Best Ways of Developing a Workable Action Plan for a Business (Essay Sample)

Action Plan
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation
Action Plan
New West Hardwood Floors is looking to increase its customer base and thus it sales revenues by enhancing its digital footprint. The company realizes the power of modern technology in facilitating business growth and creating a competitive advantage. More specifically, the company is focusing on an online marketing strategy that will see its market share increase and by extension its sales revenues. This would include developing an official website for the company and investing in development of social media websites. Arguably, online marketing is a way or leveraging web-based media to spread information relating to the brand of a company and its products/services to potential customers (Verma, Sharma & Sheth, 2016). The main objective is to reach the target market using the most effective channel. New West Hardwood Floors realizes that adopting an online marketing strategy can give the company a head start especially given the fact that no competing company is yet to establish an online presence.
Action Plan
The first goal in the designing the marketing plan will be the development of clear goals and objectives for the proposed digital marketing strategy. Goals are important in that they determines what need to be done, the resources required and how roles and responsibilities will be shared. The second task in realizing the main goal of the proposed strategy will involve contracting a marketing consultant. This is because currently, the company lacks capacity in terms of its man power as well as organizational knowledge. Notably, the company only employs 21 people besides the owner, 20 of whom are hardwood floor installers and the other one an office lady whom main responsibilities include booking appointments, taking calls and offering assistive services to the manager (owner) of the company. The decision to enlist the services of an outside marketing consultant falls solely on Victor, the owner and manager of New West Hardwood Floors. Besides its lack in human resource capacity, the company has been lagging behind in terms of digital technology.
The third task would involve training the employees on how to use social media as a marketing platform. This would also entail defining new roles and responsibilities which may be filled from within or through new recruitments. This task would be best be accomplished through joint action between the manager and the marketing consultant and with collaboration with the existing employees. Notably, a short-term investment in training employees in digital skills will lead to a long-term reward for the company. In this context, the company should embrace the need for change by empowering its employees as a way of maintaining a competitive advantage. Up skilling can also have a positive effect on employees’ motivation and hence increase their performance. It is worth noting that there is a global shortage of digital skills across all industries as a result of the rapid rate in which digital technology is growing (Bermudez-Gonzalez, Sasaki & Tous-Zamora, 2016). Essentially, recruitment of new, competent staff may present a problem for New West Hardwood Floors especially given its budget constraints. In line with this, training existing employees and redefining roles and responsibilities may be more feasible for the company if it is to be successful in implementing proposed digital marketing strategy.
The fourth task would be the development of the company’s official website as well as social media pages. The task should be done collaboratively between the employees, the manager and the marketing consultant with the latter being the team leader. The marketing consultant has ample knowledge of how to best develop a website and social media pages but will require the input of the manager and the employees in deciding what to include and what to exclude. Having worked with the company, the employees have a better knowledge of New West Hardwood Floors customers as well as the products being offered by the company. Equally, their interaction with customers implies that they can help integrate market feedback in developing the website and social media pages. This is especially important because the company may lack the required resources to conduct a comprehensive market research. The company can add information and customizations in incremental steps as new information becomes available.
The fifth step is the implementation stage or the rollout phase. As with the development of the company’s official website and social media pages, this step will also require collaborative input from all the stakeholders. For example, while the management and the marketing consultant may be responsible for the actual rollout of the digital strategies, it is the employees including the office lady and the hardwood floor installers who have direct contact with the customers. As such, through role redefinition, the employees can also assume the responsibility of sales people where they inform existing and potential clients of the new developments in the company. The traditional word-of-mouth is superior in that it creates trust and attract the attention of the customer. In addition, the traditional word-of-mouth marketing strategy is cost effective and this is advantageous for companies such as New West Hardwood Floors which is facing resource constraints (Chae, Stephen, Bart & Yao, 2016). The table below summarizes the action plan for the implementation of digital marketing strategy by New West Hardwood Floors.

Action

Objective

Accountable

Responsible

1

Developing goals and objecti