Four Steps to Writing Your Marketing Plan - Part 4

Welcome to Part Four!

At last, the final part of your marketing plan process is here! Instead give yourself smaller chunks to do at a time in order to keep the task at hand from feeling daunting. So happy writing!

What is your conversion method?

Once you have a potential customer interested, what will you do to convert them into a paying customer? Using methods like updated sales scripts once you get someone to talk to you in person or on the phone or using abandoned cart emails to entice browsers to come back can help your ROI exponentially. Sometimes it is along the lines of streamlining the checkout process, personalizing all customer touchpoints, or finding out why your potential client/customer didn’t move forward with a survey.

Retention Strategy

While always gaining new customers is great, a sign of a great business is repeat customers. I have a client that uses my photography services for all of her family's major life moments. That is not only the biggest compliment I can receive, but also means I am providing a service she needs, and making sure it is quality. What are you going to do to keep customers coming back for years to come?

Increasing ROI per transaction

ROI has been mentioned many times in these blogs. For those that don’t know, ROI means return on investment. The jist of this section is how you will upsell or cross promote other products or services (if you have them) to increase your ROI per transaction. If you spend $10 on advertising to bring in a customer who is purchasing $50 in product, you have made $10 (if you don’t include any other costs for the sake of this example.) What can you do to increase that sale from $50 to $75, $100 or more and therefore increase your profit?

Financial Projections

The biggest thing any investor is going to want to know is what your expenses of any of the above will be and what you expect the result to be. Like my example above of ROI, what do you expect your marketing efforts will being in.

Analytics

You need to detail out what you will use to measure if your results are effective or not. If you did x, then y happened - was it what you expected, worth repeating, or do you need to shift. If you spent $500 on radio advertising, did you receive 30 new customers who spent $100 each? Or did  you receive only 1 customer who spent $50? Make sure you are detailing out how you will track where your customers are coming from (meaning you need to be asking for every transaction!!!!), and how you will measure how your marketing is doing

Executive Summary

Your executive summary doesn’t need to be long at all. This is just a summary of the overall plan. And even though it is first in your marketing plan, it doesn’t get completed until you have written the rest of the marketing plan. Why is that? As I mentioned it is a summary of everything else you have written, and that is hard to do BEFORE you have everything written out. So write this out after you review your plan, and place it at the start of your marketing plan.

Conclusion

Now that you have the jist of your marketing plan, what are you waiting for? Jump in. There is no right or wrong way. The marketing plan for your business is based on what is best for YOU and YOUR business. Plug away, I can’t wait to see what you do!