What is Marketing? Do I Need A Marketing Checklist?

Marketing is the commercial process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods, or services, that will ultimately satisfy and hopefully delight a customer. Why is it important to have a marketing checklist?
Consciously or unconsciously, every one of us does render some service or another, maybe even an idea. So why do such a high percentage of companies fail? Well in most cases, the problem lies not in the idea or service itself, but in the cultivation thereof.

Let’s try and analyze where most businesses go wrong:

Most small businesses don’t have an effective marketing plan.

Successful businesses thrive because most people in the organization are aware of where the business is going. The business is a result of one person’s vision with the help of all employees or subcontractors, the company as a whole is dedicated to seeing that vision through.
A Marketing plan helps to achieve this kind of focus and when used effectively, it will ensure that the business is able to adapt to today’s dynamic business environment and changing customer needs.

They tend to confuse Sales with Marketing.

One important fact to remember is that Sales is a direct byproduct of effective Marketing. The objective of sales is to increase revenue that the company generates by distributing products and services, none of which would be possible if the consumer of that product had no information on which to base their purchase. Although it is important not to confuse the two, Sales and Marketing tend to work hand-in-hand, ultimately driving sales.

“We don’t need marketing, we’re a small company”.

That should be that exact reason as to why a business does need to have a marketing process. No business owner wants to remain the same size forever and to just keep breaking even. But the only way of changing that is to be proactive, know what the market is, where its going and where you fit in.

A good place to start is to create a SWOT Analysis. In a business context, the SWOT analysis enables organizations to identify both internal and external influences.

Need some inspiration? There are several SWOT images available to help

• SWOT Analysis Examples
  

YOUR MARKETING PLAN:

Perhaps that’s one of the primary reasons why franchises are so popular. They present a very detailed plan for just about every aspect of running a business. But if we are talking about internet marketing, it’s going to take some time and effort.

So, what do you really need for an effective digital marketing checklist?

Your plan (checklist) is a sort of road map to help you define and reach your goals. A good way to start your business plan is to think of where you want to end up, then start working backward from there. What steps will you have to take? How much will you make? How will you make it? How much will you invest? What marketing methods will you use to promote your online business? Answering questions like these will help you make a good marketing checklist.

The questions you ask are important. Try to think of as many aspects of your business as you can. And when answering, be as detailed and specific as you can. In fact, if you find you are giving vague answers, take that as a sign that you need to give your marketing checklist more thought.

After you complete a SWOT Analysis, start on your Sales and Marketing Goals:

Remember that sales and marketing work together, but will have distinct and different plans.

You should also divide your plan into short, medium, and long-term goals. This will help you to stay on track as your business grows.

You should be ready to make revisions to your plan as needed, but don’t make those changes lightly. However, your business is going to grow, and you won’t be able to predict how things turn out with 100% accuracy. So you need to be able to alter your plan if the situation warrants it. Remember, your business plan isn’t written in stone and is there to work for you, not against you. The key is to continue to test and refine your marketing approach.

Your Marketing Checklist Should Include:

Step 1: SWOT Analysis

• Strengths (include your Unique Selling Proposition and Customer Perceptions and Brand Attributes)
• Weaknesses
• Opportunities 
• Threats

Step 2: Sales Projections (long and short-term goals)

• Distribution methods (Direct or Indirect)
• Pricing Strategy
• Be Specific with the How

Step 3: Research: Who is Our Target Market?

• Demographics (age, gender, income, household stats, location, occupation)
• Persona (Personas are fictional, generalized characters that encompass the various needs, goals, and observed behavior patterns among your real and potential customers. They help you understand your customers better.)
• Psychographics (Where do they hang out? What do they believe? Interests? Opinions? Values?)

Step 4: What are the Best Ways to Reach Our Target?

• Traditional Media (Radio, TV, Brochures, Catalogs, Packaging, Point of Sale, Direct Mail, Outdoor, Indoor, Trade Shows, Networking)
• Digital Media (Keyword strategy, Social Media, Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing)
  • How to choose the best keywords for SEO? 

Step 5: Sales Strategy (Budget, Methods, Timeline)

• How are you going to increase sales over time (increased sales from current clients, increase the number of new clients, increase the price, increase the offerings, etc.)

