Create a great marketing business plan with ease

• Summary. Even though this will eventually be first in your plan, you can only write it when all the other sections have been finished because that is where you will get your information to write your summary. This useful for anyone involved in your business as they will be able to understand at a glance where you are heading with your marketing.
• Customers. You need to work out who is going to buy your products or services and where you can find them. The more you can find out about your target customers, the better. For instance, if you are selling designer maternity wear, you won’t be targeting the over eighties. Think of your customers as the bull’s eye on an archery target – the closer you get to hitting that, the easier it should be for you to get a sale.
• U.S.P. (Unique Selling Point.) You need to really think about this one because it is that essential point that makes you stand out from the crowd. For instance, if you sell vintage jewellery, you could concentrate on a niche that makes you more memorable. For instance, you might concentrate on Suffragette jewellery.
• Pricing and Status Strategy. You have to decide whether your business is going to be upmarket or economy and then make sure that the price reflects that. The reason for this is that if you sell cheaply made products at expensive prices, you will rightly have a lot of returns. Alternatively, if you have a quality product and offer it at a very low price then folks will get suspicious that it is really a cheap copy and won’t buy from the business.
• Distributing the products. You have to make decisions here. For instance, you can sell directly to your customers from a shop or website or will you sell to manufacturers or retailers?
• Promotions and Offers. You don’t have to have these but they do help to get customers interested in you and they also help past customers buy off you again. There are various ways that you can do this. You could have three for the price of two; a free gift when a customer spends a certain amount of money or even free trials. For instance, if you were writing a plan for business that conducted piano lessons, you might offer new pupils the first half hour free of charge.
• Marketing Resources. In this section of your plan, you need to add whether you have a website, have printed materials like brochures, banners or business cards and also any materials that you may use in the future.
• Promotions Plan. This will probably be one of the biggest parts of your plan. Essentially, you need to list possible ways that you can promote the business. It could include television ads, online campaigns, attending trade shows and also press releases. When you have considered each avenue that could be explored, you need to write in your plan whether it would be possible to follow that avenue.
• Online Marketing Tactics. This can be done by a series of ways that include using keywords on your website to attract customers to your site. Combined with this, you will need to also write in your plan SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) as a similar way to attract target customers to your website. In addition to this, you may also use paid online advertisers to direct customers to your business. An essential part of your plan in this section would also be to describe how you would utilize social media to attract more customers.
• Conversion Techniques. This is an important part because it explains how you will turn interested parties in paying customers. This can be done in a series of ways depending upon your particular business or service. For instance, if you send out query emails and people telephone you to find out more, it may be something as simple as really working on your sales pitch at the telephone stage. There are also other ways like showing customers testimonials on your website. Basically, you need to work out what is the best way to make the conversions for your business.
• Buddying Up or Partnerships. Here you need to work out who could become a business buddy to help improve your sales and theirs too. For instance, if you run a drama school for children, they may need to purchase leotards and soft pumps for your classes. If there is business in the same town that sells these products, it could be worth your while getting your businesses together to promote each other. In other words, she could have your leaflets in her shop and tell people about your classes and you could tell your pupils about her shop. When writing your marketing plan, you need to add all these types of ideas into it.
• Referral Tactic. This is simply getting satisfied customers to refer you. In a perfect business world, every single customer would bring in another one but of course, this is real life. However, it can be a very useful tactic to think about and put in your plan. It is always useful to offer an incentive to the customer doing a referral.
• Transaction Price. This is basically working out how much each customer spends with you and trying to get it to be more by offering promotions and incentives etc. In this part of your plan, you also need to get an idea of how much customers spend with your competitors. The reasoning behind this is that if they are getting so much more revenue per head than you, they will have more money for advertising etc. and may even take all your customers.
• Retaining Customers. This part of your plan concentrates on keeping hold of the customers that you already have. Many a business has lost its customers and eventually gone out of business because they are so busy chasing new people that they neglect their old customers. This is a serious mistake to make. It is therefore essential to explore ways to make sure that your present customers keep buying from you. Obviously, it depends upon your business but reminding them of what you do with offers and incentives to purchase your goods will help. This is an essential part of your plan so you need to take time to explore the opportunities that are open to you and use them.
• Financial projections. This section is very useful. You need to make sure that you include all the costs of promotions and offers etc. Moreover, it is essential that you try to get an approximate amount of how much revenue the marketing will bring in. Of course, this will never be truly correct but it should give you an indication of whether your marketing plan is viable. If it isn’t, you need to go through it again to see where you can cut costs or change tactics.