To begin developing a no-nonsense marketing plan for your business, we start by evaluating your target market and competition. We inventory your current marketing efforts and review your customer database to get a good idea of who buys from you. We can even go so far as interviewing a group of your ideal customers to better understand what convinced them that you were the best choice for their needs. The goal is to determine the “how’s” of the way they come to conclusions – how they gather information, how they prefer to communicate, how they get information, how they make decisions, and numerous other factors.
Based on our overview of your target audience, we come up a handful of avatars that represent the typical attitudes, beliefs, and buying decisions of your target market. We will reference these avatars throughout the marketing planning process as well as the development of your web and identity design, copy, and calls to action throughout your website marketing collateral.
We also analyze your top three competitors and explore how they market to leads that could be yours. We examine what appears to work and what doesn’t based on our experience and knowledge.
If you already have a website, we’ll give it a thorough inspection and suggest ways to improve its usability (navigation), appeal to your target market, and improve your search engine rankings.
Once we’ve done all the research, we compile the results and provide you with a set of plainspoken recommendations to get more and higher-quality leads in your sales pipeline. We’ll work together in one or two work sessions to whittle down the recommendations into a plan that balances your sales goals with your resources.
You’ll receive a marketing Calendar with goals and target dates for implementation of your new strategies. What’s even better is that we break down each of your goals into manageable steps and flexible timelines to help you and your staff stay on track.
Your new marketing eCalendar integrates directly into iCal, Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar, and many other calendar software. What’s great about this is that your marketing tasks will be integrated with your other deadlines which helps you schedule your days wisely and protect time for your all-important marketing activities. Oh, and the eCalendar is totally customizable. Priorities shift as the year goes on and you’ll be able to reflect that in your schedule with just a few clicks.
With the popularity of internet-based applications, also known as cloud computing, there are a myriad Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) applications available to small businesses. Instead of paying an up-front licensing fee you get the option of paying an affordable monthly fee. The best part of cloud computing is the ability to work as a team from anywhere that you have an internet connection.
We strongly recommend to our clients to implement a CRM to track lead and sales-related activities. We are happy to provide recommendations of solutions based on your needs as well as set up the solution for you. We assure you that once you automate your sales process that your lead-to-customer conversion rates will increase.
We can implement any of the recommendations for you, or guide your staff through to completion. All along we’ll be in touch with you to either give updates on our efforts to attract and convert your target market into actionable leads or check in with you on your progress.
We also recommend that you evaluate your target market and marketing plan annually. Doing so will confirm whether your efforts are adapting to your market’s changing priorities and behaviors as well as economic, political, and technological changes. In these ways, our world seems to evolve more quickly than we can even keep up with. A less intensive evaluation will help you to adjust and stay ahead.
In our latest free white paper, you'll learn what your organization is really offering, why traditional marketing isn't enough, what really persuades your market and how to write a high-impact case study that sells. Download it.
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