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Have You Thought About Your 2010 Marketing Plan?

Posted by admin on December 8th, 2009   

With just a little time left in 2009, it’s time to start thinking about how you will target your customers in 2010. There are multiple strategies and price points you could consider when trying to attract new business, but the first thing to consider is HOW MUCHdo you want to stand out in 2010 and HOW MUCH will you need to spend to get there.

Have you even thought about how much you want to spend? Some resources suggest you should spend as much as 20% of your resources on marketing a year. In some cases, that may be effective, but that doesn’t always mean it’s an appropriate strategy. Generally spending between 7% and 10% of your revenues on marketing is a good strategy. One thing that is definitely true is that you should ALWAYS BE MARKETING your business. The minute you stop is the moment your competition will swoop in to take advantage. When considering your 2010 marketing plan and your budget, consider bringing in your design/marketing company (Pulse Creative Partners) to help you develop marketing strategies to implement throughout the year. If you can determine ahead of time HOW you will be promoting your product or service, you can more accurately predict your budget, and more efficiently put these strategies into practice, saving time and resources. It’s not always about how much you can spend but about how smart you can spend your marketing dollars to gain the greatest results. One thing we have learned is that GREAT MARKETING is not about how much money you spend but about coming up with creative, memorable experiences that make you stand out in the market.

SOME SOLUTIONS TO CONSIDER IN 2010:

• Update your website: Whether you are just making some content updates, or completely redesigning, your website is generally the first place people look to learn about what you do. If your content is out of date, or your site is hard to use, you will lose potential clients because they won’t be able to get to the accurate information they are seeking.

• Consider e-mail marketing: E-mail marketing is one of the most cost effective ways to reach out to your existing customers. You can run promotions, deliver valuable tips and even showcase products or recent projects you have completed. In any case, you can reach customers for as little as $9/month sending as many messages as you want. This strategy combined with other marketing strategies can create a powerful way to stay front of mind and keep your customers coming back. Our Acquaint e-mail marketing product would be a great place to start.

• SEO is important: Search Engine Optimization has been a hot button topic for the last couple of years, but it is really important to make sure your website’s SEO is healthy. In many cases things you are doing on your site are beneficial to building your search rankings, but there are some things that can actually hurt you. Have a qualified web design firm (Pulse Creative Partners) take an intimate look at your sites SEO to determine if there are some ways to heal negatives and boost the productivity of the positives. There are many creative solutions we can discuss with you that can help improve your placement when a customer searches for your services online.

• Call Pulse Creative Partners: We are eager to help you grow your business. That’s what we are really excited about. Bringing us in on the marketing plan process at the beginning can help save some headaches for us and you later as we have worked together to help you determine the best solutions to implement throughout the year and in addition, helping you create a more accurate picture of what your marketing budget will look like. In many cases, we even have some creative ways to help make your marketing budget easier to manage like retainer based plans which help you distribute your marketing dollars more evenly throughout the year rather than in larger chunks periodically. Plus, this strategy allows us to work more closely with you which allows us to make decisions and change direction as the market shifts mor efficiently.