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Everyone knows that having a marketing plan is crucial to reaching customers and attaining more sales, but how do you make the best plan for your business? Follow the steps below to create a simple plan to reach a wider and more targeted audience!
With a limited marketing budget, it is necessary to create a list of specific, actionable, and realistic goals that you want to achieve within a certain time frame. An example goal is to boost attendance and traffic to your online garage sale by 10% by the end of the year by using more social media posts through Facebook, which is one of the many ways to make money on the side in addition to your primary job. Having a set list of one to two clear, precise, and reasonable goals makes it much easier to create a plan based on achieving those goals.
After creating your goals, it is then important to think about how to reach your audience. The most common goals involve increasing sales, customer reach, targeting new customers, and launching new products. All of these goals require an audience to be successful. A great way to start is to segment your audience, which involves dividing your target audience (people who would be interested in your product, such as all bike riders for a new bicycle) into groups with similarities such as needs, location, demographics, or interest (customers only interested in road biking versus customers interested in mountain biking). This process helps you break a large pool of potential customers down to a few specific groups, which enables you to then select the segment that is most appropriate for your product or service. This process can be complicated, so using machine learning tools to process this large amount of data more precisely and quickly can be a great way to expedite market segmentation.
After identifying the best and most specific target audience to reach, you can then move to planning the actual promotion and customer outreach part of the plan. The best methods to use depend on your target audience. If you are selling a flowery-scented new perfume, your target is likely segmented by demographics, such as sex (female) and age (younger people aged 18-25). The best way to reach this younger audience is through social media, which is a great low-cost way to launch a promotional campaign. However, if you are selling a boat, which is often sought after by seniors, then social media is not the best option since older customers are less likely to be active online. Instead, it is more effective to use traditional marketing such as newspaper, billboard, or direct mail promotion to reach this audience segment.
Overall, to make the best marketing plan, it is important to start with precise and realistic goals, identify your target audience segment, and then think about the best promotional methods to reach that target. If you did not meet your goals, you then can revise your plan and identify points of improvement for next year!
