Creating Your Home Business Marketing Plan
You might think that cash is the lifeblood of your business. You are wrong. It is marketing.
It is the one activity (well actually, an entire group of activities) that will make or break your business. The day you aren’t marketing is the day that your business stagnates.
In this section of your home based business plan, you’ll answer these questions:
• How does the business reach customers?
• What are the unique features this business offers that competitors do not?
• How will the business interact with and retain customers?
• How is pricing structured in your line of work? What is the going rate for the service you provide?
Read on to learn about the information you’ll enter to answer these questions.
Describing How Your Business Will Reach Potential Work At Home Customers
Pulling together the information you’ll use to answer these questions might be quite simple. If you are offering surfing lessons, for example, you are probably reaching your customers on or near a beach. You are fulfilling their desire to learn how to surf and have fun in the water.
Of course, most answers to these questions are more complex because determining how to market to the right audience can be a complex task. You want to insert information about you and your business right in front of the people most likely to hire you. Where are they located?
If you are having difficulty answering this, visualize the target customer(s) you described in the previous section. Imagine one composite person who represents an entire target customer segment. When does this person get out of bed in the morning?
What kind of home does he or she live in? Sketch an imaginary day in the life of Carl or Connie Customer. At what point in the day is their desire for your product or service at its high point?
That is where and when your marketing should take place!
Describing the Unique Features of Your Home Business
Also in this section, you must answer the question, “What unique features does this business offer that competitors do not?”
In an earlier section of the business plan, you discussed your unique skills. The information you’ll enter here is similar to that information, but here, you describe those skills in the third person – as a quality of your business, not as a personal quality.
So you might say, “Carol Anne Carroll Communications offers one-stop shopping, from conception to printed product, for a wide variety of documents.” Or, it could be your location: “We’re the only full-service bookkeeping business in the tri-county area.” Or perhaps your equipment makes you stand out: “We are the only photographers with a fully-digital photo development process in the area.”
Here, too, you will need to do some competitive analysis. What does your competition offer, and how is your business better?
Tomorrow we will post more on how to create a home business marketing plan!
Tags: home based business, home business, home business marketing