You have a great product to promote but are unsure where to start. The best place to start is by creating a marketing plan. A marketing plan includes figuring out your business identity, determining your competition, your target audience, your unique selling proposition, and a way to quantify all of the above. Then it includes deciding what marketing channels you’ll use and what methods you’ll use to penetrate those channels.
You’ll need a different marketing plan for each channel:
- Search Engine Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Pay Per Click Marketing
- Authorship
- Speaking Engagements
- Joint Ventures
- Events
- Affiliate Marketing
- Contests
Each type of marketing you plan to do needs its plan and will likely include more than one of the channels above. For instance, if you have a contest, you may use many other ways to promote the contest, which as promoting a particular product or service. You may write blog posts about the contests, social media updates, mention the contest in a webinar, etc.
Don’t just think about the marketing plan. Actually, put it in writing. It can be just one page.
Example Marketing Plan
For instance, let’s write a marketing plan for your 12-week course on “How to Create a Widget.”
- We’ll create an excellent sales page that allows the purchase of the product.
- We’ll include excellent product information, information, and so forth for our affiliates, who will be excited about the new product and ready to go the moment the sales page is live due to your pre-launch emails to them educating them about the new product.
- We’ll go to our affiliates and customers and ask for testimonials.
- We’ll interview three people about how the widget solved their problems, post them to the blog, and post an announcement about them to our email list. Each interview points to the sales page.
- We’ll create testimonials from the three interviews and put them on the sales page.
- We’ll write six blog posts educating our audience about the problem the widget solves, linking to the sales page.
- We’ll write a social media update about the blog posts.
- We’ll send out 6 Newsletters discussing the problems the widget solves, linking to the sales page.
- We’ll encourage people to sign up for our newsletter on our blog and social media to learn more about How to Create a Widget.
Put these actions into a calendar, such as Google Calendar, or a calendar you made in MS Excel so that you know exactly what day you will do each thing you’ve decided to do. Be very specific with your calendar, so quickly go to each day, do the tasks listed, and hand them off to a contractor. The more carefully you plan each step of your marketing plan, the more likely it is to get the results that you want.
When you think about this clearly, you see that planning your marketing supercharges your chances for marketing success.
