Anyone can place an order for an ad, but only Entrepreneurs with their eye on the bottom line and Fortune 500 companies understand the value of a solid marketing plan.

The Fortune 500 have mountains of cash to throw around, so they can pound their offerings into your head and tell you that they sell “moments of pleasure” until you believe it, even if you don’t understand how drinking cola is a moment of pleasure more so than an ice cream cone or a sunrise.

Small and medium-sized business owners, on the other hand, need to be very smart with their marketing budgets. They need to focus on what is working and keep doing that until it doesn’t work anymore.

That’s where a marketing plan comes in. Those business owners who don’t have clear marketing plans find that their marketing tends to be reactive and only when they are running short on cash, or falling short of their goals do they launch a campaign to try to fix the problem. The trouble is, the campaigns they come up with are really just “Hail Mary” passes. The odds of catching the pass in the end-zone is slim, but there is a big reward if it pays off. It’s a big, risky gamble.

Marketing campaigns are actually the farthest thing from a risky bet against the odds

Running a business is a risk, but Entrepreneurs mitigate the risk with knowledge. They don’t risk everything on the roll of the dice or the toss of a ball.

Marketing campaigns are well thought out methods of attracting prospects and a process that clearly states what happens next. This is important because it keeps your employees on the same page and it helps them deliver identical experiences to every prospect. This makes it easy on your employees and it solidifies your brand in the minds of your prospects.

Most B2B companies rely on sales teams as the primary method for reaching out to the market, but they can only do so much in a day and they tire quickly when faced with the insurmountable task of finding needles in hay stacks.

Marketing campaigns alleviate this by including everyone in the organization in the most important focus of the business: making sales!

Think of this Web Campaign:
You use pay-per-click to bring in prospects to your website. Your website has information that the prospects can download which helps educate them on your offerings. They fill out a form in order to download the information. A junior salesperson or a telemarketer calls the prospect to see if they require any additional information and to feel them out as to their time to purchase without selling them anything. You continue to send them emails to keep in touch with them over the coming weeks. You track their visits to your website and see what they are looking at. You may even send them additional information based upon what they are viewing on your website. When they are ready to buy, they contact the sales department and the sales rep closes the sale.

In this scenario did you notice that the sales rep never had to spend an inordinate amount of time on this prospect? The customer, using your website, was able to educate himself on your product or service because the marketing campaign was designed to enable him to do it.

The net result of this marketing campaign is:

• The website was utilized the way a website is supposed to be used. A website is not a brochure.
• The salespeople get to focus on what they do best. Close! When salespeople spend all day closing prospects instead of prospecting, they get very excited because salespeople love making money! We have found that the salespeople in a scenario like this get better and better at closing because they are getting a lot more positive reinforcement than they were previously and that equates to a positive, “I can sell anyone” attitude.
• You know how many prospects you will need to attract in order to reach your goals.
• You can measure the effectiveness of the campaign.

We can help you develop Marketing Campaigns that not only give you a strong return on investment, they also give you valuable information about your customers: who they are, what they want, how they buy, and what they need in order to educate them.

While most businesses agree that a solid plan is crucial to success, so many fail to create a marketing plan.

Marketing plans are important for many reasons. most notably:

• You understand how many leads you need to generate in order to meet your business goals.
• You understand the costs associated with your marketing campaigns and tactics.
• You have detailed goals that are organized by product, customer segment and/or distribution channel.
• Your competitive advantage, position, and message are coordinated, thus extremely powerful.
• You understand your sales process and the flow of business through your company.
• You have a calendar of events with which, over time, you learn to estimate your cash flow.
• It’s the instructions employees use to know how to implement the long-term goals of the company.

While it might take time to develop a marketing plan, it’s extremely important because it ties all of your activities to tangible goals.

As you go through the process, your team gets to brainstorm all of the possible ways your local business can attract more clients.

Once the marketing plan is complete, you have a road map from where you are to where you want to be. You know what’s at stake, how much it costs, and what you will gain from following the plan.

Additionally, your entire marketing plan for the year has been defined. This means that any spur of the moment, reactionary marketing ideas will have to wait until next year. Which is a great benefit because you can’t track spur of the moment, reactionary marketing, and if you can’t track it, you can’t judge its effectiveness, or duplicate it if you thought it was effective.

A marketing plan is one of the most important strategies you can develop in your local business to coordinate the activities of the company.

Without a marketing plan you are doomed to lead the life of most small to medium-sized business Entrepreneurs.

Most small to medium-sized Entrepreneurs struggle weekly to make ends meet, even though they have excellent products and services to offer consumers. They work long hours. They wear themselves down and risk their health. They spend little time with their families, and they still never seem to get ahead. What they are missing is the understanding of marketing their local business and the value of a marketing plan.

A small percentage of Entrepreneurs do understand marketing and through it have made sizable incomes from their businesses. They have a different quality of life. They spend more time with their family, doing the things that they want to do in their lives. They balance work and play. They are relaxed and easy going, because they enjoy multiple vacations each year and nice things in their lives.

As an Entrepreneur you have two choices. You can either work hard and struggle, or you can enjoy life and relax.

The difference which transforms dreams into reality, pain into pleasure, is marketing.

• Not education
• Not IQ
• Not who you know
• Not how much money you can spend

Marketing!

When you are ready to live the life you know you deserve to live and take your business to the next level simultaneously, call us: (770) 449-3233.