Have you completed or started your business plan for 2019? Have you included your marketing plan and your marketing budget in that plan?
I am never surprised when I meet a business owner and ask if they have a marketing budge. Should I be? Probably, but guess what most business owners don’t have a business plan and if they do, most don’t include a marketing plan and therefore, most don’t have a marketing budget.
But, in today’s, noisy world where businesses are clamoring for consumers’ attention and bombarding them with messages on Social Media and Text of “Buy From Me”, “You Need This” etc., marketing is more important than ever. It is through the right marketing that businesses will connect with their customer and ENGAGE them in experiences that matter.
Marketing Is Misunderstood
If marketing is so critical to business today, why is it overlooked or undervalued by so many? The way marketing has come to be defined and executed is to blame. Marketing has been reduced to customer acquisition and retention. These days, what most people consider marketing is really simply advertising. Search, email, content, and other common forms of marketing today are primarily methods for generating or maintaining awareness or repeat purchase. They are the “announcements and persuasive messages” referred to in the American Marketing Association’s (AMA) definition of advertising, and their intent is to “inform and/or persuade” people. (via Forbes)
However, marketing is more than simply pushing sales messages out to anyone who can read them. Marketing is about developing your niche, understanding your customer, and how your product or service fits into customers’ needs, wants, values, and lives. Marketing is about building a customer experience that turns the offering into a solution. Once you understand and embrace how your product or service fits into this experience then marketing becomes more of a discipline in your company culture and less of a task.
So, when you sit down to write that 2019 Marketing Plan keep in mind that you are not doing it to sell, you are doing it because it is your guide to understanding, to have a clear plan for how to ENGAGE with your ideal customer; thereby, keeping you top-of-mind when they need your product or service.
