How To Write A Marketing Strategy

Unless you are planning to fail one of the most import things you can do for your business is write a budget for advertising and marketing. This will vary depending on such things as they size of your business, location, type of business, overhead, and so on.

Along with budgeting for marketing expenses is determining where you will spend that money. Let's take a look at how to write a marketing strategy for your business that could apply to just about every type of business there is.

- First of all what is your budget? A general rule of thumb is to spend 2%-5% of your gross on advertising. A new business may actually need to budget more as you will not have an existing customer base for repeat business and referrals. Just spending money does not assure success. Many business waste money every year on advertising that does them no good.

- Where are you going to promote? In the old days a business would run yellow page advertising and then compliment that with newspaper, direct mail, or radio. Today the internet has changed the way customers shop, so virtually every type of business has to have an internet presence of some kind.

- This starts with having a website. In place of a website many businesses are using a blog which is easy to update and set up. Along with a website should be a lead capture form to acquire your visitors contact information for future follow-up.

- Getting your name out on the internet is not as easy as it may sound. Pay Per Click advertising is the fastest way to become known. It can also be one of the most expensive. Google Adwords and Yahoo Marketing are the 2 most popular ppc programs to look into.

When you think about how to write a marketing strategy for you business you will want to budget for other online promotion such as search engine submission, article marketing, and blogging.

Every business, both online and offline, can benefit from some good old fashioned offline advertising. Business cards, flyers, word of mouth, car signs, and so forth still offer some benefit to your business. This is especially true in smaller rural area where everyone know everyone.

One final thought. After you written you marketing strategy keep track of what is working. There are online program that can help you monitor where your website visitors are coming from. In an offline business you may just have to ask where your customers got your name.

Effective marketing only works when you know where it is coming from. Hopefully this will give you some ideas on how to write a marketing strategy and what to keep in mind when you do it.