We’re going to grow 10% over the next quarter is not a good sales projection. We’re going to grow 10% over the next quarter by doing X, Y, and Z is much better.

Step 6: Analyis (ROI, Market Changes, Growth)

• How do different methods of marketing compare over time compared to sales. Make sure to factor in overall industry and market growth or decline.

Start with an Inbound Marketing Plan Checklist:

Since 2006, inbound marketing has been the most effective marketing method for doing business online. Instead of the old outbound marketing methods of buying ads, buying email lists, and paying for leads, inbound marketing focuses on creating quality content that pulls people toward your company and product, where they naturally want to be.

Contact us if you’d like us to create an inbound marketing plan checklist for you.

The post What is Marketing? How to Create a Marketing Checklist appeared first on Platform Creator.

We get a lot of web design questions from our clients and people who call Platform Creator. Where do I start? Do I need several different domain addresses? What is web hosting? If you have a business in Dallas, Fort Worth or any metro area, chances are there is a wealth of freelance web design, SEO and brand strategists near me and you. In addition, there are several free online marketing tools that can help get you started with your online platform.

However, if you’re on a tight budget, here’s a free step by step web design resource that utilizes several professional tools and answers many of these web design questions. Even though we, at Platform Creator, are in the business of serving our web design and video production clients, we understand that not every business or individual has a large enough budget to launch a stunning website.

Nine Web Design Questions.

1). What change are your trying to create? Why is this critical? It’s important to know the reason why you are creating a website in the first place. This will determine your strategy for how it’s designed and on which platform it will be designed. A website should help accomplish many things. It should help you: build trust with whoever visits your site, get found, inform, engage, tell your story and differentiate from others. 

2). What platform should I use to have my website created? Many of the top websites in the world use WordPress. It’s where a large pool of talented web developers create and exchange ideas and tools to best bring businesses from a brick-and-mortal presence to a well-designed graphical representation of their brand online. Here’s another resource to help you determine which website platform to use.

3). Who is your persona? Not just age, income and gender demographics, but dig a little deeper into who your typical customer is. As an example: ‘What does their typical day look like?’, ‘What do they value most?’, ‘Where do they go for information?’, etc. Some of this information can be gathered through Google Analytics. Other info can be gathered through surveys (online and in store) and online research.

4). Once you find out who your ideal persona is, how are your going to develop your website (design, content and functionality) to create a positive user experience and to accomplish your goals? 10 Quick Fixes to Build Killer Landing Pages

5). How often will you need your website updated? This is were local talent comes in. It’s fine to work with someone outside your trade area, but it’s helpful if they understand your market. What’s good for web design in Dallas may not cut it in New York. But, it’s convenient to have a face-to-face meeting on occasion.

Consider price, quality and timing. Normally, you can have two of the three (low price, high quality, fast turnaround). If you want it done fast and at a low price, often the quality will suffer. If you want quality work and at a low price, it might not happen as quickly as you’d like. However, if you’re willing to pay the standard $100 – $175 an hour to keep your website properly maintained and secure, you should expect quality work with a fairly quick turnaround (24 – 48 hours, depending on the complexity of the request).

6). Are you using your site as a lead generation tool? If the answer is yes, it’s best to engage a digital marketing agency or freelancer who has multiple capabilities such as: building lead generating landing pages, designing your email marketing campaigns, marketing to and engaging your ideal persona with social media tools, optimizing your website with an effective SEO strategy and measuring progress through Google Analytics.

7). How will you know if it’s working? Creating your online platform is much more than just building a website. You are competing with hundreds or possibly thousands of other companies online who have had an established online presence for many years. It takes time, at least six to nine months, to make even a small impact online. Of course, it depends on your digital marketing budget.

If you don’t have that kind of time or thousands of dollars to spend on your monthly digital marketing budget, you might want to start with a free website builder like Wix or Strickingly. Are you trying to generate sales or donations online? What’s your baseline for sales now and by what percentage do you expect your sales or donations to increase. Consider times of the year and doing a year over year comparison.

8). How long before you lose patience? As mentioned in number 7, building an audience online takes time and money. Set reasonable goals, possibly a 10 – 15% increase over 6 – 12 months, depending on your ad budget.

