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Why Should you Have a Strategic Marketing Plan?

A marketing plan is your roadmap to increased lead generation and sales. Vista Marketing Group can help you craft your marketing plan to start you on the path to success. Whether you are a small startup or have been around over the years, a carefully researched, planned and executed Marketing strategy is imperative to the overall success of any business.

Factors we consider in your Strategic Marketing Plan:

• Situation analysis – synopsis of the market landscape (competitors, target customers, business need, etc.)
• Market opportunity – What niche exists in the market? What is your anticipated revenue? Can you build or steal market share?
• Business objectives – What is your business trying to achieve through its marketing efforts? For example: Is it market share, expanding reach into existing set of core customers, expansion into new markets, increased sales, etc.?
• Key messages – business differentiation statements that uniquely position your business and its offerings against your competitors
• Strategies – What key approaches will you take to effectively achieve your business objectives? For example: if one of your business objectives is to expand your reach into existing set of core customers, then a supporting strategy might be an executive-level ad campaign targeting senior level executives.
• Tactics – These are the specific tactical actions you will take to fulfill your strategies. For example if one of your strategies is an executive-level ad campaign, then a supporting tactic might be to develop a new ad that appeals to C-level executives.
• Execution timeline – putting target completion and execution dates to each tactical action item you have outlined.

A Web Site Marketing Strategy Plan

Web Marketing, in general was always known as putting an ad in the local paper, penny saver, a magazine and of course TV. When it comes to setting up a web marketing strategy plan it really is not that different.

Technology has certainly advanced more than the traditional way of advertising which has made the financial rewards far greater. In order for your  web site marketing plan to be effective, there are generally two things that a business will need in the Internet market.  The first is to have a product that can be  sold and distributed.

The second is to have a product that is marketable and is in need by the consumers in that market. The fastest and most effective way of getting your product noticed is to generate traffic and when that traffic starts coming, you most definitely need a website for them to come to. So let’s say that your website, by far, is where you need to start.

If you are ready to move into this direction then here is a solid web site marketing strategy to help you get started.

1. The first thing to do is to determine what the market or consumer is looking for weather it be a solution to a problem or a way to give them a more solid financial future. Research will be of vital importance to make sure the product you will promote is going to help those that are searching. You must take YOUR personal needs and wants completely out of the equation or you are doomed for failure.

What you need and want may not be another s cup of tea.  In other words, what may look and sound great to you, or vice verse, may not look so good to someone else. They will be buying not you.

2. You will need to focus on some key Internet strategies, to be able to zero in on your target market and their needs.  Your domain name plays a big part in this process so if you have others involved in the decision making for your company, it would be best for all to concur on what the best name would be. Your web site marketing strategy for this needs to be well planned.

It needs to be easy for people to remember, so you can build brand recognition, as well as being one that catches on. A good rule to follow is to think of it in different angles, switch words around, drop some, add some see what sounds best.

If I was to say to you, “what is the happiest place on earth”? I will assume you will say Disneyland. This is what I mean by catchy.  You will be surprised at how many names you will come up with that are already taken. Their are billions of people in our world and most people have been online at one time or another to see if a name they have always thought of was available. Sadly, at times their fantasy is crushed so it would be wise to have 3 or 4 names just in case.

At this point you will also need to develop a search engine marketing strategy because the search engines are looking for specific things and names that their searchers are looking for. They will not send your information to them unless they feel it best represents what they want.

Crazy, I know, seems unfair that someone would decide this ahead of time without giving us a chance but it is what it is and you will need to be prepared for that or I am afraid to say you will never sell a thing nor will anyone ever know about your business without it.  These sites also allow one to make a sitemap which can be downloaded in minutes for a small fee. No web site marketing plan should be without one.

Another good example is the various email sites which you can partner with for some good exposure and some free services. Most of these services will let you sign up for free. When you have money to add to your marketing campaign, you can upgrade to a paying member and get as much as double even triple more exposure and services. That sounds good doesn’t it? O.k. let’s move along…

3. A product of good quality should be sold at a decent price. Sometimes, the product one makes is already available in the market. To be competitive, one must figure out a way to convince people as to why this product is better than the other leading brands available. What features does it have that the competitor doesn’t?

What makes it unique which is not only about the product on hand but the service that this can give as well? Remember always to keep in mind that your web site marketing strategy will need to be creative and different with an impulse to act quickly.

