5 Tips to Start a Marketing Plan for Your New Fiscal Year

Hosted by: technogranny
Title: Monday Morning Marketeer, How to Start Your Marketing Plan for 2011
Time: 01/24/20

Hosted by: technogranny
Title: Monday Morning Marketeer, How to Start Your Marketing Plan for 2011
Time: 01/24/2011 11:00 AM EST
Episode Notes: You never thought of doing a marketing plan for the year, shame on you! It's not too late. The snow has not thawed yet and guaranteed you will still have a few days where you do not feel like going out of the house, so let's get started with the basics, where do you start? And how do you make it sticky? Or how do you make sure that it is something you can and will follow?


Sticky and Stickiness are ways to describe marketing ideas that hold a certain value in a user’s mind. Within that value, the ideas must be worth enough to be shared with friends and family.
The concept of sticky marketing came from Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point“. Gladwell discusses product epidemics and tipping points being made up of 3 Laws:
1. The Law of the Few
2. The Stickiness Factor
3. Law of Context
“The Tipping Point” illustrates that products and services if presented right, and under the right circumstances, can be irresistible and sticky.

The clock is ticking,
is your plan ready?

Whether you are reading this at the first of the  year or the end of it, the clock is ticking.  Have you ever heard that having no business plan is like having a plan to fail?  No matter when you are reading this, there are only a Only a few more hours until the clock strikes IMMINENT, yes imminent and that is what time your failure arrives without a marketing plan.  Soon you will  fin yourself in another month, another quarter, another year without a marketing plan.   Do you know what you want to accomplish this year and what about the next and the year after that.  This is not And I’m not talking about your year-after-year resolution to that becomes a wish list at the end of the year that your fairy godmother did not grant.  Have you taken the time to sit down and truly figure out what you want to achieve for you and your business in the next months, next quarter, next year?
 This is not you writing into your to do list or on your calendar:
Here is a list of generic goals.
A..   Get my business in shape
B. Outpace my competitior
C. Find more clients
D. Make more money
But how are you going to get there?
The buzz word now is “sustainable business.”  If you are jumping on this buzz like it’s the train to success, which it is,  you must understand the importance of planning. However, that’s often easier said than done. Hectic schedules and day-to-day business tend to get in the way.  Again it is biblical, “Write your vision on tablets.”
Have no fear! Even if you haven’t put a strategic marketing plan in place for 2011, it’s not too late to get started now. So, what are you waiting for? Here are simple five steps to kick you into high gear and help you develop a marketing plan that will generate results for your business.

1. Start with goals
Before you can put a plan in action, you need to know which direction you’re headed. Although this may seem like an obvious step, it can be often overlooked.

Sounds elementary, but
you have to set goals!

Take the time to write down specific, measureable goals for your business. Start with the larger goal in mind. Then, take it down into bite-sized chunks and look at what benchmarks you need to achieve on a monthly basis to accomplish the overall goal.  Not only will this exercise help you determine the best marketing strategy, but it will help hold you accountable along the way.
I will give you an example from my own seminar, Monday Morning Marketeer™  This is part of my Dreamweaver Marketing Associates plan which is by the way the parent company from which I run both my full service marketing company and all of my information products and media.
Goals from my Dreamweaver Marketing Plan Example:

•   to garner additional listeners and sponsors for my radio shows
•   To diversify products and add new ones that will augment my online platform and my business
•   To create more stable income with diversification
•   To increase my list and sphere of influence
•   To keep my online identity fresh

I am not going to bore you with the bite size chunks that I broke these down into.  Everyone has to start somewhere and this is where I started.

2. Self Evaluation
The best marketing strategies in the world can’t help a business that doesn’t have a killer product or service. Before you do anything else, make sure you’ve got something spectacular to offer your customers.

What do you see when you
look in your business mirror?

I know, I know – we all think our own business is the best thing since sliced bread. But, ask your customers. Do they feel the same way? Does your product or service solve their problems or give them the results they’re after? Do your customers receive top-notch service?
If you’re not sure about the answers, talk to your employees and your customers. Getting their honest feedback will likely highlight some ways you can improve your offerings and make your business shine.
Here’s what I did in my Dreamweaver Marketing Associates Plan with regard to my media offerings:
Looked at my editorial calendar and how I could beef up my calendar for
TechnoGrannyShow
PositivelyPittsburghLive
Monday Morning Marketeer
Professionals with Impact
This all feeds locally into PositivelyPittsburghLiveMagazine.com
So I looked at:
· Web Statistics including hits, click throughs and unique page views
· Did my clients find the Pittsburgh Internet Radio and TV channel easy to use?
· Did they even understand its purpose?
· What could I do to augment content?
· Could I turn my current listeners and viewers into advocates?
· What did they think I should add?
· How did they think I could improve?
· I turned my listeners and readers into marketing constultants.  I asked them what they wanted, what could be better, how could I fix it.  And guess what?  I also took their recommendations.

3. Master the basics
There are a couple of marketing basics that are so essential, it’s like milk and bread. Branding and a websites fall into that category. If you want to move the needle for your business this year, you must have these in place.

It's simple, just do it!

