There is a well-known quote about marketing plans, which is: “Hope is not a marketing plan!”. You can’t just choose a marketing strategy and hope that it will work. Instead, you must create a detailed marketing plan where you determine which strategies to use based on your business goals. This isn’t a to_do list.  Rather, it’s a step-by-step breakdown of your plan and the process you will use to implement.

Start With Your Business Model

Not all marketing techniques work with every business model. You’ll l hear all sorts of wild ideas and so called “proven” tactics, but that doesn’t mean they’re the ones that will work best for your business and goals.  Begin by looking at your own business model by evaluating these key factors and characteristics:

• A description of your ideal customers
• Where leads will come from, such as organic search, paid search, joint ventures, offline sources, affiliates, etc.
• What are your prospective clients’ buying triggers? In other words, where or when do they usually make a purchase decision? For example, it could be from a product review, a personal recommendation, through surfing content sites, through email newsletters, etc.

Popular Marketing Strategies of Competitors

Now, look again at your business model and the most popular marketing tactics used by your competitors. How do they convert prospect into customers? For example,

• Individual sales pages that lead to freebies that put prospects into an email series
• Regular free teleseminars that include a special offer at the end
• Straight SEO and traffic generation
• Multiple joint ventures and recruiting of affiliates

Which marketing strategies will you focus on?

If you try to do several marketing campaigns at once, you might not find success with any of them. You’ll need to focus on one to start with. Test one at a time, evaluate its success, and then add more strategies into your marketing plan.

Try selecting the easiest strategies first. You should always have at least one easy tactic you can use that doesn’t require a lot of time and stress. For example, you can quickly and easily create an autoresponder series that starts every time a person signs up for that list. It’s a passive form of marketing that requires almost no follow up once it’s in place. Then you can start planning out more campaigns.