The third element of your basic marketing plan consists of the specific objectives you will try and attain and the overall strategy you will use to achieve those objectives.

It is worth noting that the marketing plan objectives should always lead to actual sales revenue.  If not, you need to re-examine your marketing objectives and restate them so that they relate to sales results.

Marketing Objectives

Your marketing objectives should be:

• Clear and specific
• Tangible and measurable
• Be time-based, with a target achievement date

Some examples of a marketing objective you might include in your basic marketing plan are:

• Launch new product line on January 1, 2009 to target market, achieving sales target of $250,000 by December 31, 2009
• Re-launch “new and improved” product line to existing customer base, conveying enhancements and revisions and delivering 1,000 qualified sales leads by June 30, 2010.
• Increase product awareness among the target audience by 30% this year.

In many cases, you will have multiple, concurrent marketing objectives, in which case you should make sure that they are consistent with each other and support your overall marketing vision.

Marketing Strategy

In the marketing strategy section of your basic marketing plan, you should outline the strategic plan by which you intend to reach the objectives stated above.

You’ll want to specifically address the “four Ps” of marketing (also known as the marketing mix) to address four specific areas of your strategy.

• Product – the specifics about the product or service you will be marketing
• Price – your pricing strategy as it relates to the market conditions and your competition, specifying the exact pricing and offers you will make
• Promotion – the high-level plan of how and where you will advertise your product or service in order to reach your target audience, including TV, radio, print advertisements, direct mail and online marketing efforts
• Place (Distribution) – how the product/service and your prospective customer interact and engage in the selling process, including retail, mail-order, direct sales, telephone sales, wholesale or distributors, etc.

Although it may seem tedious, spending the time to carefully identify your marketing objectives and the overall marketing strategy you will use to reach those objectives will help you create the tactical marketing promotional plan that will ultimately inform and guide your marketing team on what specific actions need to be completed, when they need to be completed by and finally by whom they will be completed.

To write a truly effective marketing plan for your business, you must have the basics in place first.  One of the most basic, yet often overlooked elements of a marketing plan is the situation analysis.

This situation analysis will provide the context for the proposed plan of action and must be fact-based, not theoretical.  This analysis will include basic market and product information, as well as current and anticipated market conditions, the implications they hold and any major opportunities or risks that may be forthcoming.

Your situation analysis will include the following sub-sections:

• Business/Product Review
• Market Analysis
• Competitive Overview
• Consumer Profile
• Distribution

Let’s look at each section in a little more detail.

Business/Product Review

Questions to ask and answer include: What product service am I offering? How does this meet the needs of the market? Do I have a core product with secondary or supporting products or a complete product line?

The key in this section of your marketing plan’s situation analysis is to clearly define exactly what your business offers and what value you provide to your customers.

Market Analysis

What factors will affect your ability to become and remain profitable in the current marketplace?  What is the size of your potential consumer market? Are there internal or external factors that affect your business’ performance? What sociological or economic factors may affect your customer’s ability to do business with you?

Competitive Overview

Who are your main competitors?  What approach are they taking to reach the same consumer profile as you?  What advantages do they have over you?  What weaknesses exist that you may be able to exploit?

Also consider what secondary competitors exist – those businesses competing for the same budget allocation, regardless of their specific product or service offering.

Consumer Profile

Who is your primary target market?  Who is your secondary target market?  What demographic (attributes & characteristics) and psychographic (preferences & biases) similarities exist that could help or hinder your ability to market effectively? What is the potential size of your market?

Distribution

How will you get your product to market?  Do you require distributors or other intermediaries or will you sell direct to the consumer?  In either case, what factors could impede your ability to deliver your product to market?

Although the situation analysis may seem complicated and involved, it is one of the most important marketing plan basics you will need to include in order to effectively develop a marketing strategy and tactical programs.

If you’re currently in business for yourself or are considering starting a new business, marketing is a skill you absolutely must master, if you hope to be successful.  Although marketing can be a daunting prospect for many entrepreneurs, mastering the basics of writing a marketing plan can be easy and fun – and it can provide you with the foundation you need to successfully grow your business.  Let’s get started by defining the purpose and mission of your business.

