How To Market Your Business: Building A Solid Foundation

How To Market Your Business: We All Need To Market

Every single business is faced with a very simple question. How do I make more business? It doesn’t matter who you are, you’ve either asked it in the past, or you’re asking right now. If not, you will. In order to market your business you must plan. If you don’t plan, I promise you will waste money. If you follow these tips you will have a stronger marketing plan that can be used in a variety of applications.

How To Market Your Business: 3 Steps To Planning

Step 1:
Decide your goal.
Decide on an actionable and measurable result. Do not be afraid of being specific. In fact, I encourage you to use numbers. Don’t be intimidated to make the numbers high either. Why? Because you need to know the result to know if it’s working.

Ex. Your goal is to generate 100 leads in the month of April. If you only managed to get 50, then you know you need to tweak the marketing plan. Something isn’t working, so don’t stop until you’ve reached the goal. Remember, aiming high can be a great motivator. Sometimes it’s even better to make unreachable goals. This way you are always pushing toward greatness, constantly reviewing, learning and making your system better.

Step 2:
Decide who is your target market.
You can use any number of ways to determine your consumer. You may have noticed certain clients have better budgets, some you may like working with more, or certain industries are accepting your proposals more. Whatever it is, I promise hiding within your current client list is a wonderful and valuable tool. That tool is the knowledge used to identify your target market for the marketing plan.

Think about it. Maybe you’ve noticed 90% of your business is brought in by 10% of your clients. Take that ten percent and make that your target market. You can break them down into industry, age, profession, job titles, literally anything.

Step 3:
Decide on a pain point of your target market.
Ask questions. You can go directly to your clients. Don’t be afraid to ask, “Why did you buy from me?” You will find interesting and useful information that you haven’t thought of before. Ultimately, you want to hone in on the client’s pain point and how your service helps them. Please, be unique. If you can’t find an answer that isn’t on wikipedia or is generic to everyone who is in your industry then think harder.

Ex. You should be able to say something like this: Your problem is (blank), and I can do more for you by doing (blank), which makes me unique from my competition.

If you can’t make the above statement make sense, keep working on it.

How To Market Your Business: In Summary

If you take the time to really get into the heart of these three steps you will have the needed information to start creating and implementing marketing strategies. Build a foundation, know your goals, know your market, and think about how you help the consumer.