Getting Better Results from Marketing
Improve results and work smarter with the resources you have available.

What comes to mind when you think of marketing? For many of us, it’s jingles, tag lines and branded images that companies use to reach their audience. But even something as seemingly small as a logo is the result of a much larger, behind-the-scenes marketing effort. Effective marketing requires an end-to-end approach--from establishing goals and target audience, to measuring results and refining activities to be more successful the next time around. With each new marketing cycle, you can improve your results and work smarter with the resources that you have available.

But what if this is all new to you and you don’t have a marketing plan in place? Or maybe you have a plan, and still aren’t sure of what actions you need to take to reach your goals. Here are five steps for a successful marketing plan.

1. Research and understand the market, your customers, and competitors. What are trends in the marketplace, what are your competitors doing, what are your customers responding to?
2. Identify your target audience, and define the value-proposition for your offering. Why should your targets be interested in you and your offering? Make the proposition clear and simple—something that can be stated in one sentence.
3. Develop a plan to reach your targets with measurable goals. Make them SMART: Sensible, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-specific. Do you plan to attract new customers or increase the average sales for existing customers? Get specific – by how many, how much?
4. Implement that plan through a set of actions and allocate sufficient resources, in both effort and dollars. How will you attract customers or increase sales? Will you place ads in new media, run a direct mail campaign, build a prospect list, or launch a promotion?
5. Measure the results of those actions, learn, and adjust your marketing efforts. Did you reach your goals? Can you attribute successes/failures to specific actions? Can you establish new goals more confidently based on what you have learned?

When you establish goals, develop actions, and measure results, you become more knowledgeable about your market and your customers. With each cycle, learn from these results and tailor your actions for the next marketing effort. Over time, you will become SMARTer in setting goals, and applying your efforts and resources on actions that are more likely to yield positive results!

Vida Tamoshunas
C4 Marketing Solutions
49 Hunters Run
Pittsford, NY 14534
585-385-3884
tamosh@frontiernet.net