To begin your marketing plan, you have to start with an understanding of your industry as well as your local market. If your local market is not performing to the trends you’re seeing throughout your industry, you have to ask why, and you have to make a determination as to whether or not your local market will follow that trend at some point.
So let’s take a look at some of the ways you can analyze your market:
- Define your target market and its segments by size, needs, trends, demographics, geographics, psychographics, and purchasing cycles. Sound like a lot of work? It is; but it’s the kind of work that results in sustained success.
- Clearly develop a tactical plan for your marketing penetration strategy. It’s not enough to say that you’re going to “contact all major providers” of whatever your product line is. You have to clearly define who they are (including contact names and phone numbers) and a plan for actually making contact with them. Are you going to call them? Send letters? Set appointments for face-to-face meetings? What? How? What will you say to them when you talk? What will you send to them? What will you hand them?
- Once you know the “who, when and how” of your marketing strategy, you’ll need to define your growth strategy. Lots of folks truly think they’ll double their efforts every quarter; but that typically doesn’t happen. Growth strategy has to take into account additional personnel, additional collateral material costs and the ability to support additional sales.
Tomorrow we’ll take a look at what else it takes to develop your marketing strategy.
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