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How to Write Marketing Plan for both Traditional Businesses and Internet Businesses
By Peter C. Geisheker, CEO, The Geisheker Group, Inc. www.geisheker.com
Behind every successful Internet business is a well-researched marketing plan. A marketing plan guides a company step-by-step how to market its product or service to a specific target market and it helps a company remain focused on its marketing objectives.
Your Internet Marketing Plan will define all of the components of your marketing strategy. You will address the details of your market analysis, sales, advertising, and public relations campaigns. The most successful Internet marketing plans integrate both Internet marketing strategies as well as traditional (offline) marketing strategies.
By not preparing a marketing plan, you are leading your company to certain failure. Attempting to market your product without first creating a marketing plan is like trying to build a house without a blueprint. By not preparing and following a marketing plan, you will be flying blind and you are going to make a lot of marketing mistakes and probably lose a lot of money.
The Topics You Need to Discuss in Your Internet Marketing Plan include:
1. Market Research
Collect, organize, and write down data about the market that is currently buying the
product(s) or service(s) you will sell. (From now on we'll refer to your products or
services as "product.") Some areas to consider:
• Market dynamics, patterns including seasonality
• Customers-demographics, market segment, target markets, needs, buying
decisions
• Product—what’s out there now and what's the competition offering? Conduct
market research by going to www.google.com and conduct searches on the
types of products or services you want to sell
• Current sales in the industry
• Benchmarks in the industry
• Suppliers-vendors that you will need to rely on
• Target Market(s)—To be successful, focus on one or two small niche markets
instead of a large general market. Niche markets have far less competition and
they tend to be more profitable. If there is one thing you can do to help your odds
of being successful in business it is to focus on one or two small niche markets.
2. Product
Describe your product (or service). How does your product relate to the market? What does your market need, what do they currently use, what do they need above and beyond current use?
3. Competition
Describe your competition. Develop your "unique selling proposition." What makes you stand apart from your competition? Why are you special? Why should a customer choose to do business with you instead of one of your competitors? The better job you can do to differentiate yourself from your competitors, the more success you will have.
4. Mission Statement
Write a few sentences that state:
• "Key market" - who you're selling to – be very specific!
• "Contribution" - what you're selling
• "Distinction" - your unique selling proposition – why are you different from your
competition?
5. Internet Marketing Strategies
Write down the Internet marketing and promotion strategies that you want to use or at
least consider using. Strategies to consider include:
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO). What this means is using optimization
techniques so search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) will rank your website
within the top 10 search results. By doing this you can get literally thousands of
people to your website everyday for free. To do this I recommend you use a
fantastic software tool called SEO Elite that I discuss on my resources page at
www.geisheker.com/resources.htm.
• Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing. When you use this service you are
bidding on keywords so that your website text ad is displayed when a person
conducts a search on a particular keyword or key phrase. Google, Yahoo and
MSN all have pay per click internet marketing services. For more information on
these services, please visit www.geisheker.com/resources.htm.
• Affiliate Marketing. This is where other websites market your products for you
and you pay them a commission on each sale. This is an outstanding way to
create a successful Internet business. For more information please visit
www.geisheker.com/resources.htm
• Link Exchanges. This is where you and other websites exchanges links to drive
traffic to each other’s website.
• Write Articles and distribute them online. This is a great way to send targeted
traffic to your website and to become an expert in your field. The way it works is
very simple. You write an article and use online article distribution services to
distribute your article to other websites and ezines (electronic magazines).
People them read your articles to learn about your products or services. For
more information, please visit www.geisheker.com/resources.htm
• Write press releases and distribute them online. Just like writing and
submitting articles, this is a very simple and extremely effective way to drive
targeted traffic to your website. For more information, please visit
www.geisheker.com/resources.htm
• Advertise in ezines (also know as an internet newsletter or an internet
magazine). This is another simple yet highly effective way to market your
products or services online. For more information, please visit
www.geisheker.com/resources.htm
6. Offline/Traditional Advertising Strategies
• Networking-Go where your market is, Chamber of Commerce, BNI, etc.
