Top 10 Components of your Marketing Plan
and 21 Key Items to Track for Results!
The key to any success business venture is having a solid plan. While many entrepreneurs have a business plan, they fail to plan their promotional efforts. A marketing plan will help you to create a cohesive approach that best helps you to meet your goals. It should include specific objectives, strategies for realizing each objective, and benchmarks for measuring your results. Below are the 10 key items to include in your marketing plan and 21 ways to track your promotional results!
1) EXECUTIVE SUMMARY - Create a mission statement
about what specific objectives you are trying to achieve with your marketing campaign. Include whether the scope of the campaign is local, regional, national, or international.
2) “SWOT” ANALYSIS (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats). This will include information about directly competitive and indirectly competitive businesses in your industry.
3) TARGET MARKET: Write a clear definition of your target market, market segments, and major market trends and influences.
4) MARKET RESEARCH: This will tell why your product is needed in the marketplace and what specific ways your product will fill that need. This will include unique selling points, competitive advantage, and product benefits to consumers.
5) MARKETING OBJECTIVES: Your marketing objectives and goals will include measurable and deadlines by which you wish to achieve them.
6) MARKETING TACTICS: Which promotional vehicles you will use to meet the marketing objectives.
7) DISTRIBUTION CHANNELS: What channels of distribution you will use to bring your product to the marketplace?
8) ACTION PLAN: Here you will includes budgets, costs, and outlines resources will be required to implement the marketing tactics. This will include financial, monetary, personnel, vendors, systems, resources and partners you need to realize your marketing plan.
9) TEST MARKETING: Make a list of any product research or test marketing you need you will perform.
10) TRACKING RESULTS: Method of tracking results to determine if your promotional efforts are effective.
TRACKING YOUR PROMOTIONAL CAMPAIGNS
Another idea to keep in mind is testing and tracking your publicity and promotional efforts. Measuring the effectiveness of various ad campaigns will tell you which ads are working, which ones aren't, and will give you an opportunity to adjust your efforts to obtain optimal results.
22 Key items to track in your publicity and promotional efforts:
- · name of campaign
- · date the campaign was launched
- · cost of campaign
- · newsletters, sales letters, magazines, television, radio stations, or web sites where the advertising, stories, or press releases were sent and run
- · where news story was published
- · list of interviews generated
- · sales inquiries generated
- · new sales generated
- · return customers generated
- · new contacts added to your network
- · new business partners created
- · web traffic generated
- · new newsletter subscribers
- · overall revenue increase
- · increased product revenues
- · market share increase
- · improvement in search engine rankings
- · increase in sites linking to yours
- · number of search engines listed in
- · new speaking engagements obtained
- · number of articles published
- · prospects called
Additionally, surveys can provide real-time feedback on product titles, product offerings, price points, preferred method of contact, and other key items.
Survey Monkey ( http://www.surveymonkey.com/ ) is a free service that allows you to create surveys. What better way to find out what your audience needs them to ask them?
* Article by Kristie Tamsevicius,
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Email: kristie@webmomz.com
* Author of "I LOVE MY LIFE: A Mom's Guide to Working from Home" (Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing 2003)
