A Practical Marketing Plan for Busy Entrepreneurs
The world’s shortest marketing plan is not Kelly Odell’s, referenced at Guy Kawasaki’s blog. And with all respect to Guy, his version 2.0 is not actually a practical marketing plan template. A better alternative is Becky McCray’s over at Small Biz Survival. And ever since I read this post, I’ve been calling her system “MR. CoG.”
There are four parts, representing the letters in the acronym MR. CoG:
- What is your target Market?
- How will you Reach them?
- How much will it Cost?
- How does it integrate with your business Goals?
What is your target market?
Before anything else, you have to identify who your market is. Be specific, as specific as you can. You want your offering to stand out to your customers. And you want your customers to stand out to you. You may have multiple target markets. If so, you need a strategy to reach each. And that’s part 2.
How will you reach them?
Find as many ways as you can to reach each market. Consider:
- Cold-calling prospective customers
- Search-engine and website ads
- Websites, blogs, and podcasts
- Participating in on-line forums
- Giving interviews
- Mini-courses and white papers
- Email newsletters
- Podcast ads
- Giving away a book, CD, or DVD
- Direct mail
- Meeting with prospective customers
- Newspaper and magazine ads
- Radio and TV ads
… and anything else you can think of.
You want to start with inexpensive channels. Use these to refine your message before spending the big bucks. You want to convert visitors from one channel to others: from a blog to opt-in email, then to direct mail. And vice-versa. You want to be able to contact them multiple times through multiple channels. And you want to be able to market to them again and again various offerings they may be interested in.
How much will it cost?
Not only should you have some idea of how much it will cost to reach each customer, you should also know how to measure how much it will cost. You want to determine with as much detail as possible how much each marketing channel actually is costing you, per customer and per dollar of sales. You should also know which customers are more valuable to you, and how much you can expect these customers to buy over the long haul.
If an ad costs you $2 per dollar of sales over the lifetime of each customer, that’s no good. You need to improve the ad or pull it. But if you discover an ad that for every dollar you put in, it brings you $10 in sales— You’ve found a money machine. You probably want to find every dollar you can get your hands on and stuff it into the money machine for as long as it continues to work.
How does it integrate with your business goals?
Again, this is more than mere prescription. You need to know what you expect, but you also need to know how you will measure reality and compare it to what you expect. You’ll need to revisit and readjust this as you get this real-world data. Know what resources you will need, and at what times. How much money will you need to spend on how many ads in which medium? Will your sales force be able to make enough calls, respond to enough emails? How many calls and emails do you need?
There’s a lot there.
This is a brief, overly simplistic overview to a goldmine of useful ideas. In the future, I hope to explore how software entrepreneurs can use MR. CoG improve their careers and home businesses.
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