• Direct marketing-Sales letters, brochures, postcards, flyers, etc.
• Advertising-Print media, directories, billboards, yellow pages, radio, TV
• Training programs-Seminars that you give to increase awareness
• Write articles, give advice, become known as an expert
• Direct/personal selling
• Publicity/press releases
• Trade shows
• Referral programs
• Co-marketing with businesses that share your target market
• Barter
7. Pricing, Positioning and Branding
From the information collected, establish strategies for determining the price of your
product, where your product will be positioned in the market and how you will achieve
brand awareness.
8. Budget
Budget your dollars. What strategies can you afford? How much can you afford to spend per month?
9. Marketing Goals
Establish quantifiable marketing goals. This means goals that you can turn into numbers.
For instance, your goal might be to gain at least 10 new clients each month or to
generate 100 leads per month.
10. Monitor Your Results
Test and analyze. Identify the strategies that are working.
• Survey customers
• Track sales, leads, visitors to your web site, percent of sales to impressions
• Determine which marketing strategies are producing the most customers and
which are producing the least customers
• Measure Return on Investment per each marketing activity
If you need help preparing your marketing plan, call The Geisheker Group, Inc. We will prepare a marketing plan full of powerful marketing strategies to help your company attract new customers and increase sales fast! Call (920) 592-9595 or send email to peter@geisheker.com.
100+ Marketing Strategies to Successfully Market Your Business
If you need help implementing any of these marketing strategies, please call The Geisheker Group at (920) 592-9595 or email us at peter@geisheker.com.
For more outstanding marketing ideas, pick up a copy of any of the Guerrilla Marketing Books by Jay Conrad Levinson, the Father of Guerrilla Marketing, www.gmarketing.com.
1. For marketing on the Internet, the easiest way to sell your products if through “affiliates”, which are other businesses who will market your product to their customers for a commission of each sale. This is the most powerful way to sell on the Internet because you have thousands of other people marketing your products for you and it does not cost you anything except a commission when a sale is made. Therefore, you have zero financial risk.
To learn more, please to http://www.geisheker.com/resources.htm.
2. Write friendly personalized sales letters to your prospects. For insider tips and secrets on how to write very powerful sales letters, please go to http://www.geisheker.com/resources.htm.
3. Place big easy to read signs in front of your store or office. The sign needs to have your company name, phone number and website address.
4. Brochures. Make sure to use strong sales text so you excite customers so they want to buy.
5. 8, 16, or 24-page booklets/catalogs that show all your products and lots of pictures. You can get these booklets designed for about the price of a postage stamp through Alternative Marketing in Green Bay, Wisconsin. For a free no-obligation quote, call Rick Manning at (920) 592-0765. Another great thing about booklets is that you can sell advertising space in them to other companies. By selling advertising space in your booklet you will probably be able to cover your printing and mailing fees.
6. Postcards – large postcards work best. Postcardmania.com is a good place to have your postcards printed and designed. www.postcardmania.com
7. Locate your office at an easy to find, high traffic location. As they say, location, location, location. If your store is located where nobody can see it, getting customers will be hard.
8. Display advertising in newspapers. Make sure you have a big bold headline that excites people to want to read your ad.
9. Display advertising in trade publications.
10. Display advertising in magazines.
11. Display advertising in your local Penny Saver or coupon book.
12. Coupon book direct mail packages.
13. Display advertising in the phone book.
14. Include sales text and your website address in your email signature.
15. Email advertising – advertise in your own ezine/newsletter and advertise in the
ezines/newsletters of other companies that market to your target audience.
16. Start your own paper newsletters and send it to your target market. Paper newsletters are
taken far more seriously than email newsletters/ezines.
17. Advertise in the newsletters (email and paper based) of other companies that market to your target audience.
18. Pay per click advertising in search engines. See Google AdWords, Overture.com. To learn how to sell products and services online using Google AdWords, please go to http://www.geisheker.com/resources.htm.
