Creating your Marketing Plan #2

from Business News Daily 7/10 enhanced by Peter/CXO Wiz4biz

Write down your “Brand Positioning” statement for your Target customers.
At the end of the day, your brand and what it symbolizes for customers will be your strongest competitive advantage. You should be able to write down a simple declarative sentence of how you will meet customer needs and beat the competition. The best positioning statements are those that are very single-minded and focus on target customer needs.

Why? To “target” the Market.
Creating a “positioning” statement will do more than help you find the best way to market to your customers. A Marketing Plan will help you stay focused on the principal reason you are in business. Too often, business owners get distracted by other good ideas for products and pursuing them. Unless it’s a super hot idea, stick to your original product – until you really get it rolling. A Marketing Plan will help your define your thinking about your “target” market to focus on how to get there.

#1 Factor in Success.
Defining & implementing a sound marketing strategy is probably the single most important factor that will contribute towards the long-term sustainable success of any business venture – yet most businesses don’t have one. A Marketing Plan starts with the features, benefits & advantages of your product or service, then develops realistic, measurable, yet ambitious goals to reach your Vision. Your Marketing Plan is the strategy spells out the tactics you’ll use to reach the goals you want by monitoring your progress, adjusting as needed, then celebrating your achievement.

The Small Business Administration has more information on how to develop a marketing plan. Before you start, here are some things to remember, courtesy the University of Missouri’s small business resource center:
· The most important order you ever get from a customer is the 2nd order.
· It costs 10x as much to get a new customer as keep an existing customer happy.
· Use the power of “repetition” to re-emphasize” your benefits & advantages.
· Be sure your message is “consistent” across all your literature & easy to understand + stands out
· Don’t think that product superiority, technology, innovation or company size will sell itself. Someone has to be there to explain, answer any questions

Lastly, keep this in mind: “People don’t buy products, they buy the benefits & solutions they believe the products will provide”.

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