4. Just like having a normal business, one must acquire the right equipment and machines for the job. Here is where your online marketing tools play a very big part on out smarting your competition.  It can be a physical piece of equipment or something electronic that is online. You will however, need to have an ordering system on the Internet to have things move quickly or you will be swallowed up whole, bones and all.

To be successful, your web site marketing strategy needs to be one that involves a delivery system that is able to get a product to your customer on time if not sooner. In addition you will need to have some kind of staff on hand to answer questions or complaints should something go wrong.

5.  I am sure you have heard this phrase more than you care to mention, or that I care to quote for that matter, however you will need to spend money to make money, plain and simple. You can do a lot of things for free but you will not make any serious money in this business unless you pay some money for the proper web marketing tools and products you are going to need to stay competitive.

That does not mean spending money beyond your means which will put you in the poor house before you ever get started. It means as you make some money , you will need to put back some and a little more after that. It is a gradual process that takes time, and is a web marketing strategy you need to follow cautiously, but the end reward is un-matched by anything and you can make a ton of money in this business if you play it smart.

Don’t set yourself up for failure be sure to properly manage your expenses. Test your web site marketing campaigns so that you are always aware of what is working and what is not. Tweak the ones that are showing potential and scrap the ones, right away, that are not. This will save you thousands of dollars. STAY WITHIN YOUR BUDGET, nothing more nothing less, until you are ahead enough to invest a little more to grow a little more.

6. With everything in place, it is now time to promote your website.  This is where the rubber meets the road. It is a lot of information and far to many different Internet strategies which will show you hot to increase web traffic.

I have a newsletter that I send out to my subscribers that goes into more detail and it is done like a college course. Only in Internet terms we call it an e-course. You are welcome to subscribe to my newsletter, I am sure you will find it valuable and you will get some great free stuff from time to time to help you on your road to success. It is free to join, and you can sign up on the form that is just to the right of this post.   Good luck and I wish you years of success.

3 Reasons for Creating a Strategic Marketing Plan

Whenever we meet with a prospective client, one of the first things we explain is our belief in the importance of having a solid Strategic Marketing Plan. For all business owners, large or small, writing a yearly Marketing Plan that identifies what you’re hoping to accomplish, and how you will go about doing so, is the foundation for all that you do that year. With the Internet, it’s easier than ever to reach your customers & prospects, connect with them, build relationships, and drive sales, that many business owners jump right in without first creating a Strategic Marketing Plan. This post will provide you with the top 3 reasons why it’s imperative that you create a Strategic Marketing Plan for your small business.

Before we get into why it’s important to have a Marketing Plan for your business, let’s first define what we think a solid Strategic Marketing Plan looks like. Let’s start at the top…When we create a Strategic Marketing Plan for a customer, we start out by learning their business. We then go through exercises aimed at finding out what our customer’s organizational goals are, and who their target audience is. Once we have a strong understanding of our customers’ business, their goals, and their audience, we start building out the Strategic Marketing Plan. 

 If you’re creating a plan yourself, be sure to list out your organizational goals for the current year, determine who your target audience is, and where those folks spend their time online. If your target audience uses foursquare, then you should have an online presence on foursquare. If your target audience doesn’t use Facebook, then don’t spend your time using Facebook as a marketing tool.

Creating your Strategic Imperatives is the next step in the process. Strategic Imperatives are simply how you will go about achieving your goals. A few examples might be, “Use online tools to reach more people, build relationships, and ultimately drive sales”, or “Create a blog to provide free articles about XYZ industry, my products, and our business philosophies”.

Once you know what your goals are, how you will achieve those goals, and who you’re looking to target, now it’s time to create your marketing tactics. Tactics are the actual campaigns that you will run to reach and engage your target audience. A few example tactics might be, “Create a YouTube Video Series to educate consumers on my services”, or “Use Twitter to promote my blog articles”. After the marketing tactics are created, your plan is complete.

