How To use marketing to Achieve Sales and Profit Targets

The marketing and sales plan must be at the heart of your business. Without it you will not survive. In very simple terms it describes what you are selling, why you are selling it, who your are selling it to, why they should buy it from you and how you will tell them about what you are selling. This is the marketing mix.

The main principle of any marketing activity is to understand that a customer or prospect is only interested in what you can do for them. Initially, they do not care who you are, how long you have been in business or the names of your senior executives. This means you must concentrate on the benefits they will receive from buying your products or services. By all means list your business features but only as a way of saying how you will deliver the benefits.

For small to medium enterprises, you do not need expensive mass media advertising. It can be a complete waste of money because you do not know whether or not it is working. Most SMEs need to niche their marketing activity. With niche marketing, or direct marketing, you control the marketing spend and measure the returns. For example if a 1000 piece mailing cost £500 and it generated 20 responses, each response costs £25. Convert one-third of the responses and each new customer costs £75. Simple maths. You cannot do that with media advertising unless it is a simple direct response (0800) type ad.

There is much marketing you can do for FREE such as:

OK it is not entirely free of expenses and you need to spend some time developing ideas. To be truthful most of these should be part of the every day way you do business. As a business owner and entrepreneur you are always spotting opportunities for promoting your products and services.

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