Writing a Marketing Plan for Your Home Based Business

Whatever type of home based business you are operating will undoubtedly benefit from a well crafted marketing plan. In fact, it's very likely your business will not survive without a marketing plan. Often self employed folks have a rough idea in their head about marketing matters but fail to turn these thoughts into an effective marketing effort. Writing a marketing plan can focus your ideas and give you a playbook to refer to as you carry out the marketing campaign for your home based business.

Here's a simple outline you can use to write your own home business marketing plan.

1. Objective. In this section of your marketing plan clearly state what the purpose of your marketing effort is within a specific time frame, with specific goals you want to achieve. For example, your objective could be to increase sales of a certain service by 30% in the next ten months.

2. A message. Here you want to clearly articulate what it is you want to tell the marketplace about your business identity, your product, or your service. Clearly defining the following areas of your business will help you choose your marketing tactics:

Product / Service: For example, business XYZ offers top quality desktop publishing services.
Price: For example, business XYZ offers competitive prices and strives to provide good value for our clients.
Place: For example, contact business XYZ at 555-1234, through our website, e-mail, text message, etc, etc.
Promotion: For example, business XYZ is most flexible at meeting your publishing needs.
Position: For example, business XYZ can get your materials ready for publication with the quickest turn around in the area.

Clearly defining your product, price, place, promotion, and position you can help you decide how to position yourself in the marketplace and what message you need to send prospective customers.

3. Getting the word out. In this section of your marketing plan clearly state what marketing media and materials are best to deliver your message and what your budget is for delivering that message.

For example: Business XYZ will run weekly advertising in the local paper, offer a finder's fee to current customers for new customers they send our way, develop a direct mail campaign, and build a website to highlight our skills and services. We will commit X amount of money to this marketing effort.

4. Track your successes and failures. Marketing is an ever evolving and ongoing endeavor and you must constantly adapt to changing economic conditions and customer tastes. Be sure to track your successful promotions and continually monitor the effectiveness of the media and methods you use to get your marketing message into the public mind.

Feel free to play around with this marketing plan outline and adapt it to your business. However, if you find that you cannot answer the questions posed by this simple marketing plan you very likely should do more marketing research and give more thought to marketing before you begin your business.

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