Marketing Strategy
5 Online Marketing Strategy Questions That Must Be Answered
There are many people who offer online marketing services. There are also many people who call themselves online marketing experts because they know how to:
- Build a WordPress website
- Implement search engine optimization (SEO)
- Set up your Google Places page and other local business listings
- Develop an AdWords campaign
- Send out an email marketing campaign
- Create a Facebook Business Page with the new iFrames landing tabs
All good stuff and important. But do these experts know marketing? Can they help you determine:
Which online marketing components are the best options for your business?- Who your target market is and how to best reach them?
- How your customers search for your products and services?
- What strategies (see diagram) are needed and which activities will be the most practical and successful given your time and resource constraints?
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Mission, Vision, Goals, Strategies and Tactics
Planning Your Road to Success
One of the things I do for my clients is simplify marketing so it eliminates confusion and enables the business owner to focus on what is important. But there is always a part of marketing that stresses many small business owners – i.e. determining their mission, goals, strategies and tactics. These concepts are important in order to develop a plan that focuses you on what is important to help you succeed.
Mission vs. Vision
Mission (purpose) = defines why you are in business and what you are doing now.
Example:
Masterful Marketing partners with small business owners as their trusted marketing advisor to help them achieve success by learning, incorporating and executing marketing strategies and programs that take their business from mediocre to marvelous.
Vision = defines what you want your business to be or be known for. It’s useful to develop a 1, 3 and 5 year vision to ensure you can progress to where you want to be through well defined measurable steps:
Example:
One year: By December 30, 2010, Masterful Marketing will be offering quality information products in addition to coaching services that make up 20% of the overall revenue for the company.Three year: By December 30, 2013, Masterful Marketing will be recognized as one of the top three marketing brands for small businesses in the United States.
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Tags: business vision, marketing goals, marketing tactics
Surprise – The Secret to Exceeding Expectations
We just returned from our vacation in Aruba. We’ve been there many times and own a timeshare at the Marriott Surf Club. We go to just get away and relax – no site seeing, no golf – just reading, sunning, swimming and oh, yes a bit of gambling at night for entertainment.
Of course, no great trip would be complete without a marketing experience blog post upon my return!
We went for dinner at the Sunset Grill at the Radisson Hotel, our usual spot for our anniversary. In response to a joke by the waiter about the dangers of the extremely large steak knife, I mentioned it was our anniversary so my husband need not worry about the size of the knife.
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Tags: customer experience, customer service, exceeding expectations, relationship marketing
Small Business Marketing Plan
You search the web for “marketing plan small business” and you get terrifying results ranging from marketing plan templates that are too cumbersome for small business owners to articles such as the one from Microsoft called 5 easy steps to create a marketing plan where the 5 steps they list are 1) position your product; 2) tap your braintrust; 3) listen to your customers; 4) draft the plan and 5) track results.
Hm, thanks for the help.
Then you wonder why small business owners run for the hills when they hear the term “marketing plan” and never really grasp what they need to do to attract new customers and clients and grow their businesses. And although I’d love to give you a magic 5 steps to a winning marketing plan, it just doesn’t work that way.
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Tags: marketing action plan, marketing tactics
Law of Attraction in Marketing
Why are business owners gun shy about selecting a target market?
You can’t appeal to everyone, so why do business owners continually drive themselves crazy trying to work with clients they just don’t connect with? When you identify people or businesses that you just love to work with, you enjoy your work more and you can focus on providing greater value. But I realize going through this exercise is painful because you still believe that doing so will limit your ability to grow your business and you will “leave money on the table”.
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Tags: ideal client, law of attraction marketing, target market
Updating Your Brand
Will the Change Help or Hurt?
A former client of mine that I’ve worked with for quite a while decided to update their brand. They had talked with me about it while I was there helping them out as they looked to hire a VP of Marketing. They had recently received VC funding and they were planning some much needed expansion of the marketing organization. My assumption was that they would refresh the image but keep the fundamental style, as after four years, their brand had an awareness in the computer security market.
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Resolve to Achieve Your Goals
We’re two weeks into the New Year and I bet many people have already broken one of their New Year’s resolutions! Personally I stopped “resolving” to do things a long a time ago because for me, resolutions only resulted in some type of failure.
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Marketing Execution – Plan, Execute, Track, Measure
Marketing your business has four stages: plan, execute, track and measure.
Four Stages of the Marketing Execution Process
If you haven’t had a marketing plan in the past, we’ll start with a review of last year so we can see how you did. Can you directly attribute revenue to your marketing activities? If so, which ones gave you the highest return? Don’t know? That’s ok – we’re looking forward to the New Year, not into the past. From this point on you will plan, execute, track and measure on a regular basis so that there are no more year end surprises.
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Tags: marketing execution, marketing planning, marketing process, marketing review, marketing roi, return on investment, tracking marketing activities
Domain Names = Business Asset
I recently had the pleasure of wrestling a new client’s domain name and web site from their current developer. It is not a pleasant experience but when you ask the developer to make changes and nine weeks later they haven’t even returned a phone call, something has to be done.
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Tags: business assets, internet presence, website domain
What Makes Your Business Different?
Introducing your business to a prospect can make many small business owners break out in a cold sweat. When they ask the dreaded question, “So what makes you different from the others?”, you hesitate, stutter, or worse, look like the proverbial deer in the headlights. And on top of that, the totally sweaty, pasty look just doesn’t do anything for great first impressions.
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