Now that you know how to create a Strategic Marketing Plan, below are 3 reasons why it’s critical to your success. A Strategic Marketing Plan provides business owners with:

1. A map for achieving yearly goals
2. The ability to track success through individual tactic performance measures – Performance measures should be setup for every Marketing Tactic
3. An understanding of the time, and budget, needed to execute on the Strategic Marketing Plan

Nine Steps to a Strategic Marketing Plan

For many physicians, marketing is simply a matter of putting an advertisement in the local newspaper, redecorating the waiting room or conducting a direct mailing to people in the community. But this is a haphazard approach that will accomplish little more for your practice than draining its marketing budget.

The key to successfully marketing your practice begins with developing a strategic marketing plan in which each activity is based on solid research and specific goals, and is implemented and carefully evaluated in a timely manner. The plan serves as a road map to help you achieve your marketing goals.

Why should you market your practice?

Some physicians still feel that marketing is at best unprofessional and at worst unethical. In fact, good marketing is no more than educating your patients and your community about your expertise and services, and there are a wide range of reasons for doing it, not all of which have a purely financial basis. However, if you do want to determine the value of each new patient to your practice, calculate the average of the revenue that 10 new patients generated during their first 12 months with you.

You might consider marketing your practice for any or all of the following reasons: to increase your income, expand your patient base, discourage competition, improve your practice image, promote current and new services, introduce new providers, enter a new marketplace or gain or retain market share. Whatever your motivation, make sure to get your staff involved right from the start. Share your reasons for marketing with them, and ask them for their ideas. If your staff is not involved early, it will be difficult to convince them to support the marketing plan and take on any additional work that comes with it.

The elements of a plan

There are nine major steps required to develop a well-crafted, strategic marketing plan: set your marketing goals, conduct a marketing audit, conduct market research, analyze the research, identify your target audience, determine a budget, develop specific marketing strategies, develop an implementation schedule for the strategies and create an evaluation process.

1. Set your marketing goals. Once you’ve decided to market your practice, you need to set realistic and measurable goals to achieve over the next 18 to 24 months. This time span allows you to plan activities around community events that are in line with your marketing goals. For example, you might help sponsor an annual walkathon for breast cancer or speak at your community’s annual health fair. Because of the rapid changes occurring in the health care environment, we don’t recommend planning specific activities more than two years in advance. One way to define your goals is to separate them into the following three categories: immediate, one to six months; short-term, six to 12 months; and long-term, 12 to 24 months. Here are some examples of measurable goals:

• Increase the number of new patients seen in the practice by 5 percent within the first six months and 10 percent by the end of the first year.
• Shift your patient mix by expanding the pediatric and adolescent patient base from 15 percent to 25 percent of total patient visits within 18 months.
• Increase your gross revenue by 30 percent within 24 months.
• Improve your practice’s image, which may be measured by “before” and “after” scores on a community survey or by reviews from focus group participants.

It’s important to share these goals with your staff members. They can tell you from their perspectives whether they believe the goals are reasonable. If you want your marketing plan to be successful, your staff needs to support your efforts to achieve the marketing goals.

KEY POINTS

• Marketing can increase your income, introduce new providers or improve your practice image, among other things.
• A strategic marketing plan requires you to define your practice in terms of what it does for patients.
• Every goal, strategy and action in your marketing plan is subject to change as you evaluate your progress.

2. Conduct a marketing audit. A marketing audit is a review of all marketing activities that have occurred in your practice over the past three years. Be as thorough as possible, making sure to review every announcement, advertisement, phonebook ad, open house, brochure and seminar and evaluate whether it was successful.

3. Conduct market research. The purpose of market research is to draw a realistic picture of your practice, the community you practice in and your current position in that community. With this research, you can make fairly accurate projections about future growth in the community, identify competitive factors and explore nontraditional opportunities (such as offering patients nutritional counseling, smoking-cessation programs or massage therapy). Your research may even bring to light some problem areas in your practice as well as solutions you can implement right away. (See “A guide to market research” to find out what kind of information you need to gather and where to find it.)

Conducting market research is often the most time-consuming step in this process. However, it’s also one of the most important steps. It’s from this research that you’re able to find out what your practice does best and what you need to work on, what the needs of your community are, who your practice should be targeting and how you should go about it.

4. Analyze the research. Next, you need to analyze the raw data you collect and summarize it into meaningful findings that will be the foundation for determining which marketing strategies make the most sense and will get the best results for your practice The research will identify the wants and needs of your current and potential patients and will help you to define your target audience (for more on target audiences, see step 5, below). This is also a good time to look back at the goals you’ve chosen. Based on your research findings, you may need to modify some of your goals.