The purpose and mission of your business is one of the marketing plan basics because these details will inform the rest of your marketing plan, as well as the team who will eventually be responsible for implementing your plan.

It should be said here that as the owner of your company, you should be intricately involved in the development of your overall marketing strategy and its implementation.  It is your primary job to ensure that you are effectively reaching your target audience with your marketing message.

The Purpose

The purpose statement details the objective (or objectives) you wish to achieve with the implementation of your marketing plan.  You may be introducing a brand new product or service to a market you already serve, re-introducing an existing product that has been improved or re-engineered, or taking an existing product or service into a new market.

In short, the purpose outlines exactly what it is that you hope to accomplish by implementing the plan.

The Mission Statement

In your mission statement you will want to identify the primary reasons that your company exists in the market in the first place.  This section often consists of several short, carefully worded statements that address some or all of the following questions:

• Why is the company in business?
• What market pain or problem does our product or service address?
• What markets do we serve?  Why do we serve these markets in particular?
• What are the main features, advantages and benefits we offer our customers?
• What is our general philosophy for doing business?
• What is our primary point of differentiation from our main competitors?

Being able to clearly convey the purpose and mission of your business is critical to ensuring your team is able to execute successfully on your vision, winning more customers in the process.

When you’ve mastered the marketing plan basics outlined in this and other articles, you’ll be well ahead of many of your competitors in knowing how to communicate effectively with your target audience and motivate them to take action and become your lifelong customer.

The key to building a successful marketing campaign is to really understand who your prospect is, what frustrates them and what they dream of for the future.

I would suggest developing a customer profile that clearly details the specifics about your most common customer.

Starting this process by taking out a blank sheet of paper and creating three columns:

1. Attributes & Characteristic
2. Fears & Frustrations
3. Dreams for the Future

Start by listing all the actual characteristics you can think of about your prospective customer – gender, age, geographic location, income, etc. Then brainstorm what bothers them, what keeps them up at night, what bugs the heck out of them. Finally, what do they want the future to look like? If they could wave a magic wand and create their perfect life, what would that look like?

Once that is complete, you can distill everything down into an actual profile sheet of your most common customer.  I would suggest even including a picture, either of a real customer (you’ll only use this internally) or find one online that represents your typical customer.

Define everything, including giving them a name! That way, whenever you write a new marketing message, you can look at the profile, get really connected to your prospect and write something very personal that speaks directly to them.

You need to really get into the mind of your prospect to find out what conversation is ALREADY going on inside their head… then you want to position your solution in relation to that conversation.

Too many marketers try to dominate their prospect. To really stand out, become a co-conspirator with them, helping them get what they want.

How To Create A Killer Elevator Pitch… In 60 Seconds or Less!
by Paul Keetch

Being able to succinctly describe your business is an essential networking skill for two important reasons.

First, the person you’re talking to can quickly and easily understand if they, or someone they know, is a potential customer of yours.

Second, knowing specifically how to communicate your business essence allows you to spend more time speaking to people who are genuinely interested in what you do and how you do it and less time trying to “sell” prospects who are never going to become your customer.

Here is my 3-step system to creating a killer elevator pitch!

Step 1 – Identify The Pain You Solve In The Market
There are two things you want to accomplish in this step – identify the specific pain you resolve in the market and get the person you are talking to agreeing with you.

You do this by stating the problem you solve in the form of a question such as, “Do you know how the vast majority of new businesses fail within the first five years?”

This states the pain (the rampant failure of new businesses) and gets the person you’re talking to in agreement with you (everyone knows this to be true).

Step 2 – Describe Your Perfect Customer & How You Work With Them
Here you want to be very specific about what niche (or micro-niche) that has the problem described in step 1 and how you help them overcome that pain.

For example, you might say, “I mentor coaches and other personal service providers on strategic ways market themselves more effectively and on a shoe-string budget.”

Already, if the person you’re talking to self-identifies with the pain you’ve described in step one and now fits into the category of who (coaches and other personal service providers) and how (mentor them to market themselves more effectively and on a shoe-string) their interest is piqued.

Step 3 – Outline How Your Customers Benefit From Working With You
This one gets a little tricky, but is still pretty straight forward. The real benefits of working with you don’t come from the specific result you help bring about (more customers, better relationships, fitness, health, etc) but from what those results create for them.

