An ideal marketing action plan...

An ideal marketing action plan includes the following elements:

Your Target Market

Who exactly will you approach? Who are your potential clients and where can they be reached?

Price

What will you charge for the service you are offering?

Strategy

How will you get the word out? What is the specific strategy you'll use to market your service? For instance, this might be networking, speaking, publishing, or mailings.

Objective

This is the ultimate result you hope to achieve by implementing your plan. For instance, the purpose of a speaking plan may be to "Get 10 new clients valued at $5,000 each."

Intended Results

This is everything else you intend to accomplish through this marketing strategy. So in addition to attracting more clients, you may want to a) get more exposure to you target market, b) increase your credibility, c) add names to your email list, c) sell products at the presentation, d) improve your speaking ability.

Strategy Game Plan

This is your actual approach to implementing your strategy. If you've chosen a speaking plan you need to determine where you will speak, how you will get engagements, what topic to speak on, what handouts and materials are required, and what offer to make after the talk. This will often take some research and assistance to avoid major mistakes in your implementation.

Marketing Materials and Resources

What written or other marketing materials will be needed? And what other resources will be required for success? This may include money, information and assistance.

Offers and Call to Action

For many steps of the plan you may need to ask someone to take action. You will need to approach organizations and ask them to book you. At the presentation you will be selling your ideas and ask them to buy your concepts. At the end you will deliver a close that asks your participants to request a follow-up.

Follow-Up

Once you have implemented your activity, you need to follow up in some way, shape or form. You can't just cross your fingers and hope the phone starts ringing.

Action Steps and Timeline

The final step in your marketing action plan is to outline all the steps you will take in chronological order.

Read more @ http://www.actionplan.com.

A few more Marketing ideas

1.Wear It! People will pay to wear a T-shirt with a cool logo. Just look at the souvenir stands after any concert and see how much money people are willing to part with just so they can wear their favorite band’s logo. But don’t be fooled into thinking that you have to charge an arm and a leg for a T-shirt or pair of shorts with your logo. Charge just a little more than cost. The real profit comes from the publicity you get as your loyal customers advertise you on their clothing.

2. Use Everyday Items. Think about the number of reusable shopping bags you see every day. Conscientious consumers are willing to pay a small price to do the right thing, including using a shopping bag that has information about the business that sold them the bag all over it. People feel good about acting responsibly, in this case by cutting down on plastic bags, and they’ll pay you for the opportunity to do so.

3. Network. If this piece of marketing advice sounds like something you've heard before, there's a good reason: It works. Join your local chamber, leads groups like LeTip International Inc.or Leads Club, your industry association, or Rotary Club. When you go, ask the people you meet what leads they're looking for--and really listen to what they have to say. They'll repay you in kind.

Tips for the photographically challenged

I am not very good at taking pictures, but from time to time you need to place a picture of your product in a marketing piece. here are 2 tips for those of you are photographically challenged - like myself.

• scan the objects using your flat bed scanner - this works beat if the article is flat. Manipulate the image in your image editing software, save it for the web and upload.
• Invest in a Portable Mini Studio in a Box. I got mine at amazon.com for about $70.00. Trust me, this works - you should see my befores!

Today's marketing tip:

Give Away A Little to Make a Lot. This is the idea of giving away a free sample, although it can also apply to those who are selling services as well as products. If you own a massage studio, offer free five-minute massages in a public, highly-trafficked area. If you own an inflatables company, set up your wares in a place where children will be present and invite them to play for free for several minutes. While you’re giving away your “free sample,” let potential customers know more about your business and what you can do for them.

Ask yourself two major questions: Can you turn your logo into something that people would be willing display or even be willing to pay you to display? And can you offer a sample of your product or service for a small fee in a high-traffic area? These two questions are the basis of a great brand-building campaign that is not only free for you, but could also be the source of a small profit.

Search Engine Strategies - stuff I found on the net

1. Write a Page Title. Write a descriptive title for each page of 5 to 8 words. Remove as many "filler" words from the title, such as "the," "and," etc. This page title will appear hyperlinked on the search engines when your page is found. Entice searchers to click on the title by making it intriguing.
Plan to use some descriptive keywords along with your business name on your home page. If you specialize in silver bullets and that's what people will be searching for, don't just use your company name "Acme Ammunition, Inc." use "Silver and Platinum Bullets -- Acme Ammunition, Inc." The words people are most likely to search on should appear first in the title (called "keyword prominence"). Remember, this title is nearly your entire identity on the search engines. The more people see that interests them in the blue hyperlinked words on the search engine, the more likely they are to click on the link.
2. Write a Description and Keyword META Tag. The description should be a sentence or two describing the content of the webpage, using the main keywords and key phrases on this page. If you include keywords that aren't used on the webpage, you could hurt yourself. Place the Description META Tag at the top of the webpage, between the tags, in this format: Some search engines include this description below your hyperlinked title.
Your maximum number of characters should be about 255; be aware that only the first 60 or so are visible on Google, though more may be indexed.
3. Include Your Keywords in Header Tags H1, H2, H3. Search engines consider words that appear in the page headline and sub heads to be important to the page, so make sure your desired keywords and phrases appear in one or two header tags. Don't expect the search engine to parse your Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) to figure out which are the headlines -- it won't. Instead, use keywords in the H1, H2, and H3 tags to provide clues to the search engine. (Note: Some designers no longer use the H1, H2 tags. That's a mistake. Make sure your designer defines these tags in the CSS rather than creating headline tags with other names.)
4. Make Sure Your Keywords Are in the First Paragraph of Your Body Text. Search engines expect that your first paragraph will contain the important keywords for the document -- where most people write an introduction to the content of the page. You don't want to just artificially stuff keywords here, however. More is not better. Google might expect a keyword density in the entire body text area of maybe 1.5% to 2% for a word that should rank high, so don't overdo it. Other places you might consider including keywords would be in ALT tags and perhaps COMMENT tags, though few search engines give these much if any weight.
5. Use Keywords in Hyperlinks. Search engines are looking for clues to the focus of your page. When they see words hyperlinked in your body text, they consider these potentially important, so hyperlink your important keywords and keyphrases. To emphasize it even more, the webpage you are linking to could have a page name with the keyword or key phrase, such as blue-widget.htm -- another clue for the search engine.