Discover How to Grow Your Business Using a Strategic Marketing Plan

When you’re creating a marketing plan, it’s important that you start with the basics first.

So what are the basics?

1) Make your potential Customers aware of you

2) Build trust and authority

3) Have something of value to offer to potential Customers

4) Continue to nurture that relationship for ongoing sales and return on investment (ROI)

Sounds simple right?

But how do you do that on an ongoing basis? How do you leverage off the multitude of marketing channels and options? And more to the point which one is right for you and your business?

Well here are some areas to work on and apply to your business:

Know your niche – you’d be amazed at how many Business Owners don’t know what market they are doing business in!
Know your Target Market - do you understand who actually makes the buying decision in your market?
Do you have a profile for your "Ideal Customer"?
Do you know where your Ideal Customer hangs out?
What is your Ideal Customer already buying? this will highlight who your competitors or potential partners could be.
Once you have converted a potential buyer into a Customer, what is the sales funnel that you are going to lead them through?

All really important things to know – and if you don’t have the answers then this is the perfect time to stop and work it out. It is critical to your marketing success – in fact, it’s critical to your overall business success…

When it comes to putting together your strategic marketing plan, you will need to have the answers to the above questions to ensure a successful outcome. You will need to break your plan down into goals, strategy and tactics.

So how do you do that?

First set your goal because this is the overall result that you’re looking to achieve.
Then apply the strategy related to how you might achieve that goal.
Finally work out the tactics you are going to use. In other words work out the specific set of actions that need to happen in order to achieve the strategy. Break it right down so that there are clear, simple steps. You will be amazed at how much difference this will make.

Without all three steps you will find that your marketing plan may fail 🙁

When you are starting out, you will need to do some marketing on all of the channels that apply to your ideal customer. But what you will find is that this will narrow down very quickly to only about 3 of them giving you the conversion results that you are looking for. These are now the ones that you need to focus on and revisit to map out individual marketing plans for each of them. The plans may be similar but it will depend on the channel itself (eg LinkedIn will be a very different strategy to Pinterest).

Here’s a tip for you…

Figure out how to use a marketing channel by studying your competitors and see what they are doing. Become one of their subscribers whether that be for their YouTube channel or sign up for their email list if they are using email marketing. Like and follow their Facebook pages to see what content and offers they are posting.

Ultimately, the goal is to know where you are going to market, what you are going to offer and how will you market it. So if one channel isn’t giving you the conversions you require, then change tactic and use another one instead.

Of course it goes without say that before you do any of this, you need to make sure that you have a way for your Customers to buy from you – and if they don’t buy then you need to make sure that you have a way of collecting their information so that you can continue to build a relationship with them until you get to the point where they trust you enough to part with their money. Then you can continue to offer them different products or services that will ultimately help them even more…