You have a great product to promote, but you’re not sure where to start. The best place to start is by creating a marketing plan. A marketing plan includes figuring out your business identity, determining who your competition is, who your target audience is, what your unique selling proposition is, as well as a way to quantify all of the above. Then it includes deciding what marketing channels you’ll use and what methods you’ll use to penetrate those channels.
You’ll need a separate marketing plan for each channel:
Search Engine Marketing
Social Media Marketing
Content Marketing
Email Marketing
Pay Per Click Marketing
Authorship
Speaking Engagements
Joint Ventures
Events
Affiliate Marketing
Contests
Each type of marketing you plan to do needs its own plan, and it will likely include more than one of the channels above. For instance, if you have a contest, you may use many of other ways to promote the contest, which is really to promote a particular product or service. You may write blog posts about the contests, social media updates about the contest, mention the contest in a webinar, and so forth.
Don’t just think about the marketing plan; actually put it in writing. It can be just one page. For instance, let’s write a marketing plan for your 12-week course on “How to Create a Widget.”
We’ll create an awesome sales page that allows the purchase of the product.
We’ll include great product information and so forth for our affiliates, who will be excited about the new product and ready to go the moment the sales page is live due to your pre-launch emails to them educating them about the new product.
We’ll go to our affiliates and customers and ask for testimonials.
We’ll interview three people about how the widget solved their problems, post them to the blog, and post an announcement about them to our email list. Each interview points to the sales page.
We’ll create testimonials from the three interviews and put them on the sales page.
We’ll write six blog posts educating our audience about the problem the widget solves, linking to the sales page.
We’ll write a social media update about the blog posts.
We’ll send out six emails discussing the problems the widget solves, linking to the sales page.
We’ll encourage people to sign up for our newsletter on our blog and social media to learn more about How to Create a Widget.
Put these actions into a calendar, such as Google Calendar, or a calendar you made in MS Excel so that you know exactly what day you will do each thing that you’ve decided to do. Be very specific with your calendar so that you can easily go to each day and do the tasks listed and/or hand them off to a contractor. The more carefully you plan each step of your marketing plan, the more likely it is to get the results that you want! Time to make some plans
When you think about this clearly, you see that planning your marketing supercharges your chances for marketing success. In case you need a better understanding of what to do, I have a video library that you can utilize from anywhere to increase your understanding of digital marketing.
Tracey Lee Davis, founder of ZingPop Social Media, turns busy small business owners into online marketing rockstars! A social media expert and Certified Partner for Constant Contact, she coaches entrepreneurs in how to grow their business using social media and provides total management for their email marketing campaigns. Tracey Lee is also a featured speaker for associations and business groups. She is a 2022 Silicon Valley Woman of Influence, Alignable's 2022 Local Businessperson of the Year for San Jose as well as a Top 25 U.S. Business Mentor of 2021, a Certified Content Marketing Strategist, and the Co-Owner and Vice President of the Women’s Networking Alliance. She also really, really loves cheese.