Whether you’re starting up a new business, launching a new product, or simply making adjustments to what you’ve been doing all along, a little planning can go a long way.

Now, I’m a marketing strategist. I believe a marketing plan should start at the beginning — with your audiences — and do a thorough job of integrating the needs of your customers (and potential customers) with your own goals, resources and realities to detail what you need to do, why you need to do it, when it needs to happen, what it will cost and how you will measure its effectiveness.

Sometimes, though, it’s nice to look at things a little differently. Sometimes you just need a quick check on a new initiative to make sure you’re covering all your bases. That’s when I whip out this little exercise, a simple checklist of key stages a prospect will go through in becoming a customer and, eventually, an advocate of your business to others. I wish I could come up with a catchy name for it, but I can’t, so we’ll just call it ATALA.

A = Awareness

Potential customers can’t evaluate you if they don’t know you exist. How are you getting in front of the people who are likely to find you the perfect solution to their needs? Do you even know what those needs are? Where do you need to be for them to see you? Sometimes this is easy — I sell audience research to digital agencies, so I love opportunities to speak to groups of agencies. Sometimes, it isn’t — I also need to reach out to small businesses looking for marketing strategy, and they can be harder to find since they’re not all attending big national conferences. Think about where your prospects are, and how best you can make your presence known there. Speaking opportunities, volunteering at or sponsoring events, keyword search, PPC advertising and traditional advertising are all possibilities.

T = Trust

This is a biggie. Whether someone is buying an ice cream cone or an enterprise network system from you, they have to trust that you can deliver. How are you working to generate that trust? There are all sorts of options here, from testimonials on your website to certification and licensing by appropriate agencies, to case studies or a blog in which you show your expertise. Even the photos of your team can exude professionalism or make you look like amateurs. What evidence do you provide to prospects to show them you can be trusted?

A = Adoption

Once they trust you, are you making it easy for prospects to come onboard? What kinds of barriers are you putting up that could discourage people from giving you a shot? Requiring answers to a long list of detailed questions on your “Contact Us” form is a barrier. So is asking customers to enter their credit card information, even if you’re not going to charge them until their free trial period is over. Allowing customers to apply the cost of their initial purchase to an upgrade (like a season pass) is a win.

L = Loyalty

What are you doing to ensure that customers keep using your product or service, or keep coming back for more? Benefits for repeat customers — from FourSquare mayor benefits, to frequency programs (ThinkGeek’s Geek Points is a favorite of mine), to a birthday club are all good ways to keep customers buying. Opportunities to engage with your company, like social media or blog commentary, are a great way to build loyalty. Even a customer insight panel participating in surveys and providing feedback on your products or services can cultivate loyal fans.

A = Advocacy

Word of mouth is one of the most valuable marketing tactics out there. How are you going to make it easy for your customers to pass along the good word? Are you actively promoting your Yelp reviews? Do you include “share with a friend” promotional opportunities in your emails? Are there referral benefits for bringing you a new customer? Social media plays a part here as well — are you actively monitoring and responding to comments about your brand? And remember our first step, Awareness? How can you ensure that the advocacy of your brand champions are reaching the ears (or eyes) of the audiences you most want to reach?

Every marketing decision you make — new product introductions, pricing, distribution, etc. — is going to affect at least one of these areas. While this exercise can’t replace the benefit of a well-researched, exhaustive marketing plan, if you do a quick run-through of this list before you make your move, you’ll go a long way in ensuring that you don’t accidentally miss a key component in turning prospects into brand advocates.

Know what?  Not everybody’s a web genius.  Not everyone has a family member who codes for a living.  And many small business and individuals have no idea how to get up on the web, and unfortunately have come to believe that it’s incredibly difficult and expensive.

Which is not to say that a custom, professional site created by people who really know what’s important on the web (search-engine visibility, relevant content written for web readers, design that puts function over “pretty”) aren’t worth their weight in gold — they are.

But spare gold is hard to come by for many of us just now.

I work with a lot of small businesses and individuals just trying to get the word out about what they offer and start to develop relationships with potential customers.  And the web needs to work for them, too.

My go-to recommendation is WordPress.

WordPress is a fast, easy, way to be up and running on the web.  Often thought of as solely a blogging platform, WordPress is actually my favorite startup website platform — even for companies (or individuals) without a blog.  It’s become my favorite content management system.

Why?

1)  It’s easy to manage yourself.