More customers may actually mean that they earn more and are able to provide for their family or travel the world and live the life they’ve always dreamed of.

In the example above, this may look like, “So that they can have a steady stream of qualified clients coming in every month, helping more and more people while creating a generous income for themselves!”

The primary benefit here is that they can help more and more people as well as create a generous income, a challenge faced by many of the coaches and personal service providers I work with.

Bringing It All Together!
Here is what an elevator pitch would look like when you bring all three elements together:

Do you know how the vast majority of new businesses fail within the first five years? I mentor coaches and other personal service providers on strategic ways market themselves more effectively and on a shoe-string budget, so that they can have a steady stream of qualified clients coming in every month, helping more and more people while creating a generous income for themselves!

That’s all there is to it. A killer elevator pitch you can easily remember and that flows off your tongue will allow you to spend more time marketing to truly qualified prospects.

3 Tips for Marketing In a Recession

By Paul Keetch

Marketing at any time should be a carefully managed process, but this is even more important when trying to sustain or grow your business during a recession or other economic downturn.

Here are 3 tips to help you get the most out of your marketing in any economy:

Recession Marketing Tip #1 – Determine Your Profit Point

Determine the profit point (the point at which sales from your marketing expenditure breaks even and pays for itself) by dividing the average profit per sale into the total marketing or advertising cost.

For example, if you spend $1000 on marketing a $100 product, you might think that 10 sales is your break-even point. Unless you have a 100% profit margin, this could be a potentially fatal error! Assuming your profit margin is 20%, your profit per sale is actually only $20, which means that you would need to generate 50 sales $100 in order to break even.

When you know your break even number ahead of time, you will know without a doubt whether a particular campaign generated a positive return on investment or not.

Recession Marketing Tip #2 – Track Everything

One mistake many business owners make is not tracking each individual marketing or advertising campaign. You cannot properly determine whether or not a particular campaign is hitting your pre-determined profit point or not without knowing where your leads are coming from.

Use custom web addresses such as www.YourCompany.com/adsource or vanity URLs (www.YourCompanyNow.com for example) to easily track advertisements that drive people to your website. Coupon codes, customized extension numbers or “virtual employee names” where you give the phone number to call and the instruction to “ask for Sally” (who doesn’t exist) or instructions to “clip this coupon” or “mention this ad” when visiting your physical location.

Make it part of your internal process to ask people where heard about you and make note of it in a spreadsheet so that you can track your results over time.

Recession Marketing Tip #3 – Do More of What Works, Less of What Doesn’t

When and if you find a marketing campaign that is consistently failing to produce enough sales to cover your investment and reach the profit point, you should immediately make a decision to either change the advertisement in some way in order to get a better result or simply stop the activity immediately.

Unless you know that your initial $100 sale will be worth many thousands of dollars over the long term (because you know your average lifetime customer value) then continuing with a money-losing campaign without at least trying to improve it is a sure way to reduced profits or even losses on your bottom line results. Even then, you should always seek to improve the results you’re getting from every marketing campaign.

On the other hand, when you find a campaign that is consistently hitting or, even better, exceeding your pre-determined profit point, then you should find ways to get more exposure in the same or similar sources.

For example, if you are advertising in a particular magazine bi-weekly, you may want to test a weekly advertisement instead. If the campaign is paying for itself and producing a profit over and above your initial investment in one magazine, you may want to try reaching a similar audience in a different, but related publication.

When you follow all three of these tips and apply them consistently and in order you will see definite improvements in your overall marketing results.

Paul Keetch is a seasoned entrepreneur and marketing coach who has helped hundreds of small business owners grow into bigger business owners. He is co-author of the acclaimed ebook Make My Marketing Work: How to Win Customers and Make More Money. Get a copy of his book online at http://www.MakeMyMarketingWork.com.

Meteors, I’m told, hit the Earth’s atmosphere just about every day of the year… but it’s not every day that one this big flashes through the sky, lighting up the night as though the sun had just burst out from behind us.

Check this video captured on a Police cruiser camera in Alberta…

I think I’d be more than a little freaked out if I had seen that happen live!

Here is another video of the same event, from a different perspective:

- Paul