How to Build a Successful Business Marketing Plan

There are 5 essential keys that you have to have in place in order to run a successful business marketing campaign. Once you have these basics right, you can use them over and over again.

The 5 essential keys are:

1. Define your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
2. Put an effective sales offer to work
3. Avoid the marketing pitfalls
4. Use a world-class marketing perspective
5. Get results!

We’ll go through each one of these, so you can see exactly how to use them and how they all affect the overall outcome of your marketing campaign.

1 – Define your Unique Selling Proposition (USP):

Take the time to ask yourself some questions from the prospective of the customers / clients. What would it take to get your attention? What needs do you have that need to be met? What are the promises you want fulfilled?

Once you know the answers to these questions you can start putting together a plan to meet these needs. Then take a look at what USP your competitors are using to help you develop your own USP. Your USP is what you are “promising” your customers / clients. This is what’s going to set you apart from your competition.

2 – Put an effective sales offer to work:

To develop an effective sales plan, you need to:

1. Put together a headline that gets immediate attention.
2. Share benefits of your products / services speaking from the customers’ perspective.
3. Identify the specific needs met by your products / services.
4. Make it easy to do business with you by offering guarantees.
5. Share your specific sales proposition.
6. Walk your customers / clients through how they should respond and act.
7. Motivate them with a call to action.

What this all means is, you need to put together what makes your products / services special and compel customers to buy. If they don’t feel like they NEED your product, they won’t buy. You need to answer a question, solve a problem or feed an obsession. You need to provide them with all the information they need to make an informed and confident decision. Buyer’s remorse is one of the worst things that can happen.

3 – Avoid the marketing pitfalls:

There are 5 major marketing pitfalls many businesses fall into which you should avoid:

• Ignore market testing and push on with an inaccurate plan.
• Offer an incomplete case, or reasons, throughout their marketing plan.
• Fail to notice the needs of their prospective customers / clients.
• Fail to diversify their marketing options.
• Fail to get market opinions on their offers.

These are all areas to avoid. If you work through these lessons, avoiding these pitfalls should be easy and natural.

4 – Use a world-class marketing perspective:

World-Class marketing perspective is important, especially if you want to attract customers / clients from all over the world. You can do this through a number of different techniques and activities:

Get Ideas:

• • Keep a marketing journal and scribble down anything innovate you see.
  • Read every quality ad you can find and keep a file for future ideas to consider.
  • When out in public, watch how consumers behave in different situations and how they consider their purchases.
  • Always listen to feedback from employees and customers.
  • Develop all your ads, campaigns and sales materials with an attention to compelling and factual information.

Try New Things:

• • Keep encouraging your marketing department, or yourself, to try new things and dump the ones that aren’t working.
  • Offer more information in your marketing than anyone else. The more information you offer, the more products / services you’ll sell.
  • Be classy in your marketing. Make sure your marketing and advertising fits your company image, products / service and quality.
  • A great marketing plan can only get better. Continue to fine tune and refine your marketing plan based on testing results and feedback.

Test:

• • Order from your own company under a different name and analyse the process of ordering, shipping, online store, customer service and the product itself. This will show you the areas for improvement in the customer experience.
  • Step down a notch or two and work on the front lines with your sales and customer service staff.
  • Continuously test markets, ads, and marketing techniques. This is the only way to stay successful and know what’s working and, more importantly, what’s not.
  • Improve your best marketing areas and drop those that aren’t working.

By using these techniques you can put your name out there to the world and become one of the top brands in your industry.

5 – Get results!

The last area I’m going to talk about is the best-satisfied customers. If your customers aren’t satisfied, you’ve wasted all your marketing resources and all chance of positive word-of-mouth advertising. You can satisfy your customers by:

• Providing quality products / services
• Providing high quality customer service
• Providing a low-pressure, highly informative sales experience
• Taking all the risk away with a great guarantee

To generate more business there are a couple of simple techniques that work every time:

• Build your database with a contest.
• Do regular mailings with incentives.
• Find other creative ways to keep your current customers coming back for more.

“As long as the reward is directly related to your product or service, you can’t lose. Why not get started today? It’s so simple, it’s so seldom done, and it’s so profitable. And that’s the bottom line.” ~ Jay Abraham