Austin Texas Advertising | web design | SEO | SMO | SEM.

What is your product and/or service?

Can you prove your capability and that of your product, for example: Most valuable experiences which lead to satisfied customers, descriptive testimonials and certain references.

Who is your target Market or Who are your customers?

What benefits are you offering, or what problems can you solve?

Decide what you want to say and who you want to say it to.

Don’t try to say too much. Save some of your promotional story for other occasions. Select your supplier, a creative firm, and publisher. Meet with them to discuss your objectives, needs and budget. Make sure they understand your requirements.

Diversification Developing new products to sell which will allow your customers the full advantage of the power and fame of your brand. You must define clearly what you are providing to your customers in terms of individual products, or more appropriately, services. You should have one for each main area of business activity, or sector that you serve. Under normal circumstances competitive advantage is increased the more you can offer things your competitors cannot. Develop your service offer to emphasize your strengths, which should normally relate to your business objectives, in turn being influenced by corporate aims and market research. The tricky bit is translating your view of these services into an offer that means something to your customer. The definition of your service offer must make sense to your customer in terms that are advantageous and beneficial to the customer, not what is technically good, or scientifically sound. Think about what your service, and the manner by which you deliver it, means to your customer. In the selling profession, this perspective is referred to as translating features into benefits. The easiest way to translate a feature into a benefit is to add the prompt "which means that…". For example, if a strong feature of a business is that it is open around the clock, this feature would translate into something like:

"We’re open 24 hours (FEATURE!) which means that you can get what you need when you need it - day or night."

Clearly this offers a significant benefit over competitors who are only open 9 - 5.

Your service-offer should be an encapsulation of what you do best, that you want to do more of to meet your business objectives, stated in terms that will make your customers think "yes, that means something to me, and my life will be better if I have it."

Before reading much further about a Business Plan and Marketing, we would like to find out what type of web presence you are looking to have. Some of the same strategy for all websites applies, but to specifically understand your needs we have to determine what information you want to represent on the web.

Write Business Plan - include costs, resources and "sales" targets Your business plan, which deals with all aspects of the resource and management of the business, will include many decisions and factors fed in from the marketing process. It will state sales and profitability targets by activity. There may also be references to image and reputation, and to public relations. All of these issues require some investment and effort if they are to result in a desired effect, particularly any relating to increasing numbers of customers and revenue growth. You would normally describe and provide financial justification for the means of achieving these things, together with customer satisfaction improvement, in a marketing plan.

Quantify what you need from the market
Before attending to the detail of how to achieve your marketing aims you need to quantify clearly what they are.
How many new customers?

Limit of customer losses?

Sales values from each sector, Profit margins per service, product, sector, percentage increase in total sales revenues?

Market share required?

Improvement in customer satisfaction, reduction in customer complaints?

Response times

Communication times.

Write your Marketing Plan

Your marketing plan is actually a statement, supported by relevant financial data, of how you are going to develop your business. "What you are going to sell to whom, when and how you are going to sell it, and how much you will sell it for." In most types of businesses it is also essential that you include measurable aims concerning customer service and satisfaction. The marketing plan will have costs that relate to a marketing budget in the business plan. The marketing plan will also have revenue and gross margin/profitability targets that relate to the turnover and profitability in the business plan. The marketing plan will also detail quite specifically those activities, suppliers and staff issues critical to achieving the marketing aims

Market Penetration:Penetrating the market means selling to more customers within your target market segment
Instead of getting to 40% of the customers, you now "penetrate" the market to get 60%

usually this means trying to get everybody in the segment to be exposed to the product and requires intensive advertising

Sales values from each sector, Profit margins per service, product, sector, percentage increase in total sales revenues?

market penetration is found in using the Internet to sell an existing product to the same customers - the emphasis being on using the new and unique aspects of the net to sell "more"

Market Development:Selling more of the product to the same customers by getting them to consume more. Some examples include using the web to sell existing products in new markets is accomplished by having features on the web site showing how the product can be used by a larger range of people (than the previous narrower demographic), or instructions to give people ideas how to use more of a product so the company can increase sales through consumers increasing consumption.