A strategic marketing plan requires that your practice be defined in terms of what it does for patients. The research analysis will reveal your practice’s strategic advantages. After looking closely at your own practice as well as your competitors’, you can ask yourself some key questions: What are the similarities and differences between your practice and your competitors’? What sets your practice apart from your competition? Is your location more desirable than your competitors’? Do you offer a broader scope of services than the competition? Is there a service you provide that no one else in the community currently offers? Your competitive edge may lie in your style of practice, the range of services you offer, the ease of making an appointment or the way you and your staff communicate with patients.

A GUIDE TO MARKET RESEARCH

To gather the kind of information you need to develop a strategic marketing plan for your practice, you need to conduct market research on your practice, your competition and your community. You can’t rely on intuition, judgment and experience; your practice needs hard data. Although it will take some time to gather this information, a number of resources are available that can make the process easier for you.

Your practice

Much of the information you need about your own practice can be found through discussions with staff members and other physicians, or by reviewing your patient records. You can also find out about your practice and whether it’s meeting the needs of your current patients by asking them to fill out a patient survey about the practice. Here are some of the questions you need answered about your practice:

• What is the background and history of your practice? Has it been in the current community for a long time?
• What are your practice’s strengths and weaknesses? Are there problems with scheduling, cancellations, staff turnover or reimbursement management?
• Who are your current patients in terms of their age, sex, ethnic origin, type of insurance coverage, chief complaints and where they live?
• What are the services provided by your practice? Who needs these services? Are these needs changing?
• How is your practice perceived by your patients?

Your competition

You need to find out who your competitors are and what they have to offer. Check with your county or state medical society and your local hospital to find out how many other family physicians, nurse practitioners and general internists are in your service area, how long they’ve practiced in that location and how many have moved into your area over the past five years.
Once you’ve determined who your competitors are, you need to assess them. This information may be a little harder to come by, but you can try to gather as much information as you can by simply asking other physicians, listening to your patients, friends and neighbors when they talk about their physicians and keeping your eye out for competitors’ advertisements. To assess your competition, you need to ask the following questions:

• What are your competitors’ target audiences and niche markets?
• Why do certain patients or groups of patients particularly like or dislike your competitors?
• How are your competitors viewed within the community?
• What marketing activities have your competitors tried?

Your community

In addition to gathering information about your practice and your competitors’ practices, you need to learn as much as you can about the people in your community. You can find answers to the following questions by contacting your local Chamber of Commerce, your state vital statistics department or the U.S. Census Bureau. Census data is available for every state, county, city, ZIP code, neighborhood, etc.:

• How many people live in your service area? Is the population expected to grow or shrink? What are the demographic characteristics of the population in your area?
• How is your practice perceived in the community? Are you known in the community?
• Who are your potential patients? Are their wants and needs being met elsewhere in the community? If not, how can your practice meet those needs?

5. Identify a target audience. With the help of your market research analysis, you should be able to identify your practice’s “target audience,” which is the specific group of patients to which you’d like to direct your marketing efforts. Your target audience might include patients of a certain age, gender, location, payer type or language/ethnicity and patients with certain clinical needs. Keep in mind that your target audience should not only be the patients you want to attract but also the people who can influence and provide exposure to that segment of the population. For example, if you wish to treat patients with arthritis, you might want to get involved in the local and regional Arthritis Foundation and explore senior organizations in the community. If you want to treat young athletes, you might consider giving talks on sports safety and first-aid tips to coaches and athletes at the local high schools, colleges and YMCAs. The key to marketing lies in targeting the audience that your practice can serve better than your competition – and communicating this to that group.

6. Determine a budget. Before you can decide what specific marketing strategies you want to implement to achieve your goals, you need to examine your financial information and come up with a marketing budget. Marketing budgets vary by the type of market a practice is in, the age of a practice and whether the practice has marketed before. There’s no standard for how much a practice should spend. However, in our experience, practices in open markets have spent 3 percent to 5 percent of their annual gross incomes on marketing. If your practice is new, in a highly competitive market or has never been marketed before, or if you intend to roll out an ambitious new program or service, you can expect to spend 10 percent or more of your annual gross income the first year you implement the plan.

