This guide will help you organize yourself to successfully sell
yourself, your product or your service with maximum results. Before
starting, learn about and study your target audience. Ask yourself five
questions: What does your target audience want? When do they want it?
Where do they want it? How do they want to buy it? How much are they
willing to pay for it? Then, use the following six steps to help you
create your marketing plan: fact base, problems and opportunities,
objectives, strategy, budget, and project sales and profit.
Fact Base involves collecting facts and data about
your business or what you are trying to do. Write a simple statement of
purpose of what it is you want to do, positioning your goals to your
target audience's needs and wants. Display, thoroughly explain, and
analyze your data about your sales statistics, trends,
markets,
product/service, competition, delivery/inventory/customer service,
distribution/sales, customer/target audience's attitudes, and
promotional material. Add photos and visuals to lighten the material
and make your marketing material more interesting, memorable, alluring,
entertaining, and exciting.
Make a list of all the problems and opportunities you are faced with in
order to further analyze each and find a effective solution. Where
there is a problem, there usually is an opportunity waiting to be
discovered. Knowing your market trends, competitor weaknesses, and your
own strengths can eventually lead to profit. An effective analysis
involves identifying problems because the data is unusual or off from
your usual statistics, removing anything or anyone that worsens
businessactivity, and removing obstacles that hinder goals. Then list the
opportunities clearly in specific terms to communicate the objective.
List each objective in terms of quantity and time frame, identifying
product/service, market and geographical location with specific details
and statistics. Making assumptions about your objectives involves
making guidelines that will help you implement your marketing plan.
These assumptions are usually unexpected happenings that can occur and
affect your implementation of your plan. In other words, prepare for
the worst. Group each assumption in the area that it affects in order
to organize them.
Create your strategy that will help you implement your plan and reach
your goal. It should include product/service information, pricing,
promotion, advertising, distribution, customer service, packaging,
merchandising, and sales. The strategy is the action of the plan.
Concentrate on the target audience's needs, wants and attitudes as well
as the marketing mix. In your strategy, list who will perform the
action, what the action should be that will lead to your goal, when is
the deadline, what is the sequence that should be taken toward your end
result, and what form of marketing would you be using. The target
audience include the buyers, buyers' location, the price range they are
willing to buying it at, their age and their income. Know your target
audience well. The four marketing mix include product/service, place,
promotion and price. Describe the features, benefits, performance and
unique attributes that stand out about your product/service. Make it
easy for your target audience to buy it and/or use it, with main
concentration on distribution and sales. Create promotional material in
the form of advertising, brochures, postcards, business cards,
newsletters, websites, profile pages, trade shows, publicity and/or
press conferences. Create awareness for your product/service with
positive, factual, entertaining and attractive information in order to
get as much exposure as you can. Provide clear communication with your
target audience as well as attractive packaging and merchandising, and
special incentives in the form of discounts or a gift with purchase.
Offer free samples, demonstration kits, free gifts with your personal
logo, or hold an event or party to introduce your product/service to
the public. The price is the
monetary valueplaced on your product/service that depends on its quality level as
well as all the work and effort that created it. Analyze and evaluate
each strategy, looking for compatibility in internal and external
forces that can affect the implementation of your plan, as well as
checking your resources, time and risk factors. Create backup
strategies in case the original strategies fail. Also, creating backups
allow you to analyze a wide arrange of choices in order to choose the
best strategies. Backup strategies further allow you to be prepared for
unexpected circumstances and happenings that can change your present
plan.
Next, consider the budget. What will it cost you to implement your
marketing plan? Separate the costs of implementation into two groups:
marketing costs as well as the shipping and receiving costs.
Shipping/Receiving costs tend to be fixed and not easily controlled,
while the marketing costs are easier to control and may vary. Always
monitor the progress of your marketing plan, making sure the budget has
not changed. Controlling your budget helps you achieve your objectives.
Check budget monthly to control it and make sure it is on track.
The final step involves forecasting of sales volume and anticipated
profit. Comparing the forecast statistics with actual statistics can
help find problems that caused the budget to go off track as well as
find a better opportunity to fix the problem. This section involves all
the sales, costs, gross profit, and before-tax profit.
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