Are you in charge of marketing where you work? Doesn’t matter if you work for someone else or if you’re a rocking solopreneur.

Don’t Believe the Marketing Hype

If a chunk of your job involves getting the word out about company products or services, you’ve probably seen marketing software or marketing agency ads that tell you how plentiful your online growth opportunities are. The ads are worded as if just because there are a lot of people online, you’ll nab lots of sales if you purchase their software or marketing services.

When I started my business, I fell for marketing promos like “Millions of people are on YouTube every day.” “Facebook has one billion users.” “More than 100 million people use Instagram.” I told myself that, with seven billion people on the planet, I could sell thousands of books.

More than 10 years later, and I’ve yet to find the magic wand that yields millions of sales just-like-that. Have you?

Marketing Takes Planning

Effective marketing calls for work, consistent work. It also requires the right marketing project planning actions. Marketing project planning stages should fit your organization, but may include:

Ask the right questions – Meet with product development teams to get answers to key questions. Find out why you’re developing a product or service. How much experience do you have in the area that you’re developing a new product or service in? Is the marketing curve for the product or service on the down swing? In other words, are you coming into the market at the optimum time?

Market research – You need to know how saturated your industry and market are. Ask an independently published novelist who published his first novel in 1995. Novels were easier to sell in the 1990s. Why? There weren’t as many self-published novels on the market as there are today. The book market is so saturated today that authors and publishers are giving books away.

More Project Planning That Yields More Sales

Value proposition – Write down your product or service’s value points. Examples of value points are convenience, safety, flexibility and reliability. If you enter a saturated market, go in with a well-defined marketing angle. Your product or service also better be completely different from similar products in the market on at least one point. Folks need to feel like, if they don’t buy your product or service, they’ll have to go without what they value. They need to feel as if they’ll lose if they don’t buy from you.

Market testing – Hold focus groups. Ask focus group members to use products or services you plan to market. Distribute score cards. Ask group members to use the score cards to indicate what they liked most and least about the products or services. Leave room for group members to offer suggestions and comments.

Start early – Marketing project planning starts before a product or service is developed. Going back to the novelist example, successful book authors and publishers start marketing new books at least six months before the books hit the market.

Are you in charge of marketing where you work? Doesn’t matter if you work for someone else or if you’re a rocking solopreneur.

More Marketing Planning Steps

Additional marketing project planning actions focus on the types of marketing tools that you’ll use. They also focus on timing and return-on-investment. We’ll cover these in the next article right here at Write Money Incorporated. Follow us or bookmark us to keep getting tips and advice on how you can get results when marketing your products and services.