Some of the initial marketing activities can be expensive. For example, it can cost more than $5,000 to have a corporate image package (i.e., logo, stationery and collateral pieces) developed by a professional and as much as $10,000 if you add a brochure. On the other hand, some of the best marketing activities cost practically nothing. For example, to build your referral network, you might try meeting with new physicians in your community and sending follow-up/thankyou notes to referring physicians. Big or small, these are all worthwhile investments that will give the community a positive image of your practice.

7. Develop marketing strategies. With your budget in place, you can begin to define specific marketing strategies that will address your goals, reach your target audience and build your patient base. Remember to focus your strategies on the elements of your practice that can be used to create a special value in the minds of patients and referral sources. Each strategy should be related to a specific goal and should be made up of numerous actions. For example, one strategy related to the goal of increasing patient satisfaction might be to make the office more patient friendly. The actions required for that strategy might include the following:

• Provide patient satisfaction training sessions to staff;
• Develop a patient self-scheduling system within the practice Web site to eliminate the need to telephone the office for an appointment;
• Improve the reception-room decor;
• Provide name tags for staff;
• Require staff to introduce themselves to each new patient;
• Conduct post-encounter telephone interviews with new patients within three days of their appointments.
  

[Watch for an upcoming article in FPM about specific, cost-effective marketing actions you can try in your practice.]

8. Develop an implementation schedule. An implementation schedule is a time-line that shows which marketing actions will be done when and by whom. The schedule should also include the cost of each marketing action and how it fits into the budget estimates for the 24-month period. When creating the schedule, carefully consider how the activities will affect the current practice operations and whether there are sufficient resources (such as staff, time and money) to accomplish the necessary tasks. In some cases, it may be necessary to whittle down the list or postpone some activities. In other cases, it might be best to go ahead with full implementation of your plan. If you want to fully implement the plan but don’t quite have the staffing resources, you might consider bringing in a consultant to coordinate the marketing activities and/or adding a part-time staff member to handle the majority of the marketing tasks. The implementation schedule will also give you a basis on which to monitor the progress of your marketing plan.

9. Create an evaluation process. The value of a marketing plan is its effectiveness, which requires deliberate and timely implementation and monitoring and evaluation of results. It’s important to measure your results against the standards you set in establishing your goals. Review your plan periodically (we recommend quarterly) by comparing your progress with the implementation schedule. There are several ways you can measure the results of your progress: patient survey scores, referral sources, increased income, increased new patients and decreased complaints.

If at any time you find your progress does not measure up to your expectations, you need to determine why. Perhaps the advertisement about a new service you are marketing has not attracted new patients. If the ad campaign has been carried out as directed without results, dump the campaign and try other actions. Perhaps you’ll want to try giving a series of seminars specifically targeted to the group you want to attract or developing a new segment on your Web site for patients that describes the benefits of the new service. You may even find that if each physician in the practice talks about the new service with his or her patients as merely informational conversation, favorable results will follow. In other words, the actions – and even the strategies and goals – in the marketing plan are not written in stone. By regularly monitoring and evaluating each action, you can always change and try new approaches.

As good as you make it

A good marketing plan outlines realistic marketing goals, strategies and actions based on sound information and research about your practice and your community. But the plan is only as good as your commitment to implementing it, dedicating sufficient resources to the endeavor, involving your staff and communicating openly with them. The marketing plan should not merely be written, reviewed and put away on a shelf. Instead, your practice marketing plan should be an evolving blueprint that guides your efforts and monitors your success. Marketing works when the dedication is there. It’s up to you!

How to Write a Marketing Plan in 60 Minutes or Less

Without a strategic marketing plan your business is ultimately doomed. Despite hard work, hours of frustration, and all your own cash… the best you can hope for is to own a job not a business.
This is one of the major reasons that over 90% of all small businesses fail. Grab a pen and pencil and let’s set about making sure this never happens to you!

Write furiously. Don’t stop to think. Just let it all pour out of you onto the paper. You can come back and tidy it up later.

　

You can use a marketing plan template… but I think when brainstorming a new marketing action plan  it is always best to start with a blank page.

1. What are Your Goals?

For your business?

You and your family?

How much money do you want to make?

How many hours do you want to work a week?

How much holiday. Do you want to take each year?

How many people you want working for you?

2. Where are You Now?

For each of the goals you set in the first section… what is the difference between where you are now and where you want to be?

