Promoting Your Business

Create a Marketing Plan

Determined to get the most out of your grassroots promotional campaign? Then you need a plan–a solid marketing plan that serves as a roadmap for your marketing efforts, keeping them on track and in line with your company's goals.

To get there, you'll need to devote some time and energy into a marketing plan. As the cornerstone of your efforts, this plan will lead you to the very innovative, sometimes unconventional, low budget marketing goals that you're seeking to achieve.

To start, here are five important factors to consider when creating your company's marketing plan:

Situation Analysis: Launch your plan with a thorough, realistic overview of your competition and how you'll position yourself against them. Be forthright about your own firm's challenges, and describe the features and benefits that set your firm apart from others in the industry.

Target Audience: Put together a profile of your customers and potential customers, where they're located, what they do, how much they spend and why they need your product or service. If you're marketing to consumers, include a profile of your target audience based on demographics, such as age, gender, household income and location. If businesses are your customers, then describe your targeted business categories and the qualifying criteria for prospects in each.

Goals: List your marketing goals and give each one a deadline for completion. This will help you work through the entire process completely, without spending too much time on any one step. Make the goals quantifiable. For example, instead of "find new customers" use "sign up three new accounts by December 1st."

Strategies and Tactics: This is where you define each marketing strategy and outline the activities that you plan to undertake. Describe your tactics, and attach media and production schedules with completion dates. Based on what your products or services are, the habits of your customers, and the methods of your competitors, determine the best way to sell your product. Consider how you will close the sale with potential customers, how much you should charge and how you will deliver your goods.

Budget: No marketing plan is complete with covering budgetary issues. Once your goals and tactics have been outline, take some time to put a cost on each one. If the tally is too costly, spend some time re-evaluating your tactics to come up with more affordable ways to reach your goals. For example, instead of hiring a part-time marketing/communications employee, outsource to a freelancer who can handle the tasks on a per-project basis.

Questions to Ask Yourself

Now it's time to ask yourself some pretty important questions and use the responses to create your marketing plan. Once you've gone through them, you can put the answers to work by creating and targeting a marketing approach that fits with your company's goals, resources and budget:

1. What do I want out of my marketing campaign? Am I looking for new customers? Higher sales? Increase market share? Better top-of-mind awareness with my customers?
2. What resources do I have at my avail and how can I best put these resources to work for my company?
3. Do I have an active promotional campaign in place right now and if so, how can I build on what I have to make it even better?
4. What is my company's unique selling proposition (USP) and how can I capitalize on it in my marketing campaign?
5. Is my marketing message consistent with my company's image? Does it fit with the image that I want to project about my firm?
6. Have I taken the time to research my competitors and determine how their products and services compare to mine?
7. Are my customers involved in my marketing activities? Am I asking for enough input and feedback from them on a regular basis, and then using that information to create even better marketing programs?
8. Am I s ending the right messages to customers about my appreciation of their business and any referrals that they can send my way? And, am I returning the favor by also referring business to them?
9. Am I thinking outside the box and making my promotions memorable, consistent with my company image, closely linked to my product or service message, most importantly, motivational?
10. Have I positioned my company and its management team as available resources for media outlets like newspapers, magazines and radio?
11. Can I take advantage of relatively inexpensive marketing options like public relations, coupons, contests, frequent-buyer programs, cross promotions, trade show exhibits and sponsorship/volunteer opportunities at community and philanthropic events?