Emnt-420 Business Plan Evaluation

Chelsea Evans

2/21/17

Jeff Blake

ENT-420

Business Plan Evaluation

Description

Promerit Advertising is an advertising company focused on optimizing a company’s email marketing techniques through offering tools in planning and implementation. Their end goal is to successfully implement a cost efficient email campaign with an increase in overall sales and customer engagement. This will be accomplished in a nine-step process including several stages in planning, testing, implementing, tracking, and analyzing.

Even though my business idea is centered on social media marketing, I chose to examine this company because I felt that they both capitalize on a current digital marketing trend. I could not find a business plan for a social media agency

since it is such a recent trend in marketing; however, Promerit Advertising accomplishes a similar goal of offering tools in planning and implementation to serve small businesses in a field that they are most likely unfamiliar with. We have a common goal to increase brand engagement and sales. The only difference between the two is that the Promerit Advertising business plan was most likely written years ago when email marketing was the most important and cost effective marketing technique to utilize, as opposed to now where social media marketing has taken it’s place.

Market Size
Promerit Advertising determined that their market size consists of over two million potential customers; however, due to this large volume, they will primarily target 50,000 each fiscal quarter.

They are anticipated a five percent response rate, resulting in 5,000 leads per year.

Accuracy of Assumptions

It is not possible to research the accuracy of their assumption of their target market due to the fact that they do not clarify the exact details of their target market. It is not clearly documented where the market size of “two million potential customers” is derived from, therefore, cannot be tested.

Credibility of Management

Robert Humphrey and Cheryl Littlejohn are both cofounders of Promerit Advertising.

Robert Humfrey’s experience consists of a BA in Marketing from Ohio State University, ten years of work-related experience in direct marketing, and five years specifically in email marketing campaigns. Additionally, he created and expanded a company called Kemp and Johnson, an Internet Marketing Group.

Cheryl Littlejohn’s experience consists of a BS in Computer Science from UCLA, experience as an IT administrator for an Internet startup, the technical lead of an email campaign for 800.com, and a technical lead of email marketing campaigns at Kemp and

Johnson.

Existing Relationships
Existing relationships with mentors, the community, and other businesses are not included in the business plan.

Funding
Robert and Cheryl plan to invest equally into the company to cover initial startup costs. They are not requesting any investments from outside parties.

Final Reflection
After reading through the Promerit Advertising plan, I was able to recognize the importance in providing supporting detail to strengthen claims. For example, within their business plan, they mention that most email campaigns conducted by businesses are unsuccessful and have incredibly low response rates, compared to Promerit Advertising, which specialized specifically in this field and will help a company to achieve exponentially higher response rates. The issue is, they do not have any statistics or sources to back up this information. The reader has no way of knowing whether this is factual information or not. From my point of view, it made it hard for me to recognize the true value of their company.
As a result of this, I know that when I start my social media company, I will need to provide market research to clearly prove that the problem exists in the marketplace, in addition to including concrete evidence of how my company can help.