Developing a Marketing Plan for Entrepreneurs

Developing a marketing plan is crucial to building a profitable business. It guides you to the target audience you need to reach. It helps you grow your business because you are putting your services or products in front of the people that need them. If you’re a new business owner, you’re probably a little overwhelmed by all of the marketing material there is online these days. It can seem like there’s a million ways to market your business. The truth is that there’s only one way to market your business effectively, and figuring what works is your mission.

The first step in developing a marketing plan is to identify your target audience. You need to find out the type of people that are interested in your services and products.

You can do this in a number of ways:

• Survey your customers to find out why they bought from you, how they heard about you, and what their interests are in life.
• Use survey websites to collect additional information about people who have the same interests as the customers who have already bought from you.
• Analyze competitors to see whom they are targeting, and then think about how your audience may differ.

Once you have your target audience figured out, you can then start developing your marketing plan. Ask yourself these questions, as you come up with ways to market your business.

• Where does my target audience like to shop?
• Where do they spend most of their time?
• When they are online, where do they go to search for information?
• Which websites are they most likely to visit?
• What attracts your audience the most to your products?
• How will your services and products solve a problem?

As you can see from these questions, you want to figure out three things:

1. Where is your target audience?

2. What will attract your audience?

3. How will your audience benefit from your business?

With this information, you can produce content that will attract and convert your audience to consumers and then place that content in front of their eyes.

Where to Start with Developing a Marketing Plan

After reading this article, open up a document. Start by listing ways you’ll find information about your target audience. Whether that’s a survey, calling people to ask, or using a survey website.

Once you have this information, spend time analyzing it. Find similarities among the people you collected information from, and then create blocks of those similarities. For example, if you have a group of people that love fishing, you want to create a block with a title “Fishing”. In the block, identify where they congregate on and offline.

Once you have that information, make a connection between your services or products with fishing. Create content that attracts your fishing audience, and then bring them in to convert with information about how your services or products can help them with their passion.

Once you have the content, head out to the places you’ve identified where your target audience gathers.  This may be online or around the community. Post the content where they will see it.

Marketing Is Ongoing Process

Just because you’ve identified one way to market, that doesn’t mean you are done. Marketing is an ongoing process because target audiences change. Identify more audiences and then check up on the ones that you’ve already identified. This way you’re constantly coming up with marketing plans that could lead you to constantly growing your business.

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