Welcome. This is Jane Gardner and welcome to the business of our home business, where we’re talking about the HomeBizStartup TV, where we’re going to be talking about how to start, run and grow home business. And today we’re going to be talking about subjects that are of interest to anyone who wants to run a business, so I’m Jane Gardner, and let’s get started. I’ll be telling you about this show right about now. Welcome. Hi, I’m Jane Gardner, and this is Solopreneur Success Strategies, and today it is Strategy Sunday where we talk about strategy and your business plan and your goals and your vision for your business.
So today we will be talking about your marketing plan and how you can add it to your business plan. But right now, I should probably tell you who I am.
And here I am. I’m Jane Gardner. At my website is Jane -Gardner dot com. And I work with my husband in our structural engineering firm for the last 20 years in western Canada and still working there as well. I’m out here on the Internet for the last three years seeing who I can help with their business. So let’s get started on talking about strategy Sunday. So Strategy Sunday, it’s all about the visions for you and your business, your goals, your one year, three year, five year goals, we looked at that before and we’ve been looking at you and your business plan for the last four weeks as well.
We’ll be looking at the business trends and how they’ll affect what your strategy for your business should be in the coming years. Some major changes, some minor changes, but there’s always changes in on the Internet. So you always have to be able to adapt. So let’s go and. I talked about as well, we talked about the diverse business model. Where you put several layers of revenue income sources coming into your business so that you’re not only dependent on one product or service so you can have different values for your product, you could either have this similar business model to this one where you have free option at the bottom and then you have a two hundred ninety seven dollar product or a ninety seven dollars product and then a four point ninety seven dollars product and then nine ninety seven dollars product.
And at the end you could have a ten thousand dollar product or service that you could do for the year so that you’re having multiple forms of income and revenue obviously coming into your business. So you’re not always dependent on one type of revenue. So we talked about that and you can go and have a look at some of these previous discussions at http://jgtips.com/youtube on youTube on my YouTube channel. I have Solopreneur success strategies and they have the various shows.
I have mindset Monday on Monday, Tuesday to get your message out Tuesday about brand and your messaging. Wednesday is about your customer. Thursday is about skills and knowledge you need as a solopreneur. Friday is about the free software and tools you can use in your business, and Saturday is about the systems you can put in your business to free up your time. So we also discussed what kind of business model you might envision if you were online to match your goals for your lifestyle business.
Before you can decide on your business model, you have to decide on what you want your lifestyle business to be in terms of your goals and visions for the business. The business model should work with your lifestyle. You don’t make your lifestyle fit the business model because obviously if you try and do that, it doesn’t fit and it all falls apart. So we are always talking about when we talk about a business, a lifestyle business. So you have to decide how much time and how much.
Money and et cetera, that you want to put into your business in terms of what kind of business that you can have. So then we talk , started to talk about what is a business plan and why do you need one? It doesn’t have to be complicated. You can map out your goals and your action plan and your financials for the year, and you just don’t use it for funding or get your business organized. You can just use it every year and adapt it and change it at the beginning of the year.
Depending on what you see you’re doing. That’s wrong. You can change and go in a different direction. And in a business plan, you have the business model description, which we already discussed, your unique value proposition, your business goals. We’ll be talking about marketing plan today. And then you have the action plan and your financial forecast and budget. And if you can put that together as a document, that will make it easier for you to get funding or just to help you steer you in your direction on your business.
I have a offer to help you work on your business plan at http://jgtips.com/plan, where we look at what is a business plan and how to pick your model of your business and determine the obstacles you face and how to implement your business plan as well. Of course, putting in your marketing plan and your unique selling proposition.
So let’s have a look at our business model, sales and marketing plan.
So when we’re looking at our business so we know what type of lifestyle business we want to have, we also have to know about who our customers are. And so we’ve done some research and we didn’t discuss that because that’s on another section. And but you just have to work with looking at what your end result is that you want with your marketing plan. And of course, you don’t try to do everything. So there’s a well known marketer whose favorite quote is “Hope is not a marketing plan.”