There’s nothing more frustrating to a small business operator than having to get in touch (and pay) a contractor or consultant every time they want to change a few words, add a new page, or update a price on their website.  Those things add up.  With a little training, anyone can learn to make additions and changes to their own WordPress website.

WordPress also has tons and tons of great “plugins” that add functionality to your website so you don’t have to learn how to code yourself.  You can link to your social media activity, add video, do your own search engine optimization, even add a shopping cart — all by yourself.

2)  It’s pretty

There are literally thousands of great themes for WordPress, and many of them are free.  They’re easy to choose and even easier to switch out if you want a different look.  Use one of the templates “as is” (here’s my husband’s personal job-search site we made together in about 2 hours), or build on a template with the help of a talented designer (here’s a client site developed with a little help from some creative friends).

3)  It’s inexpensive.

You can host your site on WordPress.org or WordPress.com, or use a full-service hosting service like Page.ly which charges a few bucks a month and offers domain name registration, training and support (read this post from Social Media DIY Workshops about which might be best for you).  Either way you’ve got a very economical approach to getting up on the web.

4)  It’s a great learning tool.

I didn’t even know what WordPress was when I was laid off in January 2009.  I needed a way to get a site up for my new business quickly and inexpensively, and a friend suggested WordPress.  Since I’ve never developed a website, it took a few rounds of working with people to do it for me before I started to get comfortable with managing it all by myself.  And trust me, if I can do it, ANYONE CAN.  I have friends I can tap when I need advice, and there’s lots of support on the web if you’re stuck or trying to figure out how to do something.  I’m even starting to pick up a little HTML on the side (and keep in mind that my only computer class in college was FORTRAN — on punch cards).

So if you’re a small business, and need a website, check out WordPress.  If you’re looking for a job and don’t have a personal site, get one — quick.  If you need help with it, there’s lots out there.  And even if you hire someone to help you build and maintain it, you’re going to find it’s a lot cheaper that trying to start from scratch with a customer site — and will be up and running much more quickly, too.

This is one of a series of posts about a real-life attitudinal audience segmentation project.  See other posts in this series.

Once the research plan detailing who you’re going to survey and what you need to ask them has been finalized, the next step is development of the survey itself.

Before I go further, let me stress how critical it is that you are careful in the design of your survey.  If you don’t know how to craft a survey, find someone who does.  Bad survey design doesn’t only irritate your respondents and fail to get you the information you need, but it can make you think you have good information when you don’t.  There are a lot of ways to introduce bias into your survey — even unintentionally — in what you ask, how you ask it, when you ask it and what options you give respondents for answering the questions you pose.

Your survey needs to be as short as possible to get what you want, as easy as possible for your respondents to understand and to fill out, and as well-organized as possible to make it easy for you to pull your data together afterwards.  And foremost of all, it needs to try to get the truth from your respondents, and not color their input with your own bias and expectations.

OK, enough of my “good survey/bad survey” soapbox.  Back to our project.

For the SCU initiative, the group had already agreed to include all relevant groups in one survey so that we could segment the entire data set together.  While this definitely has the benefit of allowing insight across all groups about relevant messaging and key motivations, it also means that they survey will be more complex than if a more homogeneous population is being questioned.

In this situation, we really had a matrix of groups based on three key considerations:

• Student Type: Traditional undergraduate, adult taking undergrad coursework, or adult taking graduate courses
• Status: Current student, prospective student who has applied, or simply “non-student”
• Location: On-campus student, online learner or student at one of the school’s offsite locations

Each of these characteristics brings a different set of available course options at the university, different degree opportunities, different housing options, and — most importantly — EXCLUDES OTHERS.  In order to avoid dragging respondents through a long list of questions or choices that don’t apply to them (which would frustrate people and drive down response rates), we had to map out a survey that would allow us to ask relevant questions based on some early response choices, and also to capture some data that would apply to everyone.

So how to lay out something so complex and ensure that you’re (a) minimizing the amount of time it will take a respondent to go through the survey, (b) keeping questions relevant and (c) not repeating yourself or creating multiple data fields with the same information from different respondents, that you’ll have to consolidate later?

For me, the answer is — MIND MAPPING SOFTWARE.

That’s right — those solutions designed to help you organize your thoughts can be incredibly valuable when trying to work through a complex survey flow, and have a number of other benefits that a simple document or online survey preview simply can’t provide.

Read more about how I use MindNode mind mapping software in this post.

Take a look at the complete map of the SCU survey:   SCU Survey Mind Map

Benefit 1:  Flexibility

My favorite thing about this approach is that mind maps are eminently flexible.  If you need to add a node, just do it — you don’t have to reformat the whole thing.  If you need to move something or connect it to another path, it’s a matter of a few clicks and drags.

