Building Your Marketing Plan - Step One

I thought you might enjoy my monthly column as it appears in Mark Stuckey's The Stuckey Report, a monthly e-newsletter from SixCities.com...

STUCKEY REPORT - July 2008

Since we are past the halfway point of the calendar year, it isn’t too late to start thinking about your marketing strategy for 2009. With today’s column, I will begin a seven-part series on how to construct your new marketing plan. This series will conclude in January.

The first step in developing your marketing strategy is market and competitive research. The essence of this step is to understand the following: do people want what you have to sell? In most marketing strategies, this step is never taken. And that’s why most small businesses fail. You can have a great marketing message, but if people don’t want what you have to sell, you will fail.

What information do you need to know? Are there parts of the market that are underserved? Is there enough opportunity to be profitable? How much market share do I need to break even? To turn a profit?

And what about the competition? Are there too many competitors to be competitive? And what are my competition’s weaknesses? Are there enough weaknesses to position myself accordingly and succeed?

As you learn about the final six steps, you will understand the value of this first step. Too many entrepreneurs launch their business with NO clear understanding of the market or their competition. Thus, they are flying blind – which makes the rest of their marketing effort less effective.

Todd Schnick is the president of the Intrepid Group LLC (www.intrepid-llc.com), a small business marketing firm. You can find his small business marketing blog at http://intrepidgroup.blogspot.com!