9). Who is responsible for messaging? Are you hiring an agency to compose your story or are you handling this on your own? Does your content have good flow throughout each page (reading like a story)? And a bonus question, does your messaging help you accomplish your goals in question 1? Is your content telling your story in an engaging way, with keywords for effective SEO and does it help differentiate yourself from the competition? The message map below can assist you in getting started with your content strategy.

Help For Creating Your Message Map

Platform Creator is a Dallas Ft. Worth area web design and SEO company that also provides video production, social media and SEM services. Give us a call with your web design questions or email us if you are interested getting started with your online platform.

john@platformcreator.com

972-672-8805.

The post 9 Critical Web Design Questions appeared first on Platform Creator.

Since day one, the general game hasn’t changed. Pick out key words and phrases in which you want to rank and build content around those keywords. Each new indexed page is a new way for potential clients to find you on search engines. But, if you haven’t upgraded to a mobile responsive website you are being penalized by Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. and more importantly your clientele is likely thinking, ‘they’re old school’.

So, you were an early adopter who is now a late adopter of new mobile technology. What to do? How much do I need to spend to update the website and start adopting some inbound marketing principals to attract new traffic to my website and nurture and engage potentially new clients online? It could range from $5,000 to $25,000 to get started. However, there are huge pools of talented content marketing resources to help develop your online content and effective inbound marketing campaigns are available for as little as $2,500 monthly.

We’ll cover more on inbound marketing in our next post. Want to connect to talented low-cost free-lance talent to help you get started? Email us at john@platformcreator.com.

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Do you have a system to attract new people to your website? Once them come, do you have a system to convert them and turn them into advocates?

You’ve heard the saying, ‘What you don’t know won’t hurt you’.

We challenge that notion. There are a lot of opportunity costs with that mindset. Drifting at sea with your marketing plan can be costly.

Is what you don’t now know really what’s keeping your online platform from performing better? Maybe – maybe not.

There’s an awful lot we don’t know. The maze of Social Media; the plethora of information about it that bombards you when you enter the realm can be overwhelming. It comes at you in the form of “here’s what you’re missing and need to learn right away. This is stuff you don’t now know, that you need to know to make your platform successful!” It makes sense to want to know more, but it can also become an endless chase – and a Marketer’s dream! The only apparent antidote in this scenario is to know what you don’t know, but how can you know that for sure? It can become a bird chase.

In his book, “Happiness is a Serious Problem”, Dennis Prager refers to “The Missing Tile Syndrome.” It describes our obsession with what’s missing, and the fact that we don’t notice the ceiling tiles that are there – just the holes where there are none. We assume that what’s missing from our lives is what would make us happy, if only we had it. Don’t get caught up in this mindset with your online marketing and the creation of your platform.

You must go with what you now know. Don’t be like the baseball pitcher who only practices his windup.

There are often just a few basics you need to know to make the best of your situation, or your online platform. These are the ‘old saws’ like:

• Hard work – there is no replacement! Of course we have to work on the right things, but nothing happens until the work begins.
• Have a system – you won’t know what’s working if you are not systematic about your approach.
• Diligence – sometimes it just takes time. Be like the ant – keep at it!
• Interaction – your prospects and followers are not just a crowd. Get to know them.
• Think for yourself! (This applies only if you want to create something original.)
• Adjust your approach based on the results you get.

There are always a half dozen things that make 90% of the difference. Don’t overlook the basics. We suggest you focus on the half-dozen that YOU think might work for you and then watch for a while and see what happens.

And, if you don’t currently have a system in place to harness your hard work, start with a simple inbound marketing program. It’s important to create an inbound marketing plan or the leads coming to your website will be one-timers. They will check you out today and will be gone tomorrow, maybe never to return. You may only have one shot.

Inbound marketing is a system that analyzes the way people learn about products and services leading to purchase decisions.

It’s a shed of advanced tools and processes used to attract qualified leads to your website and turn them into happy customers. Advocates only become that way through a nurturing process.

Want to know more about how to create an inbound marketing system, turning leads into customers and customers into advocates? Drop us a line below.

What you don’t know has been hurting you. You have dozens of leads coming to your website every day.

Leaving leads unattended is like loading a container ship with your precious cargo headed to the South Pole.

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