Seven Questions You Must Answer Before You Create A Great Marketing Plan

By Author: daren cari
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Have you ever spent time and effort creating a Marketing Plan to then experience disappointment and frustration because it made zero difference in your business performance?

That may be because no one told you about the seven critical strategic questions that need to be answered in order to create a truly effective marketing plan. Here’s a quick overview of those questions.

Q1: What is your Ideal Client Profile and what is their Specific Unmet Need?
You need to develop a simple description of your Ideal Client and what they want. And ideally the “what they want” part is a need that they can’t get met someplace else.

For example here’s my Ideal Client Profile: English speaking business owners who are comfortable with the internet and who want a marketing plan that is designed specifically for small business and that’s actually proven effective to bring in new clients.

Another example from a client: Fast food restaurant owners in the Asia Pacific region who want to increase their sales and profits through smarter sales software analysis.

Q2: What’s your Bold ...
... Promise?
Another way of asking this question is “what does my Ideal Client have to hear in order for them to want to buy my product/service?”

For example: as a business owner which of the follow value propositions would you find more motivating?

“We show you how to grow your business”
Versus
“Increase your sales and profits by 50% within six months – or you don’t pay”

The second one is the hands down winner because it’s a bold promise, it includes a specific numerical benefit and it adds a guarantee. That combination is one Kick-Butt formula so take note.

Q3: Where do my Ideal Clients hang out?
Now you need to figure out what your Ideal Clients watch, who they listen to, what they read, which meetings they go to, which clubs or associations they are members of, which other businesses have them in their network, which websites they visit and what they search for on Google when they are looking for your type of products or services.

The reason is obvious: once you know where your Ideal Clients hang out then you can direct your bold promise to them with direct offers including free trials, special prices, bonus goods and so on.

Q4: What’s your Black Jellybean?
There is no such thing as liking black jellybeans. You either love them or you hate them.

Similarly, you need to figure out that what you offer, your Ideal Client will love and create/adjust/refine a product/service accordingly. And in creating something that your Ideal Client will love, probably means that there’s a whole bunch of people who hate it.

For example: in my business I work with clients almost exclusively on-line. My clients love the fact that they don’t have to travel to meet with me, that they are one click away from being straight back to work and that they don’t have to have me in their offices or factories.

Naturally, there are others who would work with me if only I would visit them face to face, three dimensionally.

And so my on-line strategy is a Black Jellybean - people either love it or hate it.

Another example: the Quick Beauty House offers 10 minute haircuts for $20 for women! For every 8 women who hate that idea there are 2 who love it. And in a city of fifteen million people that 2 out of 10 adds up to a whole lot of women!

Strategic Question #5: What will your Funnel look like?
Imagine a Funnel, wide at the top and becoming narrower as is goes downward. A Funnel represents a series of product/service offerings that are free at the top and then increases in price as you descend down the Funnel and its design is a critical part of any effective Marketing Plan.

As you can see the Funnel starts at the top with free stuff and as people descend down the funnel there are less of them but they are spending more with you.

All too often business owners are trying to sell that Core Offering Product without romancing, seducing and engaging prospects with great added value free stuff first.

You need to ask yourself what you can offer for free, that if a person grabbed at it, they would be qualifying themselves as a likely client.

For example: I offer a free Marketing Plan training course. It runs over 30 days and contains a complete step by step training system for putting together a truly effective Marketing Plan for a business owner.

I offer the training course for free because the prospect can get great value from me without having to risk anything more than a few hours.

I know that enough of the people who do that course will descend down to the next level of my Funnel and (wisely) accept my two month free trial offer for my Killer Marketing Club which is a great example of the “Easy Entry Level” product from the chart above.

And enough of the people who join the Killer Marketing Club will go on to invest in something else and so on.

Other examples and ideas for Free Added Value option: free trial period, free sample, free demonstration, free class, free added-value newsletters or Ezines, free check-up, free in-store tasting.

Patience + Free = Millions

Never underestimate the power of free!

Strategic Question #7: Which Streams will you tap into?
A Stream refers to a source of prospects. I’ve identified well over sixty different places that most businesses can get qualified leads from.

Your Marketing Plan needs to start off by listing at least ten different lead generation sources that you will start work on initially.

You take the one place that you think it will be easiest, cheapest and fastest to get leads and you put a system in place for getting your message out to that place and you then measure the results and when necessary, you refine the offer until you have a proven marketing system that brings in a predictable stream of new clients.

And then you do the same for the next system and so on until you have layered ten proven marketing systems on top of each other.

At that point you’ll have a flow of new leads and new clients.

Conclusion
If you want a proven, easy-to-follow, no-nonsense, step by step training system for creating an effective Marketing Plan for your business then head over to www.8020Center.com/FreeMarketingPlan/ and enrol today. It’s proven, it’s effective and it’s free.

Tom Poland started his first business 31 years ago and has gone on to start and sell multiple businesses including two which he took international. Since 1995 he’s trained over tens of thousands of business owners in almost every English speaking country in the world on how to get more clients and make more money by helping more people. In this article he reveals the seven strategic questions he asks business owners to answer when setting up their marketing plan. More training resource can be found at http://www.8020center.com/FreeMarketingPlan/