19. Purchase text ads (NOT banner ads) on websites that attract your target market.
20. Implement search engine optimization to get high rankings for search terms in the search engines. See www.highrankings.com for information on how to optimize your website for high search engine rankings.
21. Ask for link exchanges with other websites that market to your target audience.
22. Radio advertising.
23. T.V. advertising on network T.V.
24. T.V. advertising on Cable T.V. (Much more affordable than you think).
25. Infomercials.
26. Sell your products on www.ebay.com, www.amazon.com and www.overstock.com.
27. Look for websites that sell products to your target market and call them to ask if they will sell your product on their website. This is a very east way to get distribution. To learn how to do this, go to http://www.geisheker.com/resources.htm.
28. Attend Trade shows.
29. Telemarketing, particularly business to business telemarketing.
30. Send out press releases. Send out at least one press release every 2-3 months. Send out more if you can. Two great press release distribution services are www.prweb.com and www.imediafax.com.
31. Billboard Advertising. Keep these simple with 7 words or less and make them very easy to read.
32. Hand out fliers.
33. Hang door hanger fliers.
34. PowerPoint presentations.
35. Indoor billboard advertising at the airport.
36. Advertising at your local movie theater in the advertising they offer before a movie starts.
37. Write short “how to” articles and send them out as press releases and distribute them using article distribution websites such as www.isnare.com.
38. Whenever you talk to a new customer, ask “how did you hear about us” to know what marketing strategy attracted them to contact you.
39. Use low price introductory offers to get a new customer to try a product. You may lose money on the first sale but you are looking for repeat orders to make your profit and you cannot get repeat orders if you cannot get a new customer to buy in the first place.
40. You must position your product or service in the minds of customers. Are you the safe company? Are you the company with the lowest prices? Do you have the highest quality products? Why is your product special and how does that benefit your customers? Your marketing materials and company slogan should reflect your position and you MUST position yourself differently than your competitors so you stand out as being special.
41. Market your company in job advertisements—include your company website URL.
42. Find distributors to sell your product. Conduct searches on google.com to find distributors.
43. Hire independent sales reps to sell your product. To find independent sales reps, try posting a job ad on a large job board such as www.monster.com or www.salesheads.com.
44. Follow up direct mail campaigns with a telephone call. By calling a prospect after that prospect receives your direct mail sales letter, you can increase your response rate by several times.
45. What is your competitive advantage and how does it benefit your customers? Explain why a customer should do business with you instead of your competitors in all of your marketing.
46. Include testimonials in all of your marketing. Nothing is more powerful in sales and
marketing than testimonials. If you don’t have testimonials, ask for them. If you have to, offer free sample products or services to several customers in exchange for a testimonial.
47. To find out the real benefits of your product or service, ask your customers why they choose to do business with us? What is the number one reason why they do business with us? Is it our quality, technology, price, service, delivery?
48. The more work you make a client do to buy from you, the greater the chances are that you will NOT make a sale. You must make buying from your company very easy. Therefore, don’t make a client call you to start a sale. You call them!
49. You must create a sales process—a series of steps that must take place to turn a prospect into a customer. Create a flow chart that shows this sales process and how it must be used for every prospect. The more precise you can make your sales process, the easier it will be for your sales force to make sales.
50. Create a referral system to get referrals from existing customers.
51. Join a local business networking club such as BNI. See www.bni.com.
52. Join a business barter network. Why pay cash if you can trade? See
https://www.ctebarter.com.
53. For marketing to work you must have repetition and the marketing message must be consistent. Most people do NOT buy until they see your marketing a minimum of 7-times. Therefore, you must market continuously, day after day, month after month, year after year.
54. Give free information/instructional seminars.
55. Offer free trials of your product/service to get people to try it.
56. What are the problems our customers are facing that keep them awake at night and how can you solve those problems? How can we relieve their pain? Once you figure how to solve their pain, describe it in all of your marketing.
