How Do You Market and Advertise Your Business?
7 Steps of Your Marketing Plan That a Dummy Can Follow
You may find many techniques or methods out there, but everything still boils down to the basics. You need to know what you are trying to achieve, who you will be targeting, how, when, and what you’ll do with the results.
Here are 7 basic steps to market any business services or products. You can add more steps in between based on business needs, but you cannot omit any of these steps.
- Set Goals & Objectives.What are you trying to achieve? You may want to increase sales, brand awareness, introduce a new product/ service, get more potential customers on your list, drive more traffic to you website, get people to like your Facebook page, etc. See, there are many possible objectives and you need to identify them before you can take the next step.
- Identify Target Audience. Who are your ideal customers? Where can you find them in the highest concentration? Look at your goals and objectives and match them with the target audience – your potential customers.
- Establish Budget. This is a very important step. You need to know how much you can spend on marketing. When you know the budget and who you need to market to, you will be able to better identify HOW you need to market – what marketing strategies to use. Always know that this is not just an expense, it is your investment in business. Determine your ROI and this will help you to better identify the budget. Would you invest $10 per potential customer to get $100 (if a customer would bring you an average profit of $100)? The answer should be “yes”!
- Choose the Delivery Channel / Media / Marketing Strategy. Based on all the above, you need to identify which marketing strategy (-ies) (the HOW) may work best to achieve the results. You may go with internet marketing, direct mail, radio /TV commercials, outdoor marketing, etc.
- Design the Marketing Campaign. This marketing plan already helped you to figure out what you want to achieve, who to target and how. Now it comes to designing the actual marketing campaign. Depending on your budget and needs, you may want to hire professionals or do it yourself.
- Execute. Determine when you will start the campaign and the length of it. Then execute it.
- Gather & Evaluate Results. You need to be able to measure and evaluate the results. There is really no point of marketing if you can not know if it works or not. Marketing is trial and error activities, so you need to know which media (strategy) works and which does not, and you need to be able to adjust or modify the strategies, if necessary.
Coming up more on each step!