• Analyze what happened in 2007. What types of marketing did you do? How much did they cost? Did they result in new business for you? If so, how much? Did you get a return on investment of at least 2 to 1? If not, figure out why or stop doing that activity and try something else.
• Review your goals. Did you achieve what you set out to do over the past year? If not, why? Were they too lofty or not really relevant to what you were trying to accomplish with your business? Were your goals are S.M.A.R.T. goals – specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely?
• Evaluate your target market to be sure they are the most lucrative market you can go after. Is there a better Ideal Client for your business? Do you offer something unique that appeals to a more focused audience? Are you targeting a market that is too wide which results in your messages being watered down to the point where no one is hearing the value you offer?
• Review your core message for clarity and appeal. When someone asks you what you do, do you answer with a title? Does your message get a response like “really, tell me more?” or “I know someone who would benefit from that”?

Once you have this base information, work on your core message to grab the attention of your Ideal Client. Develop your 2008 marketing goals and the activities that will help you achieve them. Spend some time now putting your roadmap to success in place. Knowing what you want to do and how you will get there will help you make marketing easier to do more consistently.

Check out more articles on developing a marketing plan at the Vista Consulting Marketing Information area.

Masterful Marketing™ covers the important areas needed to make marketing work for your business. This service is structured in 8 sessions held via telephone, each providing practical advice and actionable activities. The sessions are scheduled over 8 weeks to make it easy for folks to apply what they’ve learned to their business and see the results. The program combines information, support and feedback to keep you going in the right direction.

We cover the following topics:

• Identifying your Ideal Client
• Uncovering your unique differentiator
• Writing your core marketing message
• Defining your vision and goals
• Selecting your marketing strategy and tactics
• Creating your brand image
• Developing your marketing materials
• Mapping out the marketing activities and budget

What you get:

• Eight (8) 90 minute tele-advisory sessions scheduled over 8 weeks to help you plan and market your business.
• The Masterful Marketing™ workbook with explanations, examples and room to work on your plan.
• Recordings of your sessions so you can participate actively and review the important information discussed later.
• A private web page to access all your program materials, tele-advisory audio recordings, plus a variety of downloadable tools, worksheets and exercises for developing your plan.
• Personalized feedback on your marketing materials with advice on how to make them more effective at reaching your Ideal Client.
• Copy of “Create the Business Breakthrough You Want: Secrets and Strategies by the World’s Greatest Mentors”.
• Unlimited email access to me throughout the program for questions on anything pertaining to marketing your business. You also get limited phone and IM access to give you a way to quickly resolve issues that keep you from moving forward.

Services range from private one-to-one mentoring to tele-clinics. If you are interested in finding out more about this program, contact me or visit the Masterful Marketing Web site and request an application for the program.

Knowing what you want your business to be in the long run (5 year vision is a good target) helps you keep an eye on the direction you sometimes get forced to take in order to make money. John Jantsch has an interesting post about What’s the picture of your business when it’s done? that keeping an eye on your vision. Is everything you are doing in your business helping you move toward your vision?

But once you have your vision, knowing what you want to achieve in the next 12 months helps you focus your marketing effort.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• What is your revenue goal for the year?
• How do you want your business to look at the end of the year?
• How many new clients you need?
• How many current clients you need to sell more to?
• What new services or products do you need to offer to achieve your business goals?

For example, you have a service that you sell for $1000. If you want to make $60,000 from this service in new business in 2008, you need 60 new clients over the year. Now break it into months and you need to close 5 new clients a month. Now your marketing plan can focus on getting you 5 clients or more a month, right?

Now let’s determine what will that take. How many prospects do you need to have in order to close 5 new clients a month? 10? 20? 50? Look at your history – for every 10 prospects, how many do you close? If you are not closing many, take a look at your:

• Target market – are you trying to sell to everyone and anyone? Have you selected your target and focused on your ideal client?
• Marketing messages – are you not communicating your value appropriately?
• Marketing strategy – are you wasting money on inconsistent activities that are not focused on your ideal client? If you know your ideal client, you should be able to figure out how to reach them with what marketing activities.

From this effort, you should be able to come up with what you need to do and how much it will cost. Lay it all out in a spread sheet in at least a quarterly format (revenue goals, marketing activities with associated marketing budget by quarter), and there you have it – a simple marketing plan.