57. Focus on only 1 or 2 major selling points in your marketing materials. By having too many selling points, you will confuse the customer. Be the best at one thing and customers will remember you for it. This is positioning. In marketing, LESS is MORE.
58. Offer strong satisfaction guarantees. Take away the risk from the client. If your competition has a guarantee, make yours stronger. Put the buying risk on your shoulders, not your customer’s shoulders. If you offer a quality product or service, you have nothing to worry about as far as giving refunds.
59. The most important part of an email marketing message is the subject line. People scan email subject lines and if yours is boring or looks like spam it will be deleted before it is ever read.
60. The best days to do email marketing is on Friday (the best day) and Tuesday.
61. Consider making a telesales call prior to sending out a letter. The phone call should give a brief introduction stating how you can help the customer and that a letter with more detailed information will be arriving shortly and to please watch out for it. A few days later another phone call should be made to see if the prospect has interest and if a meeting can be setup.
62. A huge part of marketing is to get the prospect to agree to an in-person meeting so the salesperson can close the sale. If you are cold calling companies, your first job is to first get an appointment, so focus only on getting the appointment. Save your sales presentation for when you meet in person.
63. If you cannot get an in-person meeting, try to get a teleconference.
64. Research has shown that sales people who wear dark blue suits make the most sales. So, make sure your sales force wears dark blue suits when making sales calls.
65. Use the Internet to give presentations where you control their computer and walk them through the presentation over a teleconference. Microsoft XP has a feature for doing this.
66. If your company does not have its own telesales staff, consider outsourcing the
telesales/appointment setting to a telemarketing firm.
67. After a service has been completed, your client needs to be contacted to see if they were pleased with the service and if they wish to order again to renew the service.
68. Bus advertising.
69. Taxi cab advertising.
70. Sidewalk park bench advertising.
71. Enter all prospects into a database and a contact management program such as ACT or salesforce.com so customers and your relationship with them is constantly monitored.
72. Offer Free reports and free e-books on your website (just as I am doing with this e-book).
73. Allow other websites to publish your articles/reports if they give a link back to your website.
74. Write “how to” articles and post them on your website.
75. Use an online article distribution service to distribute your article to thousands of websites where it may be published. Services to use are http://www.isnare.com,
http://thephantomwriters.com, and http://www.goarticles.com.
76. Telling a story is very powerful in marketing. Use stories whenever possible to sell a product or service. Show in a story form how your product or service solved a customer’s problem.
77. If you are reselling another company’s products or services, ask the parent company for coop money for advertising.
78. When making an appointment, let your prospect know there is no obligation to buy anything.
This will put them more at ease and make the sales process easier.
79. Provide objection scripts to sales staff so they instantly know the best way to respond to any possible objection a prospect may have. Responses to objections must be memorized!
80. Teach your staff how to up-sell and cross-sell other products and services.
81. In your direct mail use press release articles written about your company (tear sheets) as a marketing tool to build credibility.
82. Get endorsements from experts in your industry.
83. Many people are more comfortable using email as an initial contact tool, so include an email address in all of your marketing.
84. To get a better response to your direct mail, use a series of direct mail letters, each sent out a week or two after the previous letter. Each letter should have a slightly different message.
85. You need to have a quality sales force—people who love to sell and who are excellent closers. If you have salespeople who are not good at selling, get rid of them and find people who are great at selling. If you need to, hire a headhunting firm to recruit the top salespeople from competitors.
86. Don’t let your marketing look like everybody else’s (your competition). You need to make your company stand out.
87. A product’s name should reflect what it does. “Weed Wacker” “Tummy Buster”.
88. Show before and after pictures to demonstrate how a product solves a problem.
89. Use case studies to show how your product or service has helped customers.
90. Provide the appearance of exceptional value by offering free ad-on products/services, two for the price of one, etc. Get $200 worth of “stuff” for only $29.99!
