The Marketing Model Canvas
The feeling of creating a Business plan overwhelm you? Even creating the marketing portion of this important business document can be a daunting task. In my days working with clients on specific apps that they were building or smaller business units within their business, we would commonly use something called the Business Model Canvas. It's a simple one page document with a nine categories of items and actions in your business. The inputs and outputs of the business, things like where is the revenue going to come from what are my customer relationships going to look like, etc. I use that document often to get a good picture of what the business should be doing.
This valuable tool got me thinking, as I was talking to a client recently. What if I took away everything not related to marketing, and created a marketing model Canvas?
If we did this, we would be left with the following categories:
1. Our Value Proposition
2. Customer Relationships
3. Our Channels
4. The Customer Segments
5. Revenue Streams
For each of these categories, we can ask a few questions to help determine our marketing strategy and our goals.
Value Proposition
What value do we deliver to the customer?
Which one or our customers problems are we helping to solve?
Customer Relationships
What type of relationship does each of our
Customer Segments expect us to establish and maintain with them?
Channels
Through which Channels do our Customer Segments want to be reached?
How are we reaching them now?
Customer Segments
For whom are we creating value?
Who are our most important customers?
Revenue Streams
For what value are our customers really willing to pay?
For what do the currently pay?
Having a great marketing strategy ensures we will head off in the right direction, whether its what website to build, how it will look and feel, or where we will spend money raising awareness for our firms.