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5 Simple steps to create a marketing plan for your business
By Jean Morgan
Write a marketing plan in five easy steps. Give yourself
and your business an edge over your competitors.
Reduce your marketing and advertising budgets by
delivering targetted leads for your sales team.
If you want to succeed in any type of business then the
business needs to be marketed to its target consumers
in an effective manner. In order to do this effectively
rather than in an ad hoc, probably expensive, manner I
propose the construction of a marketing plan.
Writing a marketing plan is something you can do
yourself quite simply, but it will need some time for
research and thought if it is to be worthwhile and achieve
results.
So, have read this far and not run away yet you will be
wondering how to write a marketing plan. I see it as a
very simple 5 step process as follows:
1) Get your information together and analyze it.
Find out all you can about the industry you are in, its
sales channels, anticipated growth, products etc. Look at
who your competitors are, who you expect your
customers to be and your wholesalers. Look at pricing,
distribution channels and product ranges.
Next complete some SWOT analyses. This is a simple
analysis of your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities
and Threats which will be of great help in clarifying your
thoughts and putting them and the information into some
order.
2) Write down your main challenges.
The SWOT analysis should have helped you to see what
they are e.g. one of my weaknesses is in how to drive
traffic to my website. After all we need site visitors in
order to sell to them.
3) Decide your objectives
following on from the example above I have decided to
set an objective for myself of increasing awareness of my
website. Increased awareness should in turn lead to
more visitors.
4) Devise strategies
Strategies need to support the objectives you have set
yourself and define the approaches you will take to
achieve the objectives set earlier. It is sometimes useful
to brainstorm ideas with a few friends at this time as you
can bounce ideas off each other but if you are on your
own don't worry just write down all of your ideas on a
large sheet of paper Following on from our example I
decide that one of my strategies should be to
communicate the existence of the site to my existing
customers.
5) Select your tactics
this is where the action is. You should now have some
firm ideas in your mind and on paper as to what your
objectives and strategies should be. You should now be
thinking in more practical terms as to what you can do to
achieve those goals. You may also need to think at this
point about any costs involved with some of your ideas.
Set yourself a budget to spend on marketing your site.
This is not the time to penny pinch. You have already
invested a great deal of time and money into setting up
your site and that money will be wasted if you expect
people to simply queue up just because it is there. The
web is huge and yours is just one site among millions
and is unlikely to be stumbled across by chance. Few of
us have the marketing budget of MacDonald¡¯s but a few
well spent pounds on targeted marketing in the right
areas will reap dividends.
So that¡¯s it. How to develop and write a simple marketing
plan. One final thing though. Treat your plan as a
continuing, living document. Revisit it regularly, update it
and change it as your goals change. If you treat your
marketing plan as something to work with then it will
become a time and money saver for your business.
So that¡¯s it. How to develop a simple marketing plan. One
final thing though. Treat your plan as a continuing, living
document. Revisit it regularly, update it and change it as
your goals change.
About the Author
Jean Morgan is a lecturer in business and management with a particular interest in helping women to succeed in the business world. For more business articles please visit http://www.ukwomeninbusiness.co.uk
Article Source: http://www.simplysearch4it.com/article/10392.html
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