You don’t run your business without a plan. You shouldn’t be running your marketing without a plan either. Unfocused marketing can lead to consumer confusion and ultimately loss of profits.

Understand Your Customers

If you don’t know your customer demographic you won’t be able to target your advertising. While untargeted advertising will certainly get seen, it will not be seen by the eyes of those most likely to convert into customers. Sure, you may pick up one or two customers who happen to see an incorrectly categorized advertisement, but you’ll get many more when you target appropriately.

Presenting Products, Services or Promotions

Once you’ve figured out to whom you’ll be marketing, you have to decide what to market. This will be influenced in part by what your customers are most likely to buy. You’ll also need to consider what you in stock or what you want to be chosen first. You’ll also need to consider if you’re going to present your products and services or offer promotions such as contests and giveaways.

Balancing Your Budget

An annual, over-all, budget will decide what you spend per year on your marketing. You’ll want to develop monthly budgets as well. Some months, such as holiday months, may benefit from more financial investment. Also to be considered is where you’re going to spend your marketing money. Print media, radio and video can have a initial out lay of cash. Online advertising and social media marketing can look inexpensive, and sometimes they can be, however, it take manpower to create those advertisements and manage those accounts.

Delivering the Message

This is when all your research pays off. Delivering the correct message at the right time will be very beneficial. Optimal delivery can even boil down to the time of day that your message is delivered.

Good research combined with a strong plan should have all your components of your marketing working together. For example, a radio advertisement which points listeners to a social media sight where they can see and purchase your products.

Tracking Your Results

Tracking your results tells you from where your customers are coming. Once you know that, you can adjust your monthly budget to fund the marketing tools which are most effective for you. Online marketing often comes with analytics available which will tell you a variety of things. Use this information to further narrow your customer demographic so that you’ll continue to get a high return of investment. Print media ads can have discount codes or you can simply ask ‘Who referred you?’ to gather demographic information.

Planing your marketing will lead to success where on effort builds upon another to create a greater whole then all the parts combined. The last thing you want are some wildly scattered fliers and some random tweet that confuse people. Planned marketing gives a clear, concise message: Buy here, now.