Benefit 2:  More Than One Path

As you can see from the map, the SCU survey required a number of branches based on responses from each survey taker — and then required that those branches converge for other questions.  Mind-mapping software can do what an outline or online survey printout can’t — help you work through what branches need to diverge, and when, and where they need to go after that.

Benefit 3: Visual Flow

I’m a visual thinker.  So a mind map allows me to follow the flow of a respondent’s flow through the survey in a visual way — and if you’ve ever tried to follow skip logic in a word-processing outline, or figure it out from a printout of your survey in online services, you’ll know just what an amazing and rare gift this is for the survey designer.

Benefit 4: Clarity For The Client

Most of my clients don’t design surveys for a living, and a complex document full of skip logic instructions can be so daunting that it completely destroys any chance they have of ensuring that the survey makes sense and covers what they want to cover.  Often they know more about their audiences than I do, and having them weigh in on language, specific items for specific groups and other elements is critical.  This format also illuminates things we’ve missed and can add it.  Working out the kinks at this stage is incredibly helpful, because it takes far less time than working them out once a survey has been programmed online.  Especially when there’s a complex dance of respondent types, special questions, and different areas of inquiry this opportunity is a huge time-saver.

Benefit 5:  Clarity For Me

When it comes time to actually program the survey itself, I now have an approved flow to follow.  And ensuring that skip logic is set up properly is also easy, because it’s shown right on the map.  After the survey is programmed I go back to the map and add the question numbers to each node on the map so I can easily find the item on the survey if I need to tweak something.

Next:  Data, data, data!  How we look at what we’ve got.

I use mind-mapping software like crazy.  But in addition to its obvious assistance with brainstorming, I’ve found it very useful in a variety of planning activities I do for clients every day.  I use a Mac-only program called MindNode Pro, developed by Markus Müller, an independent software developer in Vienna.  (Markus also has an outstanding free version, MindNode, that is chock-full of functions and has also developed a version for the iPhone/iPod Touch.)  There are lots of different options out there, but I’ve found MindNode to be the easiest to use and most flexible for what I do.

1)  Survey Development

I design a lot of surveys for my segmentation work.  Typically, they’re big, hairy things designed to accommodate multiple groups (current customers, prospects) and ask lots of kinds of questions (competitive set, purchase behavior, motivations, demographics, message relevance, etc.).  They always involve a lot of skip logic (“if answer is A, skip to Question 23″) and inevitably blocks of questions I want everybody to answer, no matter which group they’re in.

As with any survey, my goal is always to make responding as smooth, fast and easy for participants as possible, while limiting the amount of data consolidation I have to do on the back end.  I have found mapping software to be extraordinarily valuable in developing the flow of a survey and ensuring all questions are asked at the appropriate stage, and in helping me to figure out where skips need to happen so I can redirect respondents appropriately through the survey.

The other great thing about this approach is that it’s much more client-friendly than simply showing them a typical text-based survey document for approval.  It’s much easier for them to follow the flow of the survey, to see how a respondent will move through it, and to ensure that all necessary information is covered (and that unnecessary information is excluded).  Once the map is complete it’s a cinch to code the survey accurately.

Here’s a map of a recent survey I conducted for Spring Arbor University in Michigan (more on Spring Arbor’s segmentation project, shared with their permission, in an upcoming series of posts).  Once the survey’s coded I always return to the map and place the question numbers on each node so I can easily find them later.  Believe it or not, this complex survey took the average respondent only 18 minutes to complete and had a very high completion rate.

2)  Marketing Plans

Let’s face it — figuring out what your marketing efforts should look like for the next year can be overwhelming – especially when that fat written document starts to get really long.  However, marketing planning should really be a logical series of decisions based on what you want to accomplish, and what you need to do to accomplish it.  I have found mapping to be a great way to think through the logical requirements of a marketing plan, which can then be used as the basis for a written document (if necessary).  As this partial example shows, a mind map can make the logical extensions of objectives and strategies easier to work with.

3)  Website Content

I also find maps useful for laying out content for websites.  It can help me try different options for topline navigation, and identify the probable number of pages. Here’s an example of a preliminary site map I did for a client — I find they can more easily understand the relationships of pages to each other when I can show them links visually like this.

I’m sure there are many other uses for this kind of tool, and I’ll continue to share the ones I find.  Are you using mapping tools in your workflow?  Please share!