Now do the same thing with revenue from current clients. What is your strategy to upsell current clients?

By breaking your marketing planning process into smaller pieces, you have a more manageable marketing task ahead of you. Even if the plan is simple, it will help you focus your efforts and know what it really is going to take to achieve your goals.

Choosing an ideal client allows you to target a more lucrative audience and develop messages with greater precision. The clarity you achieve in your messages about what you offer makes other businesses even outside of your ideal target more likely to call you, giving you the choice of whether you want to work with them or not. If you narrowly define your market, your messages are clear, your offerings are precise, and your marketing efforts are more effective, even to those not within your primary target market.

You will also find that ideal clients take less time, resources and energy to satisfy because they value what you have to offer.

Drew’s Marketing Minute has a great post about helping an IT Services company refine their target market. The thought process he uses to help them refine their target is a good exercise for every business owner to go through.

Once you define your ideal client profile, you can be more selective and weed out those clients and prospects that don’t fit the profile. The more focused you are, the more you will attract and retain those ideal clients that can help your business thrive.

Defining how you will attract and retain customers and how you can accomplish your goals within your resource limitations (people or budget) is a good exercise for all business owners. Writing your plan makes the goals and tactics more concrete, enabling you to stay on track and achieve results. Create a simple marketing plan that is followed, assessed, measured, and improved upon as time goes on. Unless you are writing a plan to attract funding, the following five areas of the plan are what you need to proceed:

• Defining your ideal customer (target market) – Think about the characteristics of your ideal customer – what is it you like about working with them and why?
• Understanding the competition and what makes you better (differentiation) – There are a lot of people who do what you do so what do you offer that others do not? What do your clients appreciate about what you do? Figure out what it is and lead with that difference in all of your marketing efforts.
• Knowing what you want to achieve with marketing (marketing goals) – Write down your marketing goals and make them specific. Pick one or two that are critical and make them the focus of your marketing efforts. According to statistics, if you write them down, you are 95% more likely to achieve them.
• Defining how you will reach your target (marketing strategy) – Pricing, packaging and promoting your products and services is the heart of your marketing plan. Look at all types of marketing activities that would most likely reach your target.
• Projecting the costs of the marketing activities (marketing budget) – Putting together a quarterly marketing budget for your business helps you keep track of what you need to spend on marketing without it getting out of control.

Here’s a marketing plan tool I developed to help clients put all the details of their plan in a single reference sheet. It reminds you of what you planned to do and keep you moving forward. Feel free to download it and use it but please let me know how it works for you.

Just as you need consistent fuel for your health, your business needs consistent fuel for its health and future success. Fuel for your business is leads, prospects and clients. Without demand generation, your pipeline eventually dries up and your business falters. I realize that sounds logical but sometimes it just doesn’t seem to resonate with business owners. I continue to see them spend money on marketing tactics that are not well planned and result in a disappointing return on investment. This type of behavior leads business owners to believe that marketing is an expense that is easily cut in difficult times. Just the contrary.

Small businesses need to think seriously about making marketing a consistent, long-term activity for their business, develop a plan and budget and stay on course. It’s the only way you can continually stay ahead of your competition and build visibility for your products and services.

I couldn’t agree more with John Jantsch’s Duct Tape Marketing blog post Are You Investing in Long Term Marketing?, where he discusses the types of seeds you need to plant and nurture in order to develop your business’s long term growth. Balancing the today with your investment in your business’s future is crucial to long term success.

Speak with your clients about how you can eliminate a problem, satisfy a need or provide them better results. Examine the work you have done for your clients and determine the different ways you have helped to resolve their challenges. Use that information to develop a list of all the things you think are valuable to your customers. This list can then be used to develop possible value propositions.

A value proposition is a clear statement of the tangible results a customer gets from using your products or services. Delivering value requires real understanding of what your customer wants to accomplish, the challenges they face, and what is important to them.

Your marketing materials can cover many aspects of value that you provide, but when you are meeting with a prospect, you need to focus on the one or two areas that you can best help them. As you ask them what they are looking to accomplish, listen carefully for those issues they need to resolve that align with your strengths. Then focus your discussion on how you can help them achieve their goals.

The results of this effort does two things:

• You win more clients where your value aligns with their needs
• You know more quickly when to walk away from a prospect that you can not help achieve their goals

In either case, you win because you only work with clients who truly appreciate and benefit from your products and services