Considering the advances in technology now available alone and the marketing landscape is practically unrecognisable from past years. Fortunately, in many cases, the changes that are being made include many exciting opportunities for those looking for new ways to sell their products.
This article will serve as a primer to the five things you should include in your business marketing plan. Without a comprehensive integrated marketing plan it will be hard to see how all the new marketing avenues can work together to your benefit. With it, your marketing efforts can not only become automatic, but they can take you to levels never before thought possible.
Just like planning a vacation, without a map chances are good that you will never get to where you want to go. In marketing, your goal is the vision you have of what you want your marketing efforts to accomplish. Fortunately, with a clearly defined goal and effective information governance, you are in a much better position to determine how you want to reach it.
Now that you have determined where you want to go, you need to determine how you are going to accomplish that goal. What tools will you use to reach your goals? Unlike only a few years ago, many of the opportunities available today are new and largely unknown to many of even the best marketing minds. Things like Twitter, blogs, forums, social networking, and other tools are very new and to a great extent untested for marketing purposes. Fortunately, many marketers are using them with great success with information integration with these avenues.
In order to reach your marketing goal it is critical that you constantly keep in mind the people to whom who you are trying to sell. Remember that the "general public" does not exist. Instead, an effective marketing plan divides the public into identifiable marketing segments to which it can approach with appropriately designed appeals. Despite this, however, it should also be kept in mind that enterprise-wide information integration is critical to keeping a clearly identifiable business identity.
The USP is an old concept, but no less applicable than it has been for years. In order to sell your product in the vast ocean of like products, you need to determine how your product is different, and how it stands above the rest. It is only after you have determined this difference and brought it to the market's attention that you will be successful in your efforts. Unfortunately, this is often not enough. Instead, you might have to identify different USPs that appeal to different market segments.
At given periods of time, most often monthly, the success or failure of your marketing efforts should be determined and adjustments made. Just as a ship or aircraft doesn't just depart for a location without a large number of midcourse corrections, attaining a marketing goal is a matter of making continual adaptations until a goal is eventually reached. This should be a main reason for business process management solutions. The market is far from being static. Instead, it is continually changing, and your marketing efforts will change too if they are to remain effective. Without making these mid-course corrections, it is highly likely that you will end up far from the success that you are endeavouring to achieve.
Creating an effective marketing plan sounds like a daunting task, and it can be, but it can also make a great difference between the success and failure of your efforts. One of the most important benefits of creating a marketing plan is that it can crystallise what often is an ethereal idea into a very practical tool for selling your product. A marketing plan is just that, a plan. It is created to help you direct your efforts to marketing success, and working that plan faithfully will lead you where you want to go.
