As you sit there staring at a blank piece of paper or an empty word document, you think… it really should not be that hard to come up with a marketing plan. But it probably is.  You’ve got to think about how to break through the clutter out there.  What you want to say. Who you want to say it to. What specifically to do (tactically with advertising, mail, newsletters, social media, etc, etc).

We create marketing plans with our clients everyday.  And I want to share with you two secrets we use to make this process easier.  (Actually, there are 3, but we talked about the first one in the blog post on November 1st)

First, think about your marketing in terms of how well your target audience knows you.  What we talk with our clients about is that you do net-new marketing to someone who doesn’t know you at all, so that they can get to know who you are. These are things like two-step paid marketing, PR, speaking, and some of the social media tools.

With prospects that know you to some degree – they have been to your store, or have attended a seminar or visited your website and joined your mailing list – you should be doing nurture marketing.  The goal of this is to help people who know you, get to like you. Nurture marketing means providing value-added information in various forms on a regular basis.  So in one month it might be a newsletter.  The second month it might be a seminar online or a workshop at your location and the third month it might be a telephone call or a coupon offer.

If someone likes you – they have responded to your nurture offers – the next step is build trust.  Trust comes from predictability and consistency.  It means finding ways to engage your prospect in deeper individual conversations, which may include an onsite sales call or a trial of your service so they can see that you really can provide the services you have talked about in your nurture offerings.

Once you have established trust, you are likely engaged in the actual selling process, and now you must ensure that this process follows the same attitude and approach that you have used thus far.

Okay, so if you are segmenting your audiences as above  (and tracking in a decent CRM system), then the next hard part to figure out is what to talk about. This is really easy, but is also where most small business make a critical error.  You should not be talking about the product (or service) you sell.  You should not even be talking about the benefits of it.  You should be talking about the value you (or it) provides.  What value?  The problem(s) that it solves for your customer.

A quick example. You are a CPA focused on small businesses.  Everyone knows what a CPA is right?  Sure they do, and they are all alike, right? Well, not you.  You specialize in helping service based companies minimize their taxes.  One of the key problems you solve for your clients is helping them make the right moves in October, November and December to minimize their taxes for the year.

So now armed with this problem that you solve, you have a marketing theme for an entire quarter.  Here’s how that works.  You plan a seminar on 10 steps to minimize your taxes for 2011.  This is targeted to those on your nurture list.  You also write a newsletter article on this topic, which is a summary of the seminar you are going to do.  Your 10 steps are 10 blog posts and each of those posts get tweeted out.   And after the seminar, you offer to do a free assessment to anyone interested on what you could do to help reduce their tax burden.  Finally, since you are doing the seminar anyway, you buy an advertisement in the chamber of commerce newsletter and send out a few hundred postcard to people you think might be interested but who don’t know you.  And of course you list it on your website and email signature.

So by focusing on a problem you solve, you have a full quarter worth of marketing that looks like this:

  • Month 1 – Newsletter with article on steps to take to reduce your taxes next year sent by email to your list
  • Month 2 – Your seminar, postcards, advertisements for it
  • Month 3 – an offer to come out and review the situation sent by email
  • 10 blog posts and associated tweets for the quarter

And this is just the basics.  I could go on with another 10 – 15 ways to leverage this same content during the quarter and beyond.  But you get the idea.

So make your marketing planning easier:

1 – Segment your audiences by how much they know about you
2 – Use a central theme around a problem you solve combined with a pivotal activity (like a seminar or workshop) to build out a full quarter of activities.

And of course, if you need someone to help coach you through this process, call us.

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