Identify the Product or Service

Why will people buy your product? Focus on 1 or 2 items that distinguish you from your competitors, quality, convenience, and price; whatever is the most important to your customers. Define your market and position your product. Who are your customers? Where are your customers? What type of marketing will reach your customers? How will you price your product? One method is to pick a price and watch what happens. The market will tell you if you need to make an adjustment.

Identify how you fit in your Industry

Identify your strengths and weaknesses and the opportunities and threats that could impact your business. Do not ignore reality; everyone has weaknesses; identifying them is an opportunity to fixing the problem. Focus on the ones that you can change. Recognize opportunities that can come up and define how you plan to take advantage of them. Be aware of possible threats, including economic conditions, changes in legislation, trends and technology.

Market Goals

What are your goals? Concentrate most on your early goals, but also define goals for the future. Write down your short term goals – where you will be in the next 30 days to 6 months; your mid-term goals – what things are like in 6 months to one year; and your long-term goals – your achievement in 1 – 5 years. Don’t bother to set goals any further ahead than this for now; goals will likely need to be adjusted when you see how things really go.

Strategies and Tactics

How will you accomplish your goals? What do you have to do to set the wheels in motion to move toward your short-term, mid-term and long-term goals? What actions and strategies must you employ to be successful?

Create Measuring Devices

You need to set deadlines for reaching certain milestones to be used in determining if you are on track in meeting your expectations and accomplishing the goals that you have set. This way, you will know if you are moving far enough in the right direction to do what you have set out to do.

A great marketing plan is the key to your success. It is a document that you prepare for yourself to refer to often. Simple is better; make sure it is clear and concise, easy to read and easy to comprehend.

Bill Bartmann has over 40 years experience in business; he has built 7 businesses in 7 industries. Bill Bartmann’s Billionaire Business Systems is an online course that describes, in detail, how to create a Business Plan, a Marketing Plan and a Loan Proposal. Bill Bartmanns program walks the entrepreneur on a path to business ownership, from getting started to growing and expanding a successful business. Visit http://www.billionaireu.com to learn more.

you can even begin to put together a plan for marketing your business, you have to know the 3 main building blocks of any and all of your marketing activities:

1. Know who you’re marketing to

Who are you marketing to? Who are you trying to sell to?

Who is your message and marketing communications directed to? What is the personality of your potential customers? Who are the ideal clients for your service and products?

Who your target group is dictates everything in your marketing plan from your specific goals and objectives, to what marketing tactics you choose to reach that target audience.

If you don’t know who you’re trying to reach, then you won’t be able to create a marketing plan. How can you incorporate strategies and tactics that specifically target someone if you don’t know who that “someone” is?

2. Know what problems you’re solving

What is the issue or concern that frustrates your prospects and clients? What’s not working for them or could work better? Why does your target market need your services or products?

If you don’t know what people need, then how will you figure out what solutions your products and services can provide? If you can’t figure that out, then you’re not much use to your prospective customers!

When you’re clear on what problems you solve, then you can create a marketing plan that includes tactics and strategies that capitalize on these problems. For example, you can identify specific forums, websites, newsletters, magazines that talk all about the same kinds of problems you solve.

If you don’t communicate that you know your target group’s specific problems, your prospects won’t take notice of your marketing communications, which of course means they won’t buy.

3. Know what solutions you’re offering

What solution can you provide to alleviate your target market’s problem? What will your customers experience from working with you or buying your product? What are all the ways that your product or service helps your client? What are the actual results?

Your marketing must answer the question of “What’s in it for me?” for your prospects and customers. When you know the exact solution and benefits your business offers, you can clearly communicate and demonstrate the value of your service and products, and what people stand to gain by doing business with you.

Your marketing plan will have tactics that showcase your solutions – such as offering teleseminars that outline your solution-oriented product or service. Or you may add joint ventures to your plan that focus on adding to the solutions you offer by partnering with someone with similar services/products.

Once you are clear on these 3 components, then you’ve got the foundation that will make doing a marketing plan much easier and quicker.

Do you want to enjoy MLM success from day one? This is essential for your survival. How to do it? Have a marketing plan, and stick with it. Read on to find out the 6 most important aspects of your marketing plan and how do put them into practice.

1. Be in profit from day one.

This will allow you to expand your business, and it will boost your motivation. If you cannot be profitable, change what you are doing. There is a misconception: If I spend more money, it will work. Business does not work that way.

Your profits come from selling your products to retail customers. Initially, this is your focus. Retail customers give you a much higher ongoing commission than distributors, and they are easier to recruit. Adding distributors comes easy later, once you are profitable in this first step.

2. Find a target market for your product.

To sell your products, you need to find people who are looking to receive the benefits of your product. If your company has an entire line of products, focus on the one that you like best. Become an expert on what this product can do for people, for example boost energy. People who are low on energy are your target market.

3. Write a compelling message for your market.

Once you have identified who is your target market, you write a compelling benefit message for them. It must be so strong that he cannot but say yes. For example, you may ask him: “If you could have back the energy of a 20 year old, would that be of value to you?” Realize that you are competing for his attention with a host of other messages that are constantly bombarding him.

These three steps do not cost you any money, yet they are the most important steps that you have to take, and they are the basis for everything that you do.

4. Deliver your message in the most effective way.

To deliver your message, you need to use a simple, inexpensive and effective tool. It must be simple, because you don’t want to spend a bunch of time and money to master an advanced tool. It must be inexpensive, because you want to get into profit quickly. The telephone meets all of these requirements. Free teleconference lines help you to deliver your product presentation 24/7 without expense. Learn how to use the phone; it is the basic tool of choice for all successful network marketers.

5. Measure your results and find your winners and losers.

Now that you have your market and your message, you can begin to measure the results. How many people listened to my presentation this week, and how many bought or signed up? Use these statistics to improve your message constantly. To make a profit, you absolutely need to know what the return is on each of your activities. Find the winners and the losers.

6. Manage your activity, focus on the winners.

You cannot manage time, but you can manage your activities. Do more of the winners, drop the losers. If being on the phone with targeted phone leads makes you more money than hotel meetings, drop the meetings and spend more time on the phone.