The trick is to start bridging the gap.

Gradually working in increments/milestones plan your way to your desired future.

Remember this is only your best guess. There is no right or wrong answer. It’s a matter of giving yourself intermediate targets to aim for.

3. Milestones and Targets

Set these monthly for the next two years.

Include numbers of new leads, new customers, and profits.

4. Who are Your Ideal Customers?

The answer to this question should be based on market research and customer research… of your present and past customers.

How old are they?

What sex are they?

What job do they have?

How much do they earn?

What are their problems, frustrations, needs, wants, and desires?

What are they presently buying?

How much of it?

Who from?

  

5. Why Should They Buy From You?

How do you solve their problems?

How do you prove it?

What is you guarantee that your solution/product works?

What do you offer that your competitors don’t?

How do you create extra value for your customers?

6. What are Your Marketing Strategies:

To attract new leads?

To convert these prospects into new customers?

To increase the average lifetime value of these new customers?

To delegate and outsource all non-critical time-consuming tasks?

7. What Marketing Tools will You use?

There are potentially hundreds of different marketing tools to use in your small business marketing plan. But don’t make the common mistake of doing one off, inconsistent marketing actions.

Use multimedia… online and off-line. Use multi-step sequence approaches. Mix-and-match. Whether it be direct mail, fax broadcasts, e-mails, and person-to-person telephone calls… follow-up must always be rigorous and consistent.

8. Create Your Own Marketing Calendar

This will act as a visual marketing action plan.

Block out specific times for each tactic.

Record goals and budget.

Record who has responsibility for this action.

Do this for the next entire calendar year.

Make sure it goes on the company’s electronic calendar.

Create a wall chart for everyone to see.

If you’ve made it this far, and actually carried out all the steps… well done! You should now have 4 to 5 pages  that will form the basis for your strategic marketing plan.

Take a break and then sit down and go through your ideas.

If you’ve just read this article on how to write a marketing plan without doing the brainstorming… go back and do it now.

You have now got all the marketing ideas, tactics and strategies you will need. Not only that, but in a convenient marketing action planner.

Importance of marketing plan in business

In every company, the preparation of a marketing plan is vital for monitoring and tracking of the company’s marketing strategies for a certain product or service. The marketing plan is used as a tool by management or the owner to check whether the strategies that have been put into record are being implemented. It will also be a tool to determine or measure the performance of that certain product or service and also be a guide for management to revise the marketing strategy.

A marketing plan is a detailed written document that describes the strategies and steps to achieve a specific company’s marketing objectives. The marketing plan can be created for a certain product or service, a brand name or a product line. The plan can be for a period of one year or five years.

The marketing plan can be included in the business plan as part of it. The foundation of a well-written and organized plan is an effective and strong marketing strategy. Even if the marketing plan states a list of detailed action plans, the marketing plan that doesn’t have a strategic and sound basis is of lesser use. In most of the companies, strategic planning is a process that is undergone on a yearly basis. Few business organizations use marketing plans that are older than three years.

In addition to the corporate objectives that are ingrained in the marketing plan, it should also consist of the corporate mission which also lays down the guidelines for the company’s objectives in marketing activities. The emphasis in this process is to capture a complete and accurate picture of the plans and objectives. Certain customer related factors should be considered in the marketing plan.

The marketing objectives must state where the business organization plans to be at a certain and specific period in the future; what end objectives identified by the company should be achieved and at what period of time they are to be accomplished. However, very precise description of how the results are expected to be achieved is not required.

To achieve a high efficiency rate, the marketing results of your marketing efforts should be measurable. This measurement may be according to sales volume, value in currency, market share, the rate of market penetration for distribution channels and others. The marketing objective must be based on the company’s financial objectives that will convert these quantifiable measurements into measurements for marketing. The marketing strategies can be viewed as a definite action plan in which marketing objectives will be accomplished and within the structure that was selected by the company for use.

The main parts of a small business marketing plan are:

• Identifying your target market
• Understanding the competition and your differentiation
• Setting up your marketing goals
• Defining your marketing strategy (ways to achieve your marketing goals)
• Projecting the costs of the marketing activities

Please see the very basic sample marketing plan summary and budget attached. Hope it will be useful for you!

Please click the image below twice to enlarge or download it.