Manage your Enterprise and Resources to Achieve Your Goals - Start With a Business Plan

5. Develop your marketing plan.

• The marketing segment of your business plan, according to the SBA, should answer questions like these:
• Who is your typical buyer?
• Where are your customers located?
• What percentage of the market do you need to gain? And can you meet the demands if the market grows?
• How will you price your service or product?
• Will these prices give you an adequate profit?
• Are your prices competitive?
• Are cheaper products available?
• How will you handle slow-paying customers
• Will you extend credit? Will you accept credit cards?
• Who will sell your products, and how?
• What promotional marketing materials will you develop, such as advertisements and catalogs, who will help develop these, and how much will they cost?
• How will your product be made available for purchase and how will it be delivered?

Susan DePue, a marketing coach in Nashville, recommends the Guerrilla Marketing book series by Jay Conrad Levinson for practical, easy-to-implement marketing ideas for small businesses. DePue's company, On Target Marketing, gives this "7-Step Marketing Plan for Your Business":

• Set the goals. Think about how many customers you will need per day to keep the business going. Then determine the optimal number you can handle. Your marketing plan will need to generate a number between these two. For example, "I will see 30 chiropractic patients a day." Also come up with activity goals such as, "I will do three activities a day to market my business."
• Have a Unique Selling Position. Set yourself apart from all other businesses. It is not enough to have the best service. It is not enough to say that you are going to do what the business down the street does but you will have better customer service or faster delivery. First, so many businesses promise great service that none of us believe it until we experience it. A Unique Selling Position is something that brings people in the door.   For example, "My bakery is the only bakery in town that sells authentic Korean breads." Specialists find it easier to attract customers, to get referrals and word-of-mouth advertising, and to charge more for their goods and services. If you are going to have open-heart surgery, will you want a general surgeon or will you be picky and insist on a heart surgeon? The same rings true with your customers. Become their specialist.
• Know who your choice customer is. The answer to this should not be "Everybody!"   For instance in the above example of the bakery, the choice customer is someone of Korean descent, usually.   A great location for this bakery would be in an area populated with a number of people of Korean descent.   It will take fewer marketing dollars when you determine who you are trying to reach.
• Determine exactly what your product is - to your customer. There is a difference in what you are selling and what your customer is buying. Know why your customer wants your product.   People buy what they want, not what they need.
• Determine what you are going to say. This is your marketing message. In developing this, keep in mind that your potential client is listening to only one mental station, WII-FM -What's In It For Me. So tell them in clear terms how your product/service meets their needs, and more importantly, satisfies their wants.
• Develop a systematic marketing program. Doing just one thing to bring in new business is not enough. For instance, running an ad in the newspaper will need to be only part of what you do. Networking and calling on people are two more things you may need to do. Sending out postcards every other month - to the same people - for a year might be the program you choose. Remember in the beginning you need about four different marketing strategies - all going at once. There are at least 100 different ways to market your business.   Only one of the 100 is advertising. Get creative.
• Execute the plan. This starts with a budget and a calendar.   You should have on the calendar what you are going to do when. Realize no marketing plan works. YOU have to work the marketing plan.

6. Study the trends of your industry.

To stay on top of your competition, you also have to know where your industry is going. Study the trends. When Deery from SCORE was at IBM, where she worked for 26 years, the senior management wrestled with the introduction of the personal computer. Executives debated whether customers who bought mainframe computers, those pieces of equipment that took up an entire air-cooled room at large corporations, would ever choose PCs instead. They needed to accurately predict the future of the PC or their business would go under.

Kodak has had to adjust its thinking with the advent of digital cameras, Deery says. Newspapers and other print media have rethought their classified advertising models in the age of Monster.com. Retailers have revamped their storefronts with the increasing popularity of online shopping and concepts like Amazon.com and eBay.com.

Leila Fecho came up with a creative way to handle this task in 1996 when she was forming Above & Beyond Communications, LLC, a marketing firm in Mansfield Center, Conn. She knew from attending the MBA program at University of Connecticut that students split up into groups to put together a business plan for a real or fictional enterprise. So she went back to her alma mater and asked a team of students to help her conduct research.

"We did a lot of work," she says. "I have gone back to it and officially revised the business plan now twice, and I look at it on a regular basis."

Several years ago she asked another team of students to help her update her industry research. As a result, the group suggested her company get more involved in web design to stay competitive. She took the advice.

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