January 15, 2010
Where to begin your marketing plan
Every business needs a marketing plan. If you could create a robot that did all of your clients work for them in half the time and only costs $100, if no one knew about it you wouldn’t make any money. A marketing plan lays out the specifics of how you are going to let the world, and more specifically your targeted customers, know about your products or services. Many businesses and entrepreneurs don’t know where to begin with their marketing plans and wind up just piecing together strategies that they have heard about to create what they think is a marketing plan. Sometimes this works, but as with anything else, proper preparation will prevent poor performance. To increase the chance that your marketing will be affective, you have to have a marketing plan that starts with research.
Researching to begin your marketing plan is easy. The first step is to research who your customers are or if you are just starting out think about who your product is designed to help. The goal is to narrow who your customer is down as much as you possibly can to arrive at an ideal customer for your product or service. In other words you want to have an image in your mind of a person of business that would be the perfect customer for you business. This first step is imperative as you can’t move forward with your marketing plan until you answer the fundamental question, “who are my customers.” The reason you can’t move forward without answering that question is because you need to know that to answer the question “who should I market to?” Once you have the answer to the first question the answer to the second becomes clear and you are ready to move on.
Now that you know who you are going to market to you can start doing some more specific research about your potential customer/marketing target. You want to find out as much as you can about them: where do they eat, what is their average income, how old are they, where do they live, what to the do for work, how much do they work, etc. The more information you can gather the easier it will be for you to come up with creative and affective ways to market to them, which is the goal of putting together your marketing plan. If you are in a B2B business then you want to find out questions like: what is their average revenue, how many employees do they have, how many customers do they have, how do they make money, what are their main differentiators, etc. Whether researching people or business, the goals are to find out what the best marketing channels to reach your customer are and what kinds of messages will resonate with them. Knowing this will help you answer the two other fundamental questions for writing your marketing plan. First, how will I reach my customer? And second, what will I say to my customer?
It has been my experience that once you have all your research complete you will have so many creative ideas for marketing to your target customer that your marketing plan will practically write itself. The better your research the better your ideas will be and your marketing will be more affective. Let your research guide your marketing and you will probably save yourself both time and money because you won’t be chasing marketing ideas that don’t work.
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