How to Create a Marketing Plan that Works! (Part 4 of 4)

By Action Coach Dave Beam

If you are with us in creating your winning marketing plan, you have identified your ideal target customers, and you know where to find them, especially in groups.  You have also brainstormed a list of offers that you think will get their attention, get them excited, and compel them to take some action to get some more information from you.  So the last question to answer is how; how are you going to communicate this offer to your ideal target?

There are a myriad of choices; everything from direct mail to television to print ads.  You can also consider referral strategies, telemarketing, strategic alliance strategies, closed door sales, and sign dancing!  How about radio?  So how do you select the best way to communicate your offer? 

In my opinion, for the small business owner with a limited marketing budget, you must communicate your offer in a way that you can test and measure the response.  The selected means should be primarily based on where your target customers can be found in the most numbers.  You also must do a break-even analysis and decide if there is a reasonable chance of increasing sales enough to at least pay for the campaign. 

For example, I had a client that owned a gourmet specialty pizza restaurant.  The challenge is that although it was located near a major highway, it was off the beaten path a bit.  It seemed that a billboard near the highway exit was an obvious choice, until….we did the breakeven analysis.  The billboard cost over a period of one year was approximately $6,000 including set-up costs ($500 per month).  My question for my client was how many pizzas would you need to sell to cover the $500?  At an average gross profit of about $2 per pizza, she would have to sell 250 additional pizzas a month (or 3000 additional pizzas in one year) solely due to the billboard, every month of the year to just break even.  After some consideration, this was highly unlikely.  They opted instead to institute a loyalty and referral program that worked quite nicely.  Those two programs were also easier to measure.

Many very successful marketing strategies do not involve any purchased advertising.  In my coaching experience, enhancing referrals and systematized word of mouth through leveraged strategic alliances with other businesses is often the most effective means to bring in new customers.  Also, strong offers made to existing customers and referrals from those customers are often superior to traditional media advertising. 

I would love to come and sit down with you and brainstorm a creative marketing strategy based on the four questions: Who, Where, What, and How. Call Nathan at 740-444-4164 to set something up free of charge. Also,you may visit the Action Coach website (www.actioncoach.com) and download any of the Brad Sugars Instant Series e-books for free!  Thanks.