DEVELOPING YOUR MARKETING STRATEGY
understanding  your business, its  strengths, weaknesses, and  the external opportunities and threats, you can develop your marketing strategy that plays to your strengths and matches them to the emerging opportunities. Consequently, you can also identify your weaknesses and try to minimize them as best you can in your strategizing.

Then lay-out a detailed marketing plan that sets out specific actions to put that strategy into practice daily.

Here are some questions to ask when developing your strategy.

What are your strengths and weaknesses?

What are your customers looking for? What are their needs accordingly?

What do I want to achieve? Make sure to set clear, realistic, attainable objectives.

In our business environment what changes are taking place,  and how will they effect me?

Are these opportunities or threats?

Which customers are the most profitable?

What’s the best way of communicating with them?

How do I target the right potential customers?

Could I improve my customer service?

Can this  be a low-cost way of gaining a competitive edge over rivals, keeping customers, boosting sales and building a good reputation.

Could changing my products or services, and becoming more diverse,  increase sales and profitability?

Do I need to be continuously updating to maintain a competitive edge over my competition?

Would extending my product list or service provision to meet existing customers needs be more effectively?

I find that selling to existing customers is generally more cost effective than continually trying to find new ones.

What is the best way of distributing and selling my products?

What’s the best way to promote my products? What are my options to include, such as  advertising, direct marketing, trade fairs, marketing on the web and PR

How will I price my product or service? There’s the need to be competitive, but most businesses find that trying to compete on price alone is a poor strategy.

What else are my customers interested in?

Reliability?  Value? Quality? Efficiency?

How can I tell if my marketing is effective?

Check how customers find out about my business.

A small-scale trial can be a good way of testing a marketing strategy without committing to excessive costs.