Without a plan, advertising is like hot air! Putting an advertising and marketing plan together will be like a hot air balloon. When you implement the advertising plan, you have lift-off.
Inside this section:
Why a Marketing Plan?
34 Types of Marketing
Advertising 101 – Pros and Cons
Why a Marketing Plan –
Businesses today have to have a plan to be competitive in our current market. Marketing plans start with a budget to help guide the way. This budget should expand as the company expands.
If you don’t know what is an appropriate budget, I can help with that. I have a form that I can help you put a budget together. Call or email me to set up a time for me to go over it with you – FREE.
Consider if you could coordinate all your marketing and advertising, into a well-timed and tuned message, you could bring down many birds at once. That is what a well-planned marketing and advertising program can do for you. It might be to have a billboard campaign that coordinates with a newspaper ad with the same graphic to allow you to tell the story and the billboard builds curiosity. People LOVE the rest of the story type advertising. Tie that in with radio and internet programs and you have a brand building marketing plan. Take it a step farther by adding in a video on YouTube or an interview on TV or radio and now you have something that can go viral.
One of my clients found that I was able to bring in three times the response when I optimized his website, got him on the first page of his search terms and put his social media efforts to promoting to his patients to give referrals. That has only been three weeks since we got his site optimized. We can’t wait to see the results in 6 months!
The plan can be done easily once you have identified a few things:
Who you are trying to reach (be specific)? With what product or service?
What has and hasn’t worked before? Do you understand why they did what they did?
What are your competitors doing to market themselves? Does it seem effective?
Do you have the email addresses of your past and current customers?
What incentive can you give to get referrals from your past and present clients?
Do you have a website? Is it coming up on the first page of results when you search your categories (not your name)? How many views are you getting each month?
Have you put your information on the leading business directory websites? These should include the local and national directories. If you don’t know who they are, email me and I’ll send you a list of important ones to be on.