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Categories - Copywriting - Shopping - Free Online Business Help - Telecommunications Services Articles: Marketing - How to Develop a Marketing Plan By Abe Cherian
Getting your initial qualified prospects to make a sale to is often called front-end marketing. When we run marketing with the expectation of immediate responses by the consumer to whatever message you put out there, whether it's Yellow Pages, newspaper ads or direct mail, this is called direct response marketing.
Before
seeking out prospects, having a marketing plan is essential to any
business. I'm going to present a lot of research and my objective is
to include the need to quantify all the results from all your marketing efforts. And to look at all the strategies for conducting direct marketing campaigns and testing variables to determine the effectiveness of each of the marketing strategies within your business.
Most people want to be successful, but few plan to be. Very few people take the time to plan anything. Most people take more time to plan their vacations than they do to plan their lives. The most important thing you can do right now for your business is sit down and develop a marketing plan. Most business owners fail or they just move along because they don't have a plan or goal for their business.
I want you to decide right now to make a detailed plan of what you're going to do and how you're going to do it. It's the old saying, "If you fail to plan, you plan to fail".
You can say, I want to make more money or I want to be rich. That's nice, but too vague. You want 20,000 sales per month, That's not a plan nor will it even come close to become a plan.
A plan is a detailed specific road of how you're going to reach the targets you set out and the date that you want to reach them by. An example is that you can set sales goals. You can sell so many of your products for a week or so many of your services for a week. You should offset these in net profit instead of gross profit because that is the money you're making.
I know one lady who grosses $9,000,000 a year. Very impressive, She takes home roughly $100,000 of that. That's not very impressive, It maybe nice to have $100,000 a year, but it's not impressive when you're grossing $9,000,000. That won't really tell you how well you're doing.
You want to put down the numbers in net profit If you know your net per sale, and most business owners do not even know this, but if you do you're way ahead of the game. You can work backwards on how many sales you need, Then all you have to do is increase your number of sales per week or net profit per sale.
Develop a strategy for making those numbers, decide how you're going to advertise. How am I going to get referrals? How am I going to get people to buy more often? How am I going to get people to spend more? This is the beginning of your plan.
Go out and pick five of the best ideas or most comfortable ideas and implement them. Start using them to help you set your goal. Choose another five, another five, and another five. You want to set your goals on a weekly basis. As you achieve them raise the level the next week. This way you will continue to improve and so will your income.
Don't panic if you have a bad week. Just get right back on track and try to achieve the next week's goals. You want to get to know the numbers for your business. It is a business of numbers. You need to know the net profit per sale, net profit per service call, and how much it costs to get your new clients. These are critical in knowing where you are and if you're achieving your goals.
Take some time each week to plan. It's critical. Here is a simple guide for you to use.
1)
Write down your goal for your total net income you want next
week. 4)
Write down how many service calls you're going to make if
you're
a service business. 5)
Write down how many products you have to sell. 6) Write down the net income for each item and your average income per client.
You'll come up with the total income you're trying to achieve. Each week put down the actual numbers you want to achieve and you'll find out if you're reaching them or not. Then you'll know if you need to increase marketing and in what areas. Creating a simple marketing plan like this enables you to keep track with all the numbers and helps you to achieve your marketing goals.
About the author - Abe Cherian is the founder of Multiple Stream Media, a company that helps online businesses find new leads and more customers without spending a fortune. http://www.multiplestreammktg.com
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