Your First-Ever Marketing Plan

Your Marketing Plan is the CORE of your business idea.  Business idea questions

You MUST be absolutely clear about your business idea.  You need to have answers to all of the following questions and be ready to defend this idea against skeptics (like your Mentor):

1. Who is your target customer/client? Be very specific.
2. How many sales are possible in a period of time (month, year)? What is the average sale price?
3. What percentage of these sales MUST you have to be profitable?  This is an estimate, not a computation.
4. What about your product/service is attractive to this target?
5. What makes your offering different from all the others they can buy?
6. What is your competition?  How successful are they?  Is the market big enough for many such players?
7. Why does your target buy?  What is their primary motivation to get a product/service similar to yours?
8. Why does your target NOT buy?  If they are deferring purchase, why?
9. What methods are existing competitors using successfully to close business.  Can you do same, or better?

How do you find the answers to all these questions?

There is a lot of work to answering these questions fully.  You have to immerse yourself in the business you are planning to enter.  There are lots of resources that can help you, but nobody can do this work for you!

Resources:

1. Google and other Internet sources.  Wikipedia is a good place to get started understanding your target industry or market.
2. The ‘Yellow Pages’ lists businesses in categories.  This is a great place to find your competitors.
3. Classified ads in local newspapers will often list items similar to yours, Call the sellers and find out what they are selling, how much, and how they are marketing.  At this point you are just gathering information, so don’t say too much about yourself.
4. Craigslist is similar to classified ads.
5. Ask your friends and family about what they buy related to your product/service – They may be quite frank about the good and bad of similar offerings, and you need to listen carefully to them.
6. There are all sorts of market and business studies available online.  Many are available for a nominal charge. You can often read copies (free) at a public library or at a business college library.

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