What is a Comprehensive Marketing Plan?

Entrepreneurs and business owners know they need a comprehensive marketing plan, unfortunately, most entrepreneurs and business owners do not have a degree in modern day marketing. Not everyone knows how to create a marketing plan or where to start. Especially when you have a business to run.

For those that don’t know, there are two basic steps: finding your unique business story and defining your target audience.

We can help create a comprehensive marketing plan, and then take that plan to market. To make sure you’re targeting the right clients, to make your advertising dollars more efficient.

We’ll be able to help you determine that best places to advertise, the best options for marketing, the best way to reach your target demographics and what your marketing dollars will get you in that market.

We can provide the tools you need to fulfill that marketing plan; Graphic Design, Digital Marketing, Media Buying, Website Design and Development and peace of mind knowing that we care about the results of your marketing. We’ll be right beside you the entire way, celebrating your success and learning from our hurdles.

Here’s a few things to consider when starting on a marketing plan:

What is it that makes your business unique? Why is that story worth sharing?

With those ideas answered, you can start planning for how you’re going to utilize your unique message to best connect with your target audience — and ultimately increase revenue.

Here’s what is NOT a unique story, and what does not set you apart:

• The Best Customer service –
  • Every business we help create a go-to-market strategy for, says this when asked, “what sets you apart?”
• Timeliness, Fast, Speedy, etc. –
  • While this is a great quality to have in a business – like excellent customer service – it’s not part of your unique story.
• Affordable, Cheap, Best Prices –
  • Yes, potential clients are always looking for an affordable service, but the market will dictate what prices are acceptable, and which are not. Again, this is a great attribute to have, but it’s not what makes your business special.

Defining your target audience. Who is your ideal customer?

Defining your ideal customer can actually be a lot more difficult than you think. The answer, “Everyone needs what I’m selling!” is not the right answer. And if that’s your target market – the market you’ve been advertising to – you’ve probably been wasting money on advertising and marketing efforts. We are big fans of “casting a wide net” when it comes to target markets, but that’s only the first step in building a brand and developing brand advocates.

A great question to start with, is “What solutions does my company provide to potential customers? What problems do we solve?

If you’ve been in business for 5 months or 50 years, you should have a good idea of the problems you are solving for your customers. If you are brand new to your business, ask: “Why did we start this company? What problem did we set out to solve?”

The next biggest question, is “Who actually spends the most money, consistently.”

That is probably harder to answer than you think. Sure, once in a while your business will score a huge job, but how often does that happen? And sure, we get a lot of smaller jobs, but how much time do those small jobs take, and how much revenue do they actually create?

Defining the “Goldilocks’ client comes down a handful of factors:

1. How will my product or service fit into this target audience’s lifestyle?
2. How will they use the product or service?
3. What features would be the most appealing?
4. Are there enough people in my target audience to support my business?
5. Do I understand what drives my target audience to make decisions?
6. Can my target audience afford my product or service?
7. Is my target audience easily accessible?

Ready to get some help? 

LET’S GET STARTED

Want some light reading?

Here’s a few vocab words you can use to impress your peers.

What is a search engine?
A web search engine is a software system that is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. The search results are generally presented in a line of results often referred to as search engine results pages (SERPs). The information may be a mix of web pages, images, and other types of files. Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open directories. Unlike web directories, which are maintained only by human editors, search engines also maintain real-time information by running an algorithm on a web crawler. Internet content that is not capable of being searched by a web search engine is generally described as the deep web.

A search engine maintains the following processes in near real time:

1. Web crawling
2. Indexing
3. Searching

Web search engines get their information by web crawling from site to site. The “spider” checks for the standard filename robots.txt, addressed to it, before sending certain information back to be indexed depending on many factors, such as the titles, page content, JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), headings, as evidenced by the standard HTML markup of the informational content, or its metadata in HTML meta tags. “[N]o web crawler may actually crawl the entire reachable web. Due to infinite websites, spider traps, spam, and other exigencies of the real web, crawlers instead apply a crawl policy to determine when the crawling of a site should be deemed sufficient. Some sites are crawled exhaustively, while others are crawled only partially”.   Dasgupta, Anirban; Ghosh, Arpita; Kumar, Ravi; Olston, Christopher; Pandey, Sandeep; and Tomkins, Andrew. The Discoverability of the Web.