What is a Marketing Plan?

Every Business Needs A Pinpoint Marketing Plan

To develop an effective and exceptional business strategy, it takes careful planning as well as a comprehensive understanding of the market. Also, if you want to achieve success, make sure to get started with a marketing plan.

Marketing plays a vital function in every business. Business owners should be familiar with the customer base of the business and the weaknesses and strengths of their competitors. Such factors and others must be identified in the best and well-prepared marketing plan.

A great marketing plan will help you outline how your business can retain and attract customers and how this will help you beat your competitors. Your needed budget will be also included in this plan to get positive results. This must also include, business location, market research, competition, target customer group, service or product being sold, promotion, advertising, and budget.

Market Research

A successful marketing plan starts with conducting a market research. It will give you relevant information that will allow you to solve any possible marketing concerns. More often than not, the 3 most pragmatic ways in conducting market research are utilizing a telephone survey, direct mail survey or through conducting a focus team.

If you consider using a direct mail survey, ensure to keep your questions short with a length no more than 2 pages. The consumer probably will not voluntarily participate with your survey without providing any incentives. Therefore, you must include postage-paid envelopes so that your respondents won’t have to pay for the privilege of assisting you. If you have sufficient budget, sending a reminder about 2 weeks after initial mailing can be a good idea. Take note that direct mail can be expensive as you will need printing of direct mail, postage, envelopes, and other incentives used.

Phone surveys are also another option you may consider. This is the most cost-effective technique in which you can conduct a survey without the need of worrying about mailing or printing costs. The major costs in phone surveys are the fee of the interviewer, questionnaire preparation, and phone charges.

Focus Groups are also another good way of gathering specific information of your targeted audience. Your main costs could include the expenses in assembling and recruiting the groups, fee of the interviewer, research time, renting rooms if possible, incentives, and recording cost of the interviews.

Secondary data is imperative to develop a successful marketing plan. Studies and reports done by the government agencies, some businesses or trade associations within your industry can offer you essential statistics on the research area.

Regardless of what kind of market research you do, you should concentrate on gathering enough information when determining who your potential customers are and other things that would help youmake your business grow in no time.

The Marketing Plan Components

Once you are done with your market research, the next thing that you should do is to start developing your marketing plan, which has some basic components and these are:

  • Executive Summary

At the start of your marketing plan, you should always include a brief summary that would summarize its contents.

  • Business

In this part, you will need to define vital characteristics regarding your business.

  • Goals

Discussing your marketing objectives will help you create a good marketing plan. These must be clear, attainable within a particular period of time, and realistic. If you many goals, see to it that they complement each other and ensure that your plan’s components support all your marketing goals.

  • Customers

Evaluate your customers based on their gender, profession, age, educational level, neighborhood, and income. Know where some of your customers shop and what qualities of your products or service that your customers value.

  • Service or Product

Describing in detail your service or product and emphasizing its exceptional selling points, features, and many more is also an important component of a marketing plan.

  • Competitors

Knowing your competitors can also play a huge role in achieving results with your marketing plan. So, know your competitors first and find out how you can beat them.

  • Location

Include the location of your business and the pros and cons of your location.

  • Budget

Including your budget will allow you to know the cost that will be allocated for promotions and advertising including material distribution and printing.

  •  Pricing Strategy

List the best pricing methods and provide a brief description of every technique. With this component of marketing plan, you will know how to price your service or product properly.

A comprehensive and well-written marketing plan is important in every business venture as it describes how you plan to retain and attract customers, what resources you will have, and how you will stay ahead of the competition to achieve all your business goals.

The Perks of Marketing Plan for Your Business

There are numerous benefits you would get if you will make a marketing plan for your business. Some of them are:

  • Marketing Plan Allows Clear Decision Making

Knowing which factors could affect your business and auditing which resources you have within your business to deal with, you can guarantee that you will make great decisions that will lead you to success.

  • Marketing Plan Can Help You Prevent Panic Decisions

Marketing plan will provide you a clear view of what’s going on in today’s market and will provide you a framework that would help you make decisions no matter how tough the situation is.

  • Marketing Plan Also Offers Direction

Marketing plan also provides you a direction. Since it includes all of the things you need to know for your business, you will be able to stay on the right path, regardless of what issues may arise in the long run.

There are other benefits that you could get from developing a marketing plan. So, if you are planning to establish a business, ensure that you start with a marketing plan first because this can make a huge difference and can help you reach all you goals in a hassle-free manner. The Adrian Graphics team can help you craft a marketing plan for your business today and discover how our Market Optics Program can turn your business into a success.

For more information about developing a marketing plan feel free to call us directly at 916-905-0551

3 Tips to Improve your Business in 2015

Strategic Business Marketing and Planning

If you’re anything like us, getting a jump on the new year is a critical way have the competitive edge on your competitors.

Check out these tips to increase productivity, branding, and inbound leads.

 

    1. Automate your email marketing with Get Response software, it’s a robust platform allowing you to create inbound lead capture pages, build an automated email marketing system and unlimited follow-up auto responders. Video Email Marketing Give a face and a voice to your messages and triple your click-through rates! GetResponse Multimedia Studio lets you record and store up to 100MB of video email marketing files, right from your account. Deliver high-impact customer testimonials, product demos, and event videos − no added software or expense required! Twitter Integration Millions of potential customers are getting their product “buzz” from social networks − and you need to be there! GetResponse puts you in the middle of this non-stop conversation with point-and-click integration. Let Twitter deliver instant links to your latest campaigns, coupons and blogs today! Online Surveys With GetResponse Surveys, research won’t cost you a dime extra! Ask as many questions as often as you want and get the data you need to improve products, target campaigns and stay ahead of the competition! It’s a snap to use – just point and click to design, then publish and watch the results roll in. 300+ Industry Templates Looks matter! strategic-marketing-agencyChoose from over 300 Industry HTML Templates to create eye-popping campaigns for every audience and industry. Use our intuitive editor to customize your email communications with cool graphics, fonts and formatting, then brand with your company logo and colors to sign your masterpiece! Split Testing To ensure you get the best results from your email campaign, test it first! Create up to 5 messages, with different personalization techniques, subjects, and styles. GetResponse will test each version for you, then automatically select and send the best! It takes only minutes and can save you cash − and lost customers! GetResponse for iPhone Keep your finger on the pulse of your campaigns! GetResponse for iPhone gives you instant access to your dashboard and key stats, so you can react, anywhere, anytime. Add subscribers manually or import from your Address Book and you’ll never miss an opportunity to grow your list and your business! Email Analytics Make sure every campaign is better than the last! Let GetResponse track every open, click, unsubscribe, and purchase. Review your stats by product, date, domain, and more! See the Big Picture with visual graphs, and get customized reports in your inbox daily.

 

    1. Increase your search engine directory visibility with Yext Powerlistings. As a certified partner of Yext Adrian Graphics know the value of being in the Yext network of over 220+ Million monthly users. Many people have misconception that google is the only they should be dominating and in today’s market that’s just not true. The truth is in the numbers, with over 54 directories including mobile directories. Yext allows you to sync all your important company information such as a logo, videos, photos, employee bio’s, service and product menus and more all in one single dashboards. Yext Powerlisting’s also allow you to upload more categories than the standard 3 included in free listings, with yext you can select up to 10 categories giving you a wider range of potential buyers or customers increasing your reach dramatically.

 

  1. Boysell.com is a a discount online services provider offering some of the most competitive pricing and special on the internet. Purchasing a deluxe hosting package for 1 year qualifies you for a free .com domain name. Boysell also offers discounted cloud backup services for only $2.43 a month that can save you over $500 a year over Dropbox $9.99 monthly cloud hosting. It is easy to use and simple to get started. Boysell also offers very affordable email hosting for your business for less than $1.99 a month. If saving money is not enough to get you to make the switch then the award winning customer service and support should change your mind. If you want the best services for less money and  want to feel like a hero to your boss or business partner, you will not find a better place to do that then Boysell.com.

 

We hope you enjoy these great tips, and check back soon for more great resources to help your business grow and flourish in 2014!