When developing a marketing plan, there are roughly 4 core tasks to consider:
1. Develop a very clear and focused insight into why a potential customer would use your business. More specifically, figure out the core need that your product or service will meet. Is it to help your customers get through the day more easily? Do their job more efficiently? Be respected and admired by friends? Your offering should be designed to solve client problems or meet customer needs better than the competition can.
2. Identify your target customers. Most markets and sectors have numerous potential customers to communicate with, but to succeed faster and better, a small business must study the market and determine the characteristics of its best target customers. The target customer should be described in detail. Create a fictional person who has all of your target-customer attributes, and examine what that person would say, do, feel and think in the course of a day.
3. Identify competitors that would also want your target customers. No matter how original your product or service may be, there is always competition for your target customer’s pound. Small businesses seldom take the time to study their competitors in depth, or determine competition that may be outside their industry but just as capable of luring the customer away. Preparing to know who that is, what their core competitive advantage is and how they will respond to your offering (price cuts, increased communication, etc.) will help you figure out strategies to combat such losses.
4. Write down your brand-positioning statement for your target customers. Ultimately, your brand and what it symbolizes for customers will be your strongest competitive advantage. You should be able to write down a simple declarative sentence of how you will meet customer needs and beat the competition. The best positioning statements are those that are single-minded and focus on solving a problem for the customer in a way that promotes the best value.
Now that you know the elements of the plan, you need to figure out how you are going to reach that target customer………………………………………………….
