Marketing Strategies

Answer this question and convey this answer to other people by putting it in the business concept section. You do not have to write a 20 page-long document just stating the ways in which your business would be profitable. Instead, if you plan to provide candidates to various hospitals and medical facilities to cover their shifts, this reason should be enough to give your business plan a solid foundation.

On the other hand, do not skip a few factors that would describe your business operations, such as it being a well-organized company that operates with state-of-the-art staffing agency software to keep track of all shifts and assignments, etc.

If you plan to use this business plan for financial purposes, do explain why the added debt money or equity would make the company more profitable.

MARKETING STRATEGIES

1. Define Your Market

Market strategies are derived through careful market analysis. By conducting a market analysis, you would be acquainting yourself with the various factors of the market hence allowing you to properly define your target market. Once your target market is defined, you will be able to not only in a position to better target them, but you would also be able to enhance your services according to their specific needs.

For instance, in the staffing industry, if you determine that hospitals in your local area need a lot of professionals to cover their various shifts, as compared to smaller medical facilities, then you would target those hospitals with your services.

This market analysis would also allow you to come up with proper pricing structures. What are the current market rates? Which shifts cost greater? What are your competitors (other staffing agencies) charging? Can you charge lower than them and still generate a profit?

All these questions can be answered once a thorough market analysis has been done.

Start your market analysis by establishing the market in terms of its size, its structure, and potential for growth, sales, and trends. The total aggregate sales of your competing companies will give you a relatively accurate idea of the potential of the market. Once you have figured out the size of the staffing market, you should start to define your target market. You can narrow down to the target market by narrowing down the total market through several segmentation factors. These segmentation factors can be based on customer attributes, geographic area, or service-oriented needs of the clients.

2. Projecting Market Share

Projecting the market share for your business plan is a subjective matter. It is based on the analysis of your market along with pricing and promotional strategies.

For your business plan, you should be able to estimate market share for a duration that the plan covers. You would need two factors in order to project this:

Industry growth – The industry growth will go up with as the number of users increase. Most of the projections normally utilize at least 2 growth models that define various industry sales scenarios. These scenarios should be based on the leading industry sales indicators, including industry sales, demographic data, industry segment sales, and historical precedence.

Conversion of users – This conversion is from the total feasible market and is based on the sales cycle that is similar to a product’s life cycle, where 5 separate stages are available, namely: early pioneer users, the early users, early majority users, the late majority users, and the late users.

3. Positioning Your Company

Before you can position your services, several key questions have to be answered, including the following:

• How do the rival staffing agencies position themselves? • What kinds of services do you offer that your competitors do not? • What needs of your clients do your services fulfill?

4. Pricing

How you plan to price your services is crucial as it will have a direct impact on the success of your staffing agency. While developing a pricing strategy can be quite complex, the basic rules of pricing remain relatively straightforward:

• All the prices must cover all costs • The most effective way to lower your prices is by lowering the costs • Your prices need to be a reflection of the demand, dynamics of cost, response to competitors, and changes in the market • Prices have to be established in a way that they assure sales • Product utility, maintenance, longevity, and end use have to be analyzed repeatedly, and the prices must be adjusted accordingly • Prices must be set in a way to preserve order in the industry’s marketplace