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Free Home Business
Course - Part 4 |
Hi
, Today let's talk about writing a Marketing Plan
that gives results for your home business! I'm excited that you take time each
week to let us into your life. Please feel free to write in and share any
of your tips and ideas on home business and how we can make this course
more informative and meaningful. We'd love to hear from you!
Your home business success directly depends
on your ability to build, grow, satisfy and maintain the customer-at
a profit!
The word 'Marketing' continues to be a
mystery even among top executives. Well designed million dollar Ads may
nose dive to the dirt while a simple 20 word
classified may produce smashing results.
I have seen this happening! In one of the
companies I worked, our best laid Ad plans worth a fortune
just disappeared into nothingness while a simple notice inserted in an
English daily thrown into homes on a rainy day gave us more responses!
|
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before you buy those expensive CDs, DVDs, check out
"Internet Marketing For Stay At Home Moms + A
Guide To Working At Home + 3 Audios" by
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The moral is do not ignore your
gut feeling and Intuitions when it comes to marketing. Properly gel them
with the usual marketing tactics.
Improve your
marketing results considerably by the intelligent use of tried and
tested methods. To understand your customers better use the modern
method...Marketing concepts.
Marketing concepts
Marketing concepts
The marketing concepts
involves in recognizing and acting on how important a customer is to your firm. To use the marketing concept
you must
-
Identify the needs
of your customers
(Market research)
-
Improve your
competitive advantage
(Marketing strategy)
-
Identify your specific
markets (Target-marketing)
-
Identify how to satisfy
your customer needs
( Marketing mix)
-
Determine how the above
4 points have served
your customers (Marketing performance)
Already confused! Okay we
will see the above 5 important points in a little more detail now.
Top
Market Research
A thorough marketing
research will tell who your customers are, what they want, where and when
they want and from whom they want.
What to
look for while doing a market research?
Look for Customers,
Customer needs, Competition and Changing trends.
Customers:
Determine their Gender, Age, Income,
Occupation, marital status, family size, own
residence or not, Interests and hobbies.
Customer needs: 1. Is your product
limited for a short time?
e.g. diaper
2. Does your customer wants faster service?
3. Does they want guarantee?
4. Frequency of buying e.g. more for grocery,
less for a car.
5. Does your customers want to buy from
more more convenient locations/wider
distribution.
Competition: 1. What is
your competitions market share?
2. How much is their sales volume?
3. How many such competitors do you have?
4. What product-features attracts customers
to them?
5. What is their strengths and on
which of
their strengths do they advertise?
Trends: 1. Look
for population shifts (Govt.policy
changes, legal, regulatory etc)
2. Local economic situation
3. Life style changes? (single parents,
nuclear family working women, etc)
Where to get the
information from?
1. Already accessed data may be
taken from these sources
- Local Chamber of Commerce
- Trade associations in the business
- Professional market research services
- Local library
2. Own research efforts for more
customer information try the following means:
- Telephone surveys
- Local and national newspapers
- Surveys sent by mail
- Questionnaires
- Local TV and radio stations
- Interviewing
- Customer service cards
3. Your own Employees is one of
the best sources. They can give a pretty good profile of your customers as
they hear customer complaints more than you on a day-to-day basis.
4. Your customers themselves. By
asking the customers about product improvements will give you not only
first hand info but helps in building customer confidence too.
5. Monitoring competition can give
valuable inputs to small business operators. This will help you to add/delete product
features and to capitalize on 'unique'
attributes of your own product.
6. Often go back to your company
records. You are sure to unearth valuable data from sales records, receipts, complaints,
prospect sheets etc.
Conducting a market research need not be
expensive. Forget about techniques and data. Just think what 'useful information'
you can have to determine your customers likes/dislikes. And what your
competition is doing about them. That's all!
Top
Marketing Strategy
From the data gathered from
'Market Research' let us move on to building an effective marketing strategy.
I know from personal
experience that the best way for a new business is to focus on areas ignored/unattended by your competition. Consider the following areas to develop a marketing strategy.
