (Mazzarol, 2015).

E-Marketing Strategic Plan

Segmentation and Targeting

Grid Analytics is a business-to-business company, which necessitates a feature-based approach to market segmentation. This refers to dividing the target market into groups depending on 'firmographics' including company location, size, and activity. This approach also divides the market according to the nature of product usage traits.

As illustrated above, Grid Analytics targets company that varies in size from small to large businesses in both the private and public sectors. Regarding the industry sector, the company targets any industry that requires data analysis, storage, and protection.

Differentiation

The marketing campaign will also differentiate products and services by the company. As mentioned under segmentation and targeting, legal, financial, medical, and education are some of the target audience for Grid Analytics. With an online presence, the company will be able to collect information from individual clients under various industries it serves. As a result, the company will be able to create products and services that are specific to the needs of each sector. For instance, data management and protection system for financial institutions should be different from that used by universities or medical institutions.

Positioning

Every business should strive to create and maintain its own competitive advantage so that it uniquely positions itself in the market. Basically, a positioning approach does not always mean creating something unique or different rather is manipulates an existing product or service to make them more appealing to the customers (Mazzarol, 2015). Grid Analytics can set its reputation as a professional, trustworthy, and reliable business that offers highly specialized services. As an analytic data company, creating a competitive edge based on the level of professionalism, personalization of services, and confidentiality would set the company aside from existing competitors.

Objectives

Companies should be certain about the objectives and goals they want to achieve when getting into e marketing so that they can identify areas of focus, which will improve their business operations. In this regard, there are five objectives that Grid Analytics seeks to achieve through undertaking e-marketing campaign:

• Sales growth (through wider promotion and distribution)
• Value addition (by giving customers extra benefits through online platforms)
• Getting closer to the customer (by involving them in dialogues so that the company can learn more about them)
• Saving costs and increase profits
• Extending the brand awareness and reputation through various online platforms.

E-marketing Strategies

LinkedIn

Almost all B2B companies have LinkedIn profiles, which are actively used to network and reach out to new clients. Because LinkedIn, unlike other social platforms, is purely professional, companies attach significant value to the platform in increasing brand awareness. As a result, LinkedIn is the most used social platform by data companies (Bolos et al., 2016). Grid Analytics should also take the opportunity provided by this platform to improve its business. However, when creating a LinkedIn profile, the company should consider the following.

Company Overview- all the relevant information about Grid Analytics should be found on the profile including its value propositions, vision, and mission statement.

Product/services description- The products and services should be described in details while displaying ads, video links, and web links to other online platforms under the company's name.

Growing networks-, The company can use testimonials of past clients to connect with potential clients. Growing LinkedIn network would improve brand awareness.

Twitter

This is another useful marketing tool for B2B companies. Twitter enables businesses to share content with potential customers as well as engage regular customers in dialogue regarding products or services rendered to them (Ashley & Tuten, 2015). Additionally, Twitter offers an opportunity for Grid Analytics to track and measure the effectiveness of their engagement. Key features for the company's Twitter marketing should include:

• Following and interacting with meaningful contributors in the data protection industry through retweeting relevant content, commenting on shared content, and using hashtags that pertain to its products and services.
• Approaching Twitter accounts that might be prospective clients
• Transforming followers to powerful brand ambassadors in the same social media platform.
• Scheduling of tweets.

Email Marketing

This marketing technique is not only important in retaining clients but can also be used to acquire new ones. Email marketing entails keeping customers informed about a company's updates to its products and services as well as the latest offers. The technique is more useful in B2B companies because companies are more likely to check their emails more regularly than individual customers. As such, it is vital that the message content of the emails sent out contain 70% useful and relevant information while the rest should be the sales pitch (Hartemo, 2016). When the messages are structured in this manner, the target audience will be motivated to open them because they are informative. Otherwise, the messages are ignored as they are considered to be just another advertisement.

Controls

Grid Analytics should not only implement an online marketing campaign, it should also measure and analyze its effectiveness and achievement so that changes can be made where possible. Tools such as Google Analytics will allow the company to track the activity of Grid Analytics online platforms and give real-time data. The effectiveness and success are determined by different metrics for each online platform (Patrutiu-Baltes, 2016). This tool is advantageous because of its simplicity, and it is free.

Social media activity (LinkedIn and Twitter), will be measured using metrics such as:

• Audience affected by the company's message - The number of followers and likes can reveal the volume of people that reacted to the message.
• Engagement - Customer engagement to a company's message could be through mentions, shares, and retweets.
• Website traffic generated - As mentioned, social media profiles should include web links. The number of people who go to the website from a social media profile is another measure of effectiveness.
• Conversion rate - This refers to the number of people who took action to buy from the company because of the message it posted on its profiles.

Email marketing can also be evaluated using:

• Open rate - Refers to the number of people who open the email to read its contents.
• Subscribers and unsubscribes - If more people are subscribing to your email newsletters, the marketing strategy is working. When subscribers start leaving mean that a company should revitalize its email-marketing tool.

Conclusion

It is possible that Grid Analytics has been losing its marke...