Marketing Plan e-Book

a FEW SOLID SHEETS is what you need; for small business owners and entrepreneurs

McKinsey:A Marketer’s Guide to