Once you’ve done your marketing homework, you will have a well defined target market, undeniable positioning, clear packaging of your services or goods and competitive analysis, you need the right marketing mix to make the most of your marketing plan. Fortunately, it is as easy as 1, 2, 3:
Variety – They say it is the [...]

This point is SO OBVIOUS that it deserves repeating one more time! Everything in business and marketing must start with your goals. Ask any good marketer and they will tell you that marketing plans are created to help a company realize business objectives and define goals. It doesn’t matter whether your goals are to increase [...]

Without a detailed timeline, your marketing tactics are nothing more than a list of actions. Placing your marketing tactics and intermediate actions into a timeline spreadsheet along with columns for budget and assigned staff, creates a very powerful planning tool for the management of your overall marketing plans, campaigns and strategies. I have personally used [...]

In marketing, the rubber meets the road during the execution not the planning. After all of your planning and strategizing, it is your chosen tactics that customers get see (and judge you on). In a very real way, your tactics are a reflection of your company and are a marketing touchpoint in and of themselves. [...]

When you develop an advertising campaign, a careful consideration of the available media outlets must be part of your plan. Every media outlet comes with its own individual pros and cons. A great media outlet for one company may not necessarily be a good option for another – even in the same industry. Even a [...]

Remember the 4 P’s of marketing (Price, Product, Place, Promotion) when you develop action strategies. Since the four P’s cover the majority of all marketing decisions you must consider strategies for each. Developing a marketing strategy not only requires that all options be considered, but that the pros and cons of every action is correctly [...]

Marketing is all about setting goals, so it is important that you understand the difference between hard goals and soft goals. A hard goal is one that can be quantified and measured, for example: increase sales by Christmas, or complete website updates by January. Soft goals are not quantifiable and are difficult to measure, for [...]

Once you have completed your marketing and business development plans, I recommend creating a yearly marketing timeline of action items. Each item should indicate the costs, staff required, notes, and completion dates on the timeline. This can be a simple Excel spreadsheet or a complex Gantt chart. The idea here is to commit your resources [...]