91. To better market a product, show measurable results of how it has helped clients and link these results with testimonials. Give hard facts to prove why your product or service works, or your money back. “Over the past 6-months we helped our client save $7,455 on their telecom services.”
92. You must stress the one thing that your company does better than anyone else, and if you don’t know what that one thing is, you need to find it or create it.
93. All marketing must be created so that it can be reduced to a single sentence – how your product or service can help (benefit) the customer better than anyone else.
94. Learn what your customer’s goals are and show how your product or service WILL help them achieve their goals.
95. One single marketing tactic may not work very well by itself, but when you combine it with other marketing tactics to create what is called, “integrated marketing”, all of the marketing tactics reinforce each other creating better overall results. An example of integrated marketing is advertising and doing PR in the same magazine and using both tactics to market your website where customers can get a free report. And to get the report, they will have to give you their contact information, for which you build a database and market to these prospects with email, direct mail, and maybe even telephone marketing.
96. Putting all of your eggs ($$$) in one marketing basket is a sure formula for failure. To be successful in marketing, you must use multiple forms of marketing that all work together.
97. You MUST put in place metrics to measure the success of every marketing tactic to see if it is generating a return on investment. Expand marketing tactics that are working and eliminate marketing tactics that are not working.
98. Ask your customers why they did NOT buy to learn what the weaknesses are in your product/service and/or in your approach to marketing it. When a customer does not buy, ask why so you can improve your marketing. Finding out why potential customers are not buying is at least as important as finding out why customers do buy.
99. Marketing takes time and repetition to be effective. You need to keep a focused and consistent message to be successful. You must relentlessly keep communicating that same message over and over, year after year. This is what builds brands and name recognition.
This is what builds great companies.
100. You should always have a strong call to action—Act now and get 20% off or a free widget. Call today and get two for the price of one.
101. When trying to increase sales, always go to your existing customers first. They are the easiest market to sell to because they already have a relationship with you and they believe in your product or service. Most companies spend all of their marketing dollars trying to acquire new customers instead of trying to sell to their existing customer base, which is much cheaper and much more effective. Pick the low hanging fruit. Market to your existing customer base first
102. A big mistake many companies make is not informing their customers of all of the services they perform or products they sell.
103. When customers need a product on a continual basis, setup a subscription service where they are automatically billed each month until they cancel the service.
104. Offer gift certificates.
105. Consider hiring interns from your local colleges to help you market your business such as making phone calls, putting together direct mail pieces, etc.
106. Sponsor a local sports team.
107. Sponsor local events—Charity, Fundraising, good causes.
108. Offer free seminars or workshops.
109. Offer a free sample of your work prior to making a customer buy.
110. Advertise on your car and all company vehicles.
111. Give free promo gifts that have your company name and phone number on them such as pens, shirts, coffee cups, caps, etc.
For more strategies on how to market your business, please read our free marketing
articles found at http://www.geisheker.com/resources.htm.
Also, make sure to subscribe to our FREE marketing tips newsletter by going to
http://geisheker.com/newsletter.htm
Where Do You Go From Here?
You now have over 100 very powerful marketing strategies to market your business. To be successful, you must take action and put these strategies into play. If you feel confident in your ability to implement these strategies, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and get started!
If you need help marketing your company, call The Geisheker Group. We specialize in developing powerful results-driven marketing programs and irresistible marketing materials such as sales letters, sales presentations, display advertisements, brochures, press releases and websites.
For more information and a free no-obligation quote on how we will help you successfully market your product or service, please call (920) 592-9595 or email us at peter@geisheker.com.
To Your Success!
Peter Geisheker
President & CEO
The Geisheker Group, Inc.
“Innovative Marketing for Innovative Companies”
(920) 592-9595
Fax: (920) 491-9090
peter@geisheker.com
www.Geisheker.com
P.S. Please give this e-book to anyone you know who needs help marketing their
business. They’ll thank you for it!
P.S.S Want more free marketing advice? Subscribe to my FREE marketing tips
newsletter at http://geisheker.com/newsletter.htm
