[As published in The Stuckey Report]
The final step in building your marketing plan is to fund it. By now, you have justified a need for your service or product, you have determined a niche, created an appropriate marketing message, determined how you will tactically deliver that message, and know how many qualified prospects need to hear that message.
Once you have completed these initial steps, you must budget dollars to fund your marketing program. And yes, you must spend money to make money. Unless your marketing plan legitimately calls for all prospects to be generated through networking, your marketing plan will cost money.
But by going through the previous six steps, you have created a blueprint by which you will spend marketing dollars very carefully. By determining exactly how many prospects you need to contact, you are now in a position to determine the ROI on your marketing budget.
Word of warning – you WILL need to adapt and adjust this plan over the course of a year. Market and economic conditions may force change – competition may force mid-course corrections. You never know.
But with this solid foundation in place – making these adjustments are going to now be easy to make. Why? Because you are following a map, and when doing that, it is much easier to see how to adjust your course. Good luck!
Todd Schnick is the president of the Intrepid Group LLC, a small business marketing firm. You can find his website and marketing blog at http://intrepid-llc.com!