The Silent Avatar Speaks

Just What is a Marketing Plan?
A marketing plan includes a list of actions needed to accomplish marketing targets. It can be for a product, a service or a brand. There are marketing plans for short term goals – 1 year, and long term goals – five years.

A marketing plan might be part of an overall business plan, and a good marketing strategy is the basis of a well-written marketing plan.

Why does a Business Venture necessitate a Marketing Plan?
A marketing plan is an invaluable tool for guiding a small home based business owner to organise their marketing efforts. It ensures a systematic technique to creating products and services to meet and gratify customers’ needs.

How to write a Marketing Plan
Drawing up a marketing plan is not difficult. Focus on the goals and the efforts needed to achieve them.   Your goals need to be stated clearly in the marketing plan.

Remember that a good marketing plan sets clear, realistic, achievable and measurable objectives. It should consist of deadlines, a budget and allotment of responsibilities.

Marketing Plan Outline
A basic marketing plan outline may comprise of these topics:

Current Market Analysis
Depict the current market environment which your business is in. This analysis can later be used as a benchmark to fine-tune the marketing plan in the future.

Define your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis and also the PEST (Political, Economic, Social, Technological) analysis tools, write a short description of the current product or service available, the marketing benefits and barriers the business could come across. Contemplate the threats posed by competitors and also consider other factors that could affect the business in the year to come. This may aid in the formulation of strategies in the future.

Target Market
Every product or service needs a market. This explains why customer analysis in marketing plans is essential to its success. The product could be directed at the online market as well as the conventional offline market.

It could be targeted at the general public or it could be aimed at a niche market. For an online market the analysis should include reasons why people shop online.Once a target market is selected, write a target market profile based on demographics and include selection yardsticks.

Marketing Objectives
Express your business’s marketing goals for the coming year. The targets should be specific, realistic and measurable to asses the marketing progress. Avoid vague statements like, “Increase indoor sales” Incorporate specifics instead – “Increase indoor sales by 25%.”

Strategies to Achieving Objectives
If the marketing goal is to boost indoor sales by 25% then a strategy has to be developed to meet this end. For example, there could be special a promotion for walk-in clients. This promotion can be marketed via an emailed weekly newsletter to clients. The strategies should be detailed and cover the 4P’s of marketing -

• Price
• Product
• Place
• Promotion.

Marketing Budget
Putting into affect marketing strategies to fulfill marketing objectives costs money and it’s just plain stupidity to think that you can have an online presence and just by the mere fact that you are online and have been indexed by the search engines you will have a successful business.

There’s a saying… spend some money to make some money. Create a breakdown of marketing connected expenses associated with the strategies. Have a look at the numbers and decide if it is too much. Do not be afraid to lower or revise the budget until a feasible figure is achieved – and then make sure you stick to it. Don’t be tempted to buy yourself the latest “toy”.  You are growing your business so you can have as many toys as you want.. but only when your marketing has paid off.

Bear in mind that a marketing plan should remain a constant process throughout the life of a company.

Revise your marketing plan at least every 6 months, and for goodness sake… track where your results are coming from! Analyse, analyse, analyse!

I’m the Silent Avatar… and I have spoken

Tags: Business and Management, Business Tips, Internet, Internet Marketing, Marketing and Advertising by the silent avatar
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Want to make use of Christmas with some online marketing?

I know we are all busy at Christmas, but what better time than to check out the competition? Use any down time to research.

Here are some tips to make the best use if your time and reap the rewards.

1. Review your competitors website.
Just type in the main keyword in Google you are competing for with your site and browse through the results to see what your competitors are doing that you might be able to do.  Comparing your site with your competition is a quick way to bring about short cuts you may have been considering for your site.

2.  Review your website stats.
All websites should allow you to view your website statistics.  Review the statistics and make changes to your keywords and re- test for increased traffic. If you have more than one website, check which one is bringing you the most traffic. Check out the number of unique visitors to your sites and continue to monitor no less than monthly

3. Test Your website.
Go to your website and approach it like you are a customer. You are looking for quick improvements, spelling mistakes, errors. This is a way to act as a reminder for your site to see where you are at with the site.

4.  Increase trust and review your content.
Write a new press release for your site.  Fresh content is a must for sites and it shows the website is alive. Read your homepage and make a quick assessment and change the content to increase traffic and conversions.

5. Write a Quick Article
A good article that helps your visitors is invaluable. It also helps the sales process for your site visitors, and Google just loves new content! Write content which is pitched to your market. If you are stuck for ideas, write about your predictions for your industry in 2008.

6. Check out a new domain name.
Domain names with keywords in the domain name (like www.shoes.com) are easier to rank than obscure names. You may even find a domain name which is better than the one you have through expired domain names.

7. Build your database.
Collect all your business cards laying around and other email addresses and compile them in an Excel spreadsheet or add them to your Outlook contacts ready to do a mail out.

8. Write a e-newsletter
Get a newsletter ready for January by putting together content so all you have to do is hit send.

9. Tweak your Adwords
Assess you online ads and ditch those that aren’t performing. If you haven’t got your hands on a paid search marketing campaign get one from here. You can be up and running in no time.

10. Re-write your About Us page.
Review 2007 and include new products, new clients, and any other big news which happened.

11. Check your contact us form
It may be obvious, but make sure it works. Also check out your site and see if there is any other places in your site where you can out your contact us link.

12.  Plan your 2008 online marketing.
Start a wish-list of things you want to do, and things you don’t want to do. Get educated about what the latest techniques are for online marketing.

Tags: Internet Marketing by the silent avatar
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