A marketing plan should be the starting point for all your business’s marketing activities.
You should know what you’re doing, why and what you are achieving through taking those steps.
However marketing plans can be hard to get right and if they are incorrect or miss out information, it can lead to problems later on.
But we are here to help! Answer our five questions to help you with your marketing plan
1. What are your hopes for the future?
You need to set objectives; what do you want to achieve?
If you want to grow, how will your marketing to help you do this? Do you want to gain 5 new customers off social networks? If this is the case you need to measure this. Whatever your hopes are, whether they are to grow or expand, you need set your goals and how you are going to achieve them!
2. Who are your customers?
Are they male? female? How old are they? Are they a business within a specific sector? How much disposable income do they have? You need to firstly establish who your target audience are, as everything you do is aimed towards them and keeping them happy. Maybe you have more than one target audience; in any case you need to know as much about them as possible.
3. Have you done any research?
One main downfall of businesses is lack of research!!! Research is available on most subjects via the miracle that is Google – it is there waiting for you! Finding specific research suited exactly to what you want will be near impossible without a very high bill from marketing research company.
But research into trends will give you an insight – e.g You’re a hardware buy diazepam online uk 2013 shop owner and recent research has shown that DIY is on the rise. This gives you a good opportunity and insight; it would then be beneficial to find out why. Is it because people need to save money, so are doing work themselves rather than getting in contractors? From this you can then start to work on how you can help them.
4. How will you reach your target audience?
It’s easy to find statistics on which people use different social networks in particular, so use this to your advantage to find out where your target audience congregate. For example, if you’re looking for younger more technological minded people, try Instagram or Vine. Whereas if you’re looking for an older demographic, statistics show they can be found best on Facebook. Your target audience may be other businesses, in which case roadshows or networking might be what your business needs.
5. Should you be using social media and are you using the right social networks?
Social media and having an online presence is a must! Again, what will you use to target and communicate? Maybe you can optimise all the main social networks, which is great. However, if you’re an accountant, Pinterest might not be the place for you! You need to figure out what sort of return and response you get from each social media and track it over time.
We hope these tips are useful for your marketing plan but if you still feel like you need help get in touch with us! Marketing plans from Bare Bones Marketing start at £200 + VAT and could save you wasting your limited resources in marketing to the wrong people in the wrong way.