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Advertising, Sales and Marketing
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How To Write a Profit-Producing Marketing Plan
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For instance, if you’re in the service business, what does it take to acquire a new client? How many phone calls do you have to make? How many appointments do you need to set? How often do you need to follow up before you get to “yes”? What type of client generates greater profit? What type of client is most “typical” or requires less effort? How many of each type of client do you need to acquire to hit your daily/weekly/monthly target to stay on your financial track?
What tactics or strategies for attracting new customers have worked in the past? How many new or recurring customers did you acquire with a specific promotion? Did you generate interest by giving a workshop or seminar? What kind of advertising did you do? What new strategies would you like to try?
Choose precise marketing vehicles you will use, when you’ll use them (dates and frequencies), the cost of using them and how many sales you need from each one to break even.
Step 3: Track and log results.
If you don’t know which marketing efforts are working for you and
which are not, how can you possibly determine a better and more
cost-effective plan?
Don’t get caught up in focusing on the ingenuity of a particular tactic and its potential for gain while forgetting about measuring actual results. It will cost you money! You must “tag” every effort in order to measure its results. For instance, if you get a phone call from a prospective client, ask the person how he/she heard of you – from a colleague? Yellow pages ad? Other ad? Directory listing? Promotion? Seminar or workshop you participated in? An interview you did with a local radio station or newspaper? Document the answers.
If you do print advertising, mark the ad with a department number or ID number that responders need to refer to in order to get the information (or product) advertised.
Tracking results actually lets you SEE what direction your marketing efforts are currently going and where they need to go to get the financial reward you seek. And once you can see the “map” to successfully marketing your business, it will be easier to keep moving toward your goals.
Step 4: Review and change the plan to get better results.
A great marketing plan is ever-changing. You learn from it, modify it
and re-introduce it.
Using results you get from Step 3, determine if the plan is working or if it could do better. What profits resulted using each of these tactics? Which worked best? Can you recreate them? Which produced the least? Can you modify them to be more effective? What products or services are drawing the most interest from potential customers/clients? Should you promote them more heavily? Is there a specific industry that responds more than another?
Is a tactic or strategy costing more to use than the gain you experience from its use? If so, drop it! Don’t continue to use an ad that doesn’t produce just because you paid a lot of money to have it created. Move on. Try something else. Review results and change your course at every opportunity.
Summary:
Writing an effective marketing plan doesn’t have to be a daunting
task. It’s not for anyone else, it’s for you. Don’t waste your time with a
fancy cover, rambling or self-serving text and an impressive vocabulary.
Forget about grammar and sentence structure – write in fragmented phrases
if you want to. All you need is a clear goal, broken into specific
checkpoints, supported by efforts that you can track and change as you go.
Put in the effort and you’ll pull out the profit.
Susan Carter is a small business operations and marketing consultant and author. For more information visit http://www.successideas.com
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