Marketing Plans

A Strategic Approach

The success or failure of any marketing effort begins with the strategic market analysis. To be effective, marketing strategies must be based on a thorough understanding of your community, your transit system and your potential customer.

Our group's strength lies in our broad understanding of the transit environment and our insistence on a comprehensive review of your system before we begin market planning. We use a combination of market research techniques, based on the available resources, to fully explore your marketing challenges and opportunities.

Once our analysis is complete, we offer the expertise to translate the findings into a detailed strategic marketing plan. Our marketing plans are designed for realistic implementation. They are based on your system's resources, both financial and human, and include a detailed action plan for each recommended strategy.

Specific ways in which we can assist your market planning efforts include:

Ms. Barlow has developed marketing plans for transit systems of all sizes, with a wide range of budgets. She can work with your staff to prepare a customized, comprehensive marketing plan which addresses all critical areas of communications:

• Market research.

• Advertising and promotion.

• Employer programs

• Customer information

• Product/service development.

• Targeted ridership programs.

• Customer relations.

• Outreach activities.

• Constituency development

• Community relations

• PR/media relations.

• Internal marketing

Ms. Barlow can work with existing staff or an ad agency to develop sound marketing strategies, and insure that advertising creative is focused and effective, not just cute or catchy.

Launching a major program may require a short term effort beyond the resources of full time staff. We can help by providing experienced advice, creative input and implementation assistance on a project basis.

Review of current marketing activities.

We can review current marketing plan and activities, or a specific aspect thereof, providing creative recommendations for making them more effective or complete.

We can work with smaller transit systems to establish a marketing function. Early assistance might include developing a marketing plan, hiring or training personnel and providing on-going support during implementation.