Page 84 - Duct Tape Marketing

68 Part I: Getting Started in Marketing

The failsafe planning sequence

Successful business marketers follow the same lock-step marketing scenario:

1. Conduct market research. Doing so ensures that you know everything
you can about your customer, your product, your competition, and your
business environment. Follow the steps outlined in Chapters 2, 3, and 4.

2. Establish marketing goals and objectives. The previous portion of this
chapter is full of instructions on this step.

3. Set the marketing strategies and determine the marketing mix that
you will employ to achieve your objectives.

4. Choose your marketing tools and tactics. That’s what the rest of this
book is about.

Never, ever start with Step 4. In other words, never decide on your tactic —
whether to run an ad or hire a new distributor or take on a new partner —
until you know your strategies. Because when you know your strategies, you
know your objectives, which means that you know your goals, which means
that you know where you want your business to go.

Tactics follow strategies — not vice versa.

Budgeting to Reach Your Goals

To reach your goals and achieve your objectives, fuel your strategies with a
marketing investment appropriate to the size of the task at hand.

Realistic talk about small business
marketing budgets

Leaders of successful companies never say, “We’ll see how much money is
available and then spend it on advertising.” They dedicate funds in advance
because they know that without good marketing there won’t be any left over!

The most important commitment you can make to your marketing program is
to establish and stick to a budget. What is commitment? It has four parts:

ߜ Establishing a marketing budget
ߜ Spending the funds on a planned marketing program