You have a great product to promote but you’re not sure where to start. The best place to start is with creating a marketing plan. A marketing plan includes figuring out your business identity; determining who your competition is, who your target audience is, what your unique selling proposition is, as well as a way to quantify all of the above. Then it includes deciding what marketing channels you’ll use as well as what methods you’ll use to penetrate those channels.

You’ll need a separate marketing plan for each channel:

Each type of marketing you plan to do needs its own plan and it will likely include more than one of the channels above. For instance, if you have a contest you may use many of the other ways to promote the contest, which is really to promote a particular product or service. You may write blog posts about the contests, social media updates about the contest, mention the contest in a webinar, and so forth.

Don’t just think about the marketing plan, actually put it in writing. It can be just one page. For instance, let’s write a marketing plan for your 12 week course on “How to Create a Widget”.

Put these actions into a calendar, such as Google Calendar, or a calendar you made in MS Excel, so that you know exactly what day you will do each thing that you’ve decided to do. Be very specific with your calendar so that you can easily go to each day and do the tasks listed and / or hand them off to a contractor. The more carefully you plan each step of your marketing plan the more likely it is to get the results that you want.

When you think about this clearly, you see that planning your marketing in advance supercharges your chances for marketing success.

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