This is Step #24 for 30 Days to Starting a Niche Business.  Each of the steps to creating a niche business will be documented in more detail. 

Once you get to this point, you already have your product and probably have the marketing pieces that you need to sell your product.  Now, it’s just a matter of learning how to create a marketing plan.  Having a marketing plan gives you several benefits:

1. Know Where to Spend Your Money - Unless you have an unlimited marketing budget, you only have enough money for any one marketing campaign at a time.  By planning out 1 campaign at a time, you should be able to spend enough money on each campaign to get data to accurately determine the effectiveness of that particular campaign. 
2. Get Your Ducks in a Row - By scheduling out the different campaigns, you can plan for the work that needs to be done.  If you have 5 different campaigns and they each need a few hours of work to be ready, it’s a waste to spend time on each one.  But if you spread out the campaigns, you can work on new ones while other ones are in process.

What’s in a Marketing Plan

There are only a few things that you really need in your marketing plan:

1. Date to start Campaign
2. Campaign Name
3. Campaign Type (e-mail, direct mail, PPC)
4. Number of contacts

Here is a marketing plan that we created for our online marketing system.  If we’re feeling a bit more ambitious, I like to put my marketing plan for a product/service in an Excel spreadsheet.  In fact, this is often how I track the success of campaigns.  Some of the information I might track include:

1. Expected Cost - Probably should be in the above list since you might need to use that number to determine your cash flow
2. Expected Response Rate - Usually based off of previous campaigns
3. Expected Responses - Based off the projected response rate and the number of contacts that we’re sending out.
4. Expected Sales - We use our sales conversion rate to figure this out
5. Expected Net Revenue - Based on how many sales we project and the average revenue per customer
6. Projected ROI - Based on our expected net revenue and how much we are planning on spending

The big daddy in that list is projected ROI.  Once my campaigns are done, that’s the main number that I care about.  If I can get a positive ROI, I know that the campaign was a success and now I just have to supercharge the campaign to scale that ROI for more and more profits.  All the numbers are really important and tell a different part of the story, but at the end of day, when you own a business, it’s all a matter of whether your business is the best place to keep your investment.

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