Sunday, February 24, 2008

Marketing Your Business

Have you ever thought how you plan on marketing your business?

Marketing your business can be one of the most difficult tasks for keeping your business alive. But, with the proper education and testing, you can begin to see your business flourish.

Read anything and everything about marketing. By educating yourself in the subject of marketing, you increase your knowledge and your awareness of your customers. Each of your customers will be different, but learning about your customer's likes and dislikes will greatly impact your marketing efforts. Cater your marketing efforts around your customer's likes. This way you will attract customers to you.

For example, you are in the health and wellness industry and determine that you are not gaining new customers. So, you perform some analysis to determine who buys health related products, how much they spend, what do they buy, and how often. From your analysis you determine the age group buying the products are between 35-55 yrs old. You also determine that vitamin c is the most common purchased supplement at an average cost of $15/bottle for one months supply and bought every month. With this information you can begin to develop your marketing plan. Your marketing plan may consist of something like this:
  1. Place online or in print classified ads in the health or fitness section. (These two sections will accommodate the age group determined in your analysis.)
  2. Your ad should read "Benefits of Taking Vitamin C Supplements - Request your Free copy".
  3. Provide your URL to your website and have them complete an opt-in form to receive their Free copy.
  4. Once they logged into your website, they will be directed to the report "Benefits of Taking Vitamin C Supplements".
  5. Provide them with all of the benefits of vitamin c. Use your company's literature to educate them on this subject.
  6. Within your website, create links to purchase the product and offer special one-time discount for becoming a retail customer.
  7. Include links to other free reports like, "Benefits of Taking Calcium" or "Why You Should be Taking a Multi-Vitamin".
After you've developed your marketing plan and put it into action, you will need to track the results. If it is not performing as you thought it should have, then you will need to modify your plan and try again. You might have to do this a few times, but don't give up. You're just finding out what works best and of course, what attracts customers to you.

So the next time you're thinking of developing a marketing plan, do your homework, test and track. This way everyone will benefit.

Jerome Ratliff
Independent Associate
Discover your way to riches

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