Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Top Ten Affordable Marketing Strategies

By Linda P. Motyon

Affordable marketing strategies provide focus within a marketing plan. They are not specific marketing activities or tactics. Instead they guide your selection and use of tactics.

The marketing strategies listed here are affordable because you can do them with just a little planning and research.

Affordable Marketing Strategy 1 - Choose a Target Market: Your first affordable marketing strategy is to choose a target market. Every other marketing strategy requires first knowing who your best potential customers are.

Affordable Marketing Strategy 2 - Discover The Best Appeals For Your Target Market: Once you've selected a target market, you need to learn as much as possible about its members. Knowing demographics like age, education level, occupation type, gender and race, reveals many other characteristics, and their values, concerns, attitudes, information needs and media preferences.

Affordable Marketing Strategy 3 - Do A Competitor Analysis: Your next strategy is to recognize and learn about the businesses and products that compete with yours.

A table works well for recording your competitors, along with the weaknesses and strengths of each. Make a column for each competitor and a row for each benefit or feature. Then use minuses to note weaknesses and pluses to note strengths.

Affordable Marketing Strategy 4 - Decide What Makes Your Business Different: After completing your competition table, add your business to it. Record your strengths and weaknesses, looking for a characteristic that is strong for you but weak for your competitors. This characteristic is your best selling point. It's what makes you better than your competitors.

Affordable Marketing Strategy 5 - Establish A Marketing Goal: Now decide what you most want to accomplish with your marketing. This is your primary marketing goal. It should include how you can best communicate your distinguishing characteristic to your target market.

Affordable Marketing Strategy 6 - Select Objectives To Meet Your Goal: Your marketing objectives lead systematically to your marketing goal. They are the steps to the destination where you want your marketing efforts to take you.

Affordable Marketing Strategy 7 - Create The Key Message Or Slogan For Your Marketing: You should be able to communicate your distinguishing characteristic as a benefit for target market members in one concise sentence. Keep working on it until you get a strong phrase or sentence that will leave a lasting impression with your target market.

Affordable Marketing Strategy 8 - Determine The Media That Your Target Market Uses Most: Your target market research reveals this information. Using it, design messages that work best for the media and your target market.

Affordable Marketing Strategy 9 - Implement Your Tactics: Your tactics are the specific marketing actions that you take to reach your objectives. You should decide on tactics based on your target market analysis to assure effectiveness.

While you're taking action, keep records of all the tactics that you use, how much you spend on each, and the results of each.

Affordable Marketing Strategy 10 - Evaluate How Well Each Tactic Worked: Using the records from strategy 9, evaluate how well each tactic performed so you can repeat the effective ones and eliminate the ineffective ones.

These ten marketing strategies used together are not only affordable, but will save you from wasting money on ineffective strategies.

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