The Essential of Marketing Strategies
Our life can’t be sustained without a proper planning, same goes for marketing. You can determine a marketing plan on a weekly basis, monthly basis or half-year basis depends on your requirements. Below is some guidance when outline marketing strategies:
1. Work out your budget
As all of us aware, marketing is a costly activity. The output and result that you desire will affect the amount of money that you have to spend on marketing. Please bear in mind that it is good to be cost-effective but you also have to be practical on how to attract new business and retain existing customers.
2. Establish your target market
You have to determine who your targeted customers are and segregate them into respective customer groups based on their lifestyle, income level, demographic, occupation and etc. Some of you may consider “everyone” as your targeted customer.
However, this thought is one of the common mistakes in marketing. You may have several target markets, but none of the products in this world is suitable to each and every person. For instance, Coca-Cola also uses different slogans on different customer groups. You have to determine who are potential customers and focus on them. You should apply different slogans and advertisements on different customer groups although you are selling the exactly same product.
You may use the correct mailing lists in order to ensure your message is getting across to the right person. Trading of mailing lists becomes an impressive business nowadays. Below are some guidelines for you when purchasing a mailing list. It is essential to make sure that you purchase a mailing list from a reputable company.
i) Obtain recommendation from other people who have bought the mailing lists before.
ii) Warranty on deliver-ability – In relation to the unavoidable number of dummy addresses in a list, it is important if the company can guarantee a hundred percentages of deliverable addresses being sold. The tolerated number should be at least 90% or higher. People are looking for a mailing list company who can guarantee at least 90% or more deliver-ability.
iii) Frequency of updating their information – The mailing list company must able to answer this query and should update their information from time to time, at least once a month. You may get trouble on mailing lists as it is the most expensive item of your marketing campaign. You should carry out some research and ask around before buying the mailing lists, don’t simply purchase from any company.
3. Choose appropriate media to be used
The media selection is depends on your resources and your targeted customers. You are recommended to start with an appropriate media such as television, radio, internet, etc, if you never involved in marketing planning previously. This can facilitate the tracking process and enables you to figure out whether this strategy works. Also, start off with a single media will assist you to reach the same groups of people very often since recurrence is the critical success factor of marketing. It is more risky if you advertise through a newspaper or post a letter as the people only seeing your advertisement once. Anyway, you may consider distributing the postcard several times so that you can assure that your message is getting across to the same people. Then, you can start building your reputation and relationship with them.
You can diversify into another type of marketing whether the first media generate adequate returns or not. After a while, you should be able to establish a remarkably diverse marketing plan.
4. Construct an established and fixed schedule
You should work out the number of customers and prospects in your target market. Just use direct mail marketing as an example. You should estimate how frequent you can send a postcard to people within your mailing list or your target market. You have to ensure that the cost associated is within your budget. Just go for it once you come up with the number!
It is very vital to have an efficient marketing strategy. You can see the advantages by building one proper marketing plan and stick to it.
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