The marketing plan is probably the most important aspect of your business plan. That’s because it allows you to conceptualize your market, by giving you clarity on who you are targeting in the market, and the best way to serve them. Without a proper marketing plan, there is a good chance that your business won’t survive. You will simply be groping in the dark with no clear idea on what the market needs, or how best to serve it.
To help ensure that your business can establish itself as going-concern, which is the goal of every business person, here are 4 tips to creating a marketing strategy for your business.
1. Know your target market
Before you write a marketing plan, conduct market research on your target market. You can conduct a survey to your target market to gather necessary data to include in your marketing plan. Some of the issues you can focus on include their demographics, their levels of income among other factors. It is only through thorough market research that you can come up with a marketing plan that properly identifies and serves those needs. For instance, if your market is made up of young people between 18 and 30, you can use this information to come with a marketing plan that captures the same.
2. Know your competition
Before you write a marketing plan, understand who you will be competing with. Without a good understanding of your competitors, you will end up creating and executing on a flawed marketing plan. A perfect way to find out who your competitors are; is to use a company information database. Through such a database you can easily find out, which businesses are operating in the same field as you. From there, you can research on their strengths and weaknesses, then come up with an approach that beats their strengths.
3. Come up with a market approach
Once you have mapped out your target customers as well as your competition, you need to come up with a clearly defined approach on how to execute. Some of the approaches you can take include advertising on television, the print media or even on social media. With a clear idea of how to target your market, you can capture the same in your marketing plan, and execute it. A clearly defined market approach is one of the most important pillars to success in business.
4. Define your budget
When creating a marketing plan, you need to define your budget. For you to create and execute on a business plan that guarantees you success, you need to have a realistic marketing budget. Your marketing budget forecast should not be too low that it negatively affects your ability to achieve your business objectives.
On the other hand, it shouldn’t be too high that getting it is impossible without compromising other aspects of the business. In short, make sure that your plan is as realistic as possible both in terms of the money at your disposal, as well as the marketing goals you wish to achieve within a given time frame.