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Tried
marketing before and gotten poor results? Don’t give up! Rethink your
approach and try again. The single most critical element of your
marketing plan is defining your
purpose. What exactly is your product or service? Can you
explain it to someone in 30 seconds? If someone asks what you do and
you have to hem and haw, then you are in trouble. Also, remember the
planning stage. What is the goal of your marketing? To get 10 new
clients. . .or 50, 100, 1000? If you’re selling a product, are you
looking to gain new distributors, new wholesale accounts, or sell
direct to the public? If you don’t know what your real goals are, how
can you create the right strategy? How can you know if you’ve been
effective?
After you define your purpose, next you must define your target market.
You’ve probably heard this term before, but do you really understand
what it means? Your tarket market
is your ideal customer or client. Who is it exactly that you want to
reach? Why waste your time marketing to the wrong audience? If your
product was an herbal contraceptive, would you market it to senior
citizens who can’t get pregnant? If your service was extremely
expensive, wouldn’t you want your audience to be people who could
afford it? It’s not always that obvious though.
Did you take these two key steps before? Are you clear on your purpose
and your tarket market? Be honest! Many of you have not--or not
effectively, anyway. If you previously used advertising or
another marketing strategy and got poor results, don’t necessarily
eliminate that method. It may have been ineffective due to that fact
that it wasn’t reaching your target market, or it may have been bad
copy, poor timing, lack of an enticing offer, etc.
Experts agree that marketing isn’t something you can afford to give up
when you are experiencing lean times. You may have to employ strategies
that are less capital-intensive (and save certain other strategies for
when you have more of a budget), but there are always things you can
do. Many people make the mistake of cutting back on marketing at the
very time when they most need it. If business is down, you need to do
more than just pray that it will pick back up. In other words, you
can’t afford not to market your business. If you are new in business,
you must include marketing in your budget from the very beginning. You
should be able to allocate more as you get going--in other words,
reinvest in yourself as time goes on, putting part of your profits into
helping to expand your business over time. But even in the beginning,
you need some capital. It’s common to make the mistake of starting
something when you are not really ready. For example, you want to quit
your miserable job for the big corporation and become a massage
therapist. The first thing you’ll want to do is figure out how much
you’ll need to keep you going financially before your business can
support you. Save up some money first, so you can do it right!
Janice
Hughes and her partner Dennis Hughes publish The Share Guide, a
holistic health magazine & resource directory for Northern
California, and shareguide.com
a resource on holistic health for the online community.
Dennis
and Janice are experts on marketing--after having published the
magazine for 18 years, they have the tools to help you get the word out
about your holistic health business.
To
learn more about advertising in The Share Guide: click here
©
2007 by Janice Hughes, all
rights reserved
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