When it comes to Marketing, most people spend less time thinking through the process than they spend planning their vacations. This post highlights the key steps you need to follow to make sure your marketing efforts become a success.
1. Define your target market – Who is your ideal client? What are their characteristics? Where can you find them? How can you best approach them? What is the most catchy offer you can develop for your audience? These are some of the questions you need to answer before planning your marketing strategies.
2. Set your Budget – Before planning the actual marketing strategies, make sure you set yourself a budget for marketing. Many businesses spend an average of approximately 20% of their revenues on their marketing efforts. Of key improtance here is that you feel ok with the money you want to spend on marketing and stick to your budget!
3. Set your Strategies – Now, that you know your target market and your budget, you can start planning out your strategies. Do you want to do some advertising, spend your time on networking, implement a direct mail campaign, or focus on web-based marketing? You may want to do some market research and see what other successful businesses in your industry do to market themselves. Pick a handful of strategies you feel good about and want to implement.
4. Determine your break even for EACH strategy – It is one thing to develop an overall budget, but a very different thing to know the cost for each marketing strategy. In order to know your marketing effectiveness you need to figure out how much each strategy will cost you. This will be your break even point for this strategy. The goal then becomes to generate enough clients from each strategy to pass break even.
5. Plan your action items – You need to break down each marketing strategy into action items and steps you need to take. Then you write each action item on a calendar, telling you exactly what you need to do each day to follow your marketing plan. This is probably THE most important part of any marketing plan.
6. Track your success – Now that you have developed your action item list for your marketing efforts it is time to put the plan into action. As you roll out your marketing strategies make sure you are tracking your response to your marketing strategies. You should know which prospect came from which marketing strategy. This will tell you which marketing strategies are successful and which are not.