Your brand has not only to be exciting but also rock solid.  This  is an integral to a successful business. More than just a logo, a brand is the personality of your business. In other words, your brand communicates who you are and what makes you different from the competition. If you haven’t nailed down your brand message, now is the time. Don’t wait another year to get this right.

In today’s digital world, an amateur website just won’t cut it anymore. A well-written, user-friendly website is a must for businesses. In a world that’s constantly competing for eyeballs, make sure your site hits the mark and doesn’t leave them quickly moving on to the next one.
These are some methods that I used in my Dreamweaver Marketing Associates.  I decided that I needed to  Promote my business by increased Internet marketing.
These are areas that I will share my ideas with you for various niches in the media portion of my business:
· Every Monday at the beginning of my show, PositivelyPittsburghLive I do the “local good news.”  I decided not enough people were listening and so I had my blogger put together the news in blog format with links back to listen and planned to  blast it out to my list every Tuesday.  The goal was to get 20% additional listeners and it is working, every month.
· The Roving Pittsburgher™ is another segment on the news which listeners really seem to like, even my guests who I force to listen to it before their roundtable interview on PositivelyPittsburghLive.  This is where I tell listeners where I , my good news reporters and other PositivePittsburghers have been the week before. Decided that this had to become more organized and profitable so I did a few things.  I purchased domain names and negotiated a new website, put a system into place to get more tickets for events and more dinner invitations. I also have plans to institute a monthly video contest where viewers can send in their own pictures which my staff will turn into a video.  The plan for the following year is to send out
the Roving Pittsburgher Report on Wednesdays.

· Post Script PPL         .
In order to raise the number of listeners and hit to my PPL Mag I needed a vehicle.  So I invented the PPL Post Script in which I would send out all of the syndicated show links that were archived in the previous two weeks.  This increased listeners.  This is a Thursday blast.
· To further interest local listeners I developed Positively Pittsburgh Live Perks™  This is a blast for channel owners on PositivelyPittsburghLive to put out special deals for PositivelyPittsburghLive listeners on DreamweaverMarketing Associates mailing list.
     

4. Make Sure You Get Noticed
Social media is definitely the new kid on the block. But before you rush off to sign up for a Twitter account, take a look at your current marketing efforts and determine what is working well for you.
For instance, if word of mouth is your top business generator, build a referral strategy that rewards your biggest fans for spreading the word. Or, if your email list responds well to your campaigns, look for ways to grow your list by encouraging your readers to share it with their friends.
Whatever it is, continue to focus your energy in this area and look for ways to amplify it.

Start some fireworks
about your business!

Oftentimes, the most profitable marketing effort we can employ is by taking a strategy that is working really well and turning up the volume.

If you have a mobile phone use down time to communicate on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, even Sprouter and what I am doing now in New Media, TalkShoe, also Blogger
I have Ning Network for Positive Pittsburghers and two Sundays ago sent out 1700 invitations to join.  :My newest strategy is to offer a free gift to everyone on the site once we hit each breakthrough goal for membership.  I have enlisted clients and local vendors to provide the gifts.  No cost for me and good public relations for them.

5. Stretch yourself
Once you’ve hammered out ways to improve already successful strategies, you can begin to venture into uncharted territory. Social media is the considered marketing frontier for small business and it can be a great way to engage customers, generate leads and provide customer service.

The reward is in the stretch!
So wake up!

But, before you take the plunge, do your research. Determine what you want to accomplish through social media. Find out where your customers hang out on line and where they go to get their information.  Also  look at what is working well for other businesses in your niche. A misguided social media effort will suck up a lot of time and produce little in return.
Determine your goals because your return on investment will not always be in dollars. It could be in visibility, additional hits to your website, additional inquiries.  These are my goals for my internet radio shows.
· Additional listeners
· Additional visibility
· Give out good information to create credibility
· Build relationships to increase customers
 So with that in mind I certainly hope you will use the share button to pass this blog onto friends and also that you wiill listen to MondayMorningMarketeer™ or one of my other four internet radio shows.
You can listen to a fifteen minute audio version similar to this blog at:
Monday Morning Marketeer, How to Start Your Marketing Plan for 2011

For More on this Topic:

 "Folly of Marketing Plan in Your Head, 101 Compelling Reasons to Write One" 

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This blog post can be reproduced in its entirety with the following information:  
© Joanne Quinn-Smith 2011, Monday Morning Marketeer™ 412-628-5048    
Listen at:  http://mondaymorningmarketeer.com
Blog:  www.mondaymorningmarketeer.com
Or on its unique radio channel at:                                                                      
www.positivelypittsburghlivemgazine.com


Joanne Quinn-Smith is the Creative Energy Officer of Dreamweaver Marketing Associates in Pittsburgh,Pennsylvania and an expert on Web 2.0 Branding.
Joanne has also been designated by the 2009 U.S. Small Business Administration as the Small Business Journalist of the Year for her work with information relevant to and advocacy of small businesses.
Follow at:  https://twitter.com/monmornmarketer
Facebook:  http://www.facebook.com/mondaymorningmarketeer
Phone:  412-444-5197