Offer a:
-
Better or wider
distribution.
-
Specialized products
instead of Broad based products
(or vice versa)
-
Lower price
-
Better value for
money-quality
-
Improved/Modified
product/service
-
More dependable
product/service
-
Better Guarantee/Warranty
-
Better customer support
service
Top
Target Marketing
The word says it all! Know
your target-group before you start marketing. Once you are through
with your marketing strategy determine to which customer group the
marketing strategy will be most effective.
I know some of you are bit
confused about all these
'strategy talk'.
Look at this way. If you
have arrived on a Low price or value for money strategy, your product may be more appealing to a
family. i.e. family is your
target group here.
where as if your strategy is
Better guarantee/Warranty it may appeal to credit/loan purchasers.
Get the idea! Use the
collected data and a make winning combination that works best.
The market can be divided
into various segments. Some examples are:
1.
Geographic: Specialize products targeted to people who live
in a certain locality, region or climates.
2. Demographic: Target
Advertising/Promotions to families, retired groups, to the occupation of
the customers etc
3. Psychographics: Promoting to the
opinions or attitudes of the customers e.g. Political, religious etc.
4. Previous customers: Promoting to
previous buyers.
Top
The Marketing Mix
Marketing mix nothing but
the intelligent analysis of the 4 P's! That is
-
Your
Product (Services) attributes
-
The
Price of your product
-
The
Place it will be sold and distributed
-
The
Promotion that you employ
The main benefits to
derive from arriving at a correct Marketing Mix are,
-
To deepen the customer
base
-
To increase Market share
-
To increase sales
-
To penetrate new
geographical markets
-
To increase customer
traffic
-
To dispose of excess
inventories
Once you are clear on which
of the above objectives that you want to pursue...determine a date to accomplish your
objectives.
Products
(services): This stage is your last chance to rethink and
modify your product! You might want to consider changing the color, Size etc. Whatever it is do it now!
Promotion:
With a clear-cut marketing strategy and objectives, arrive at the
right promotional tactics and advertising. You may try promoting your
product through
- The yellow pages
- A press release
- Sponsoring a social event or activity
- The newspaper
- Classifieds (Very cost effective)
- Billboards or posters
- Flyers or handbills
- Direct mail advertising
- The radio
Other Sales-boost tactics may be
- Offer 2 for 1
- Discount/ Gift Coupons
- Special time-bound prices
- Rebates
- Sweepstakes/contests
- Freebies as Give-aways
Pricing:
The other important factor is how you price the product. The pricing
must be competitive, affordable and in proportion with the perceived value of the product.
(Key Note:
Dr. Ken Envoy offers
Make Your Price Sell
valued $14
as free download for joining his free affiliate program.
Very good manual to put the right price on any product. Get a copy of it.)
Place:
Here is where you decide how to distribute the products. Working
through established retailers is the most cost effective way for a new
business. If the product nature is of impulse-buy then find out retailers who has high traffic and a very visible shop to go along with it.
Top
Evaluate
Marketing performance
Once you begin to implement
your marketing mix, it needs to be evaluated often and monitored continuously. Is the objectives
being met? which strategy is working and which is not?. You may want to evaluate on
- Has the Market share
increased?
- Has Sales objectives
being met?
- Is the Strategy working out.
Evaluate on Promotions,
- Did advertising penetrate the
precise target groups?
- Were the promotions timely and
effective?
- Did customers respond to
special offers, coupons, or discounts.
Evaluate on Service,
- Is the customer satisfied?
- Do the employees make sure the
customer's needs satisfied?
An objective review of the marketing plan
reveals loop-holes that need to be plugged. For the grand success of the business you need to continually update the plans, adapt to new
market situations, realize early changing customer tastes and the
prevailing economic conditions.
We appreciate you! Take care ,
Courteously -- S. Kumar
www.learnhomebusiness.com P.S:
BTW, Here are
some
gifts for you. Please
go here to
download them. These gifts are not the same that you downloaded in the
last lesson.
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