Marketing Strategy, Business Plan Template, how to write a Business Plan

Marketing Strategy, Business
Plan Template, how to write a
Business Plan and business
planning advice to help you write
your business plans. use the
resources and free samples to
put your own business plan together.

 

Promoting Your Business

Many businesses wish to launch straight into this part of the planning process, without taking the time to properly prepare. You need to understand how the other parts all tie in together and how the industry is behaving prior to launching into promoting your business.

What you have now is that understanding. You are ready to plan your promotions strategy with a clear idea of who your customer is and what they want from you.

Promotions can be described as communication – what, and how, we communicate with our customer. As such, it tends to be more involved than other strategies, simply due to the dynamics of communications.

Before you plan how you are going to communicate to your customer, you must know what it is you want to say. Let’s have a look at the communication process.

  1. It begins with your message, which is ‘encoded’, or translated, via the promotion method you use.
  2. This is then ‘decoded’ or interpreted by your customer. This message is impacted by influences outside of your control, such as the customer’s friends and family. The message also has to contend with your competitor’s message being sent to the customer at the same time.
  3. The customer then responds to the message according to what response you want (visit to the store, making a phone call, etc)
  4. The process begins again.

Customer Communication Process
Click the image to enlarge it.

What is the message you want to say? For example, it might be about how great your product is, and how it will help your customer feel good about themselves. Don’t make the message long. Keep it sharp and to the point.

The Promotions strategy has six components in it. They are:
1. Advertising
2. Public Relations/Publicity
3. The Internet
4. Personal Selling
5. Sales Promotions
6. Direct Marketing

All of your promotional activity can be broken down into one of these categories.

As part of marketing and promoting your business, there is an on-going process that you will need to employ, using the components mentioned above. You will need to continually attract new customers, convince them to buy from you, and then convince them to buy again.

These areas are:

  • Building Brand Awareness – letting your potential customer know who you are and where you are.
  • Building Customer Trial - convincing your potential customer to sample your product or service.
  • Building Customer Loyalty – providing your customer with a reason to continue to shop from you.

Based upon your customer research already, you will be able to use these promotional strategies to tailor your message according to their behavior. In other words, you will use the right strategy to talk to a particular customer.

What we will do is look at each of the promotion categories separately. We will see how they can be used across the entire promotion process, and how Steve has used them in his plans.