Is the 1st step in a marketing planning?

Start by researching your target audience. What do you want to achieve through your marketing? What will drive you to achieve the business objectives you described (hopefully) in your business plan? Maybe you want to achieve 40% customer retention over the next year or increase wholesale sales by 30% over the next 12 months. Don't try too hard with too many marketing objectives. Decide on some high-priority objectives that will allow you to focus on them.

The first step in developing a marketing strategy is to define the need. If other suppliers have defined a need, your task is to develop a strategy to convince the customer that your product is better than that of the competition. Witness the fast-food war as an example of competition for consumers with a defined need. Being the first to market can give you an advantage, but being the most effective at addressing that need will lead to success.

This way, you'll boost your marketing efforts, serve a wider audience, and generate higher revenues. Small Business Marketing Tools is a collaborative site for sharing best marketing practices %26 strategies and introducing low-cost marketing tools %26 resources for small businesses. Creating a marketing plan for the first time may seem like a complicated process, but it's actually very simple. Once you determine who your customers are and gain information on how, when, and where they are looking for companies like yours, you need to identify marketing techniques that will effectively address them.

You'll have to really get into their minds to be able to adapt your marketing strategy to the one that best appeals to them. Since the marketing planning process is likely to take place in all departments and needs a little collaboration, it opens up communication between departments and unifies the organization. In addition, you'll also have to review old reports to see which marketing tactics worked and which didn't. The essence of a marketing strategy is how to use the 4 P's in response to your market research to achieve the marketing objectives you've set for yourself.

Through the planning process, you'll be able to establish reference points and create a roadmap for your marketing strategy to achieve business objectives. By continuously refining your marketing efforts, you could find yourself with new tools and techniques, incorporate new ideas from different team members, and challenge your standard operating procedures. Ideally, allocate between 7 and 15% of your company's revenues to your marketing department, but it's not a one-size-fits-all rule. The market research you carry out will drive the decisions you make when deciding your marketing strategy.

Precisely because of that, you need to invest a great deal of time and effort in creating a solid foundation for your marketing plan. Each single panel offers a large number of custom widgets that allow you to track marketing KPIs and each marketing objective. Once you know the market (target audience) for your product, you can start making decisions regarding your marketing combination, which is a combination of the 4 P's: product, price, place and promotion.