Home | Business | Home Business

Six Steps to Preparing a Marketing Plan for Your Internet-based Home Business

By: Matthew Eigbe


Read More About Home Business

A marketing plan is a scheme for utilising the marketing resources at your disposal to achieve your marketing objectives. This definition is true for both internet-based businesses and offline enterprises. The structure of a simple marketing plan is also the same for online and offline marketing. In fact, there is no schematic difference between the marketing plan for a big business and the one for a small scale outfit. Only content differs.
There are six sequential steps in preparing a simple marketing plan. I will assume that you already have a product that you you want to sell. To make it real, let me take an internet marketing training programme that comes with a business opportunity as an example. It is now time for you to plan your marketing for next year.
Identify Opportunities
What you want to do here is to find out areas on which you will pay attention during the year. A practical tool often used for this exercise is SWOT Analysis. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. For Strengths and Weaknesses, you compare yourself, I mean your business or product, with the competition, and to see what Opportunites or Threats exist, you take a look at the environment in which you are operating. The business environment is often analysed into political, economic, social, technological. PEST for short. You may decide that in the next twelve months you are going to focus on those seeking jobs and career change.
What do you want to achieve?
This is what you want to achieve at the end of the twelve-month planning horizon. You could state this clearly as the number of recruits or the amount of money you want to make. It is also in order to state your objective as a percentage growth over the the year before.
How to Approach the Market
For a network marketer, the most important decision to be made here is the buyers you are targeting. From your analysis above, you have found that it makes sense to focus on job seekers and career changers. The second decision is budget allocation. Will you concentrate on a particular region or on certain times of the year. It depends on the facts you have about how the market responds to stimuli.
What are the elements
The standard elements of the marketing mix are four - product, price, place and promotion. As a network marketer, you are not likely to be concernd about pricing, distribution and the product itself because decisions in these areas would have been made by the company unless you are the owner of the product. Your burden is to place the right message about your offfering before the right people at the right time. Advertising and some sales promotion. The aim is to drive traffic to your website. And there are a number of options for doing this some of which are paid for and others free.
The Plan for Each Element
It helps clear thinking, accountability and efficient allocation of resources to draw up a schedule for each advertising activity stating clearly when it will be done, where it will be done and who will do it.
Making it happen
No matter the quality of your marketing plan, if it is not put into effect, no results will be achieved. And all the efforts poured into the planning process would be as good as wasted. Implementation is key. What is your take on this folks - a grade A plan with C implementation or a grade C plan with A implementation?

Article Source: http://depositarticles.com/

I have over two decades in offline marketing designing marketing mix amd marketing strategy for products and services but now makes a full living doing internet marketing. Click on this#1 home-based business on the worldwide web today to see what he does. Fill in your information in the box on the first page to get 3 FREE trainings. On the second page make sure to watch the Step 2 and 3 videos to learn how even Internet newbies are creating success.

Please Rate this Article

 

Not yet Rated

Click the XML Icon Above to Receive Home Business Articles Via RSS!

counter easy hit

Powered by Article Dashboard