Seminar Management Marketing Plan

Advanced Linguistic Pontificators

Situation Analysis

Advanced Linguistic Pontificators is in its first year of operation. While Daug is experienced in this field, this is his first foray in creating a seminar and training company. In order to gain sufficient revenue, it will be necessary to develop and implement a strategic marketing plan. The basic market need is for a high quality, effective seminar and training production company. This market need will be addressed through ALP's service offerings.

Market Summary

ALP possesses good information about the market and the customers within. This information will be leveraged to better understand who is served, their specific needs, and how ALP can better communicate with them.

Market Needs

Advanced Linguistic Pontificators is providing its customers with several different seminars and training courses for medium to large size companies. ALP seeks to fulfill the following benefits that are important to customers.

• Expert-level knowledge- This is extremely important to customers since they are spending a fair amount of money on the training services.
• Useful topics- There is little reason to spend money on training seminars if the topics of the training are not helpful for the day-to-day activities of the company.
• Customer-centric services- The service provider must have flexibility and a customer focus in order to truly meet the needs of each individual customer.

Market Trends

Advanced Linguistic Pontificators has observed two differing trends within the training industry.

1. Seemingly short-sighted companies tend to cut back on training during economic downturns.
2. More holistic companies adopt a proactive attitude that recognizes the value in their employees and do not trim the company budget through massive cuts in the HR department training budget.

These two patterns of behavior are fairly indicative of the differentiation between surviving or withering companies, and companies that excel.

Despite the growing recognition that cutting the HR budget during downturns is a counter-productive idea, in practice it is still quite common. Fortunately for ALP, the customers that Advanced Linguistic Pontificators prizes are the ones that are most likely to make it through economic downturns.

Market Growth

The national seminar/training industry has grown into a $987 million dollar industry in the last ten years. The last four years have seen a 4.5% industry growth rate. This growth can be explained by several phenomena:

• The recognition of value in developing human capital.
• The increased usage of out-sourced service providers, a switch from the previous use of in-house staff.
• The adoption of forward-looking ways of generating operating efficiencies through the application of continuous training.

SWOT Analysis

The following SWOT analysis captures the key strengths and weaknesses within the company, and describes the opportunities and threats facing Advanced Linguistic Pontificators.

Strengths

• Expert knowledge in the seminar subject matter.
• Well designed programs.
• Customer-centric business model.

Weaknesses

• Lack of brand equity, a function of being a start-up business.
• ALP's greatest asset, Daug's expertise, takes a while to gain widespread recognition within this new market niche.
• The inability to rapidly scale up because the organization currently has only one in-house expert.
  

Opportunities

• Participation in a growing market space.
• Ability to gather quantitative data supporting the contention that ALP 's services can add to a company's bottom line.
• The ability to decrease overhead/event variable costs as Daug increases the number of seminars that he produces and presents.

Threats

• Can be effected by economic downturns.
• Potential competition from well-known consultancies such as Franklin-Covey or Innovative Learning Group.
• A change in the market when companies decide to use in-house staff.

Competition

There are many different competitors in this space:

• Seminar production companies that act only as producers of the events, they do not make the actual presentation. These companies typically have a list of different presenters that they use.
• Independent seminar presenters.
• Independent training program presenters.
• Both presenters and promoters- like Advanced Linguistic Pontificators.

The competition is on a national scale. Being local is insignificant in this industry. Companies will fly a speaker in from wherever they are in the country. Buying habits are based on word-of-mouth referrals, reputation, topic/skill needed, availability, etc.

Service Offering

Advanced Linguistic Pontificators will provide medium to large size companies with training programs and seminars covering the subjects of advanced reading, stress management, and time management. The advanced reading course will teach speed-reading with increased comprehension and memory. Stress management will teach techniques to better deal with stress, and time management will teach methods to become more efficient with the limited amount of time that we all have.

The subjects will be taught in either seminar format or training program format. The seminar format is a presentation that concentrates on a specific topic. For the seminars, the audience just observes. A training program is like a seminar but with a twist, the attendees are not merely spectators but actual participants in the entire process.

Additionally, Daug will offer seminars to the general public. This will not be a targeted segment, but will be used to increase awareness of Advanced Linguistic Pontificators to drum up future business.

Keys to Success

The following are Advanced Linguistic Pontificators' keys to success:

• Professionalism.
• Usefulness of the service/training.
• Customer satisfaction.
• Repeat use.
• Customer referrals.

Critical Issues

Advanced Linguistic Pontificators is still in the speculative stage as a start-up service provider. The critical issues that they face are the need to:

• Continue to take a modest fiscal approach to expansion. Expansion should be undertaken only to meet present customer needs. The expansion bandwagon should not be jumped on to meet some future, uncertain need.
• Establish Advanced Linguistic Pontificators as the premier seminar production and presentation company in its specific niche.