subject: Entrepreneur, Do You Really Need A Marketing Strategy? [print this page] Do you have Marketing Strategy? Do you, like many other entrepreneurs think that you don't need one? Or do you just not know how to write your own Marketing Strategy? No surprises that a Marketing Strategy is a key part of your business strategy. So how do you write your own Marketing Strategy?
Marketing is the lifeblood of your business - without marketing, people won't know where you are and what you are selling. Isn't that important enough to need a strategy? After all without a good Marketing Strategy, how will you now what to do, when to do it and what basic information you need? So what should you have in your Marketing Strategy?
So what's a Marketing Strategy. In simple language - what you are hoping to sell, at what price, how and to whom. This could be a little daunting, so let's start by making lists.
* First of all - as always - is your budget. Work out how much you can and want to spend. It is possible to market on a small budget - but you will need some kind of budget as well as time to get a good marketing process under way.
* List all the kinds of people that you hope will buy your goods or services.
* Identify where you can find them and what kind of things they read, listen to, watch, talk about etc.
* Decide what kind of benefits these customers will get from buying your products or services.
* Work out what kind of price they will happily pay. Most importantly check that this will also provide you with a fair profit.
That is your Marketing Strategy. Often it helps to summarize your Marketing Strategy into one or two sentences. For example it could be: We will budget $500, to sell our widgets to affluent pet owners in South Florida at $35 who will discover that it is far easier to clean up after them.
This gives you something to aim for as well as the benefits that you and your customers will receive from all your hard work.
So now you've got your Marketing Strategy for one set of items that you sell. Keep going for all of your products and services and you have your overall Marketing Strategy.
As you put your strategies together for all of your products, you can easily put together an overall map of the total marketing activities that you intend to do.
Examine this map and see if there are any overlaps or gaps in your overall strategy. If there are gaps - can you introduce a new product or change an existing one to fill it. Likewise if there are overlaps, can you amalgamate the marketing activities?
With a clear view of what you want to sell to whom, at what price as well as the knowledge that you have a full product range you are fully armed for the battle ahead. Good luck!
