Secret No. 15: How Organized Are Your Marketing Plans?

After you have read everything that you can about marketing (including these secrets).

After you have traveled thousands of miles in your “personal automobile university” (listening to educational CDs and tapes in your car).

After you have studied all of the information that you can find everywhere else, then it is time for you to write your marketing plan.

Gather all of your experience, education, and advice and decide what you will do to grow your business.

Begin by trying and testing your marketing ideas.

Use small and safe tests.

Estimate how long that it might take for you to see the results of your efforts by creating a marketing calendar to help to guide you along the way.

This road map will help you to see how overlapping plans and campaigns affect each other. More importantly, use your marketing calendar to track your results. This will allow you to see clearly which efforts were profitable and which should be discontinued.

Learn to keep each marketing effort that you undertake flexible. You will discover which efforts prove to be effective. You will want to use them again, expanding them into new geographic areas and markets.

“Important principles may and must be flexible.”
Abraham Lincoln

Unfortunately, you also will find out which efforts proved to be bad ideas, ideas that did not create measurable profit. These marketing efforts should be eliminated. Don’t waste valuable time and effort trying to fix them. Stick with what works or try something new.

On your calendar, use highlighter pens in different colors to indicate how long the results of each campaign should take.

If you’re a more “digital” type of person, there are many good computer programs and on-line project management to help you to track your marketing efforts.

These tools will make it easy for you to compare visually how the actual results measure up to your preimplementation expectations. This information will help you to “finetune” your ongoing efforts.

How flexible are your marketing efforts?

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