You can’t just pick a marketing strategy and hope that it’ll work. Instead, you need to put together a detailed marketing plan at which you lay out your arsenal of strategies for meeting your business goal. This isn’t a comprehensive list of daily tasks. It’s a high alert level breakdown of each tactic. Do you want to use in the process you put in place to implement? So so what you do is you start with your business model and of course, you’ve been outlining your business model and how it’s going to work.
You’ve already looked at your target market. You’ve looked at where your customers are coming from and you already know what they buy and what they are interested in buying. So you have to go and then look at everything of that and then describe the key features of your product and where your customers are coming from, whether they’re coming from organic search, paid search, offline sources, affiliates or referrals. And you should also know what your prospects buying triggers are.
When do they make a purchase decision? For example, it could be from a product review, a personal recommendation from an expert they trust through surfing content sites, through email suggestions, et cetera. So you sort of have to know roughly what they are interested in order for you to market because you want to make your marketing efficient. So looking at your business plan, what is the most popular marketing tactics used by your competitors and how do they convert from prospects to customers?
For example, do they use sales pages that lead to freebies that put prospects into an email series? Do they have regular webinars? Do they have straight SEO and traffic generation? Do they have joint ventures and affiliates that help sell the business? Do they have referrals? Do they use paid traffic or are they using social media to get their prospects to come and buy their product? So you have to know your business model on a fairly detailed way in order to figure this out.
So you need to have done your research on your target market.
But whether or not you have all this information, you should always just focus on one strategy to start test it out and then see if it’s working and then add more strategies or if it’s not working, then go on to a different strategy and try that one as well. Always be testing your different marketing plans and strategies. So you just pick the easiest one to begin with marketing and get moving. You just use an easy tactic you can use. It doesn’t require a lot of thought and planning.
For example, you could create an autoresponder series that starts every time a person signs up for that list. It’s a passive form of marketing that requires almost no attention and it can start planning out more campaigns. So in order to do your marketing plan, you have to start looking at the steps involved and what are their activities you need to complete in order to implement and maintain each strategy. So what you need to do is put these steps into a priority order and process you can follow.
So which steps are dependent on others? Which ones need to be completed? First, you can even use a mind map to lay out a vision of the PRocess, which makes it easier to move things forward. But basically you have to start at the end. What is your outcome that you want and then work backwards to see what are the steps you need in order to get your prospect to a customer, whether it’s a sales process or the marketing process which gets them into the sales process.
So you have to make sure you establish metrics for measuring each strategy success and set deadlines for achieving it. Step in your marketing plan. And so it’s dependent on a specific timeframe. So put deadlines on your calendar and set these dates in stone so your marketing plan dictates what actual tasks do you need to do from day to day. So if you need to set your emails up in daily intervals, then you’ll need to put the outlining writing of these emails down on your to do list every day.
Just don’t expect that everything’s going to work exactly as you planned and certainly don’t expect everything to get done as quickly as you expect. So just focus on one strategy at a time and set some deadlines and implement it and then test it and see if it works.
So this is a very general overview of looking at your marketing sales plan, but to be honest, I think if you think about your marketing plan and what the result is that you want the outcome, you start at the and work backwards, that will really help you to put together your sales and marketing plan in terms of how you want people to go through your business and buy your product or service. So if we put that down into your business plan as well as the other things that you’re having put in there, then you can go on and you can work on the action plan.
But for today, that was the marketing plan, hopefully gave you some ideas on what you should do for your marketing plan. And this is, of course, Strategy Sunday. And that was me. And here I am again. So hopefully that gave you a rough idea of how you can do a marketing plan. Obviously you need to start at the outcome, see what you want it to be, and then you work backwards from there. But of course, you also have to know what your research tells you about your target market and your business model and your what your customers are buying and what your competitors or strategies are that are successful and how you can compete with that and differentiate from that.
So they now you can add that into your action plan, so next week we’ll be looking at your action plan and how we could put this all together to make your business plan for the year. And, of course, after that, its financial forecast and budget. But today, we looked at your marketing plan. So this is Jane Gardner. And if you want to look at some of the previous episodes for Strategy Sunday, please go to my YouTube channel at http://jgtips.com/youtube and subscribe.
Your Marketing Plan within your Business Plan – what is it all about , who , what ,when and where will you be marketing with your business to be successful http://jgtips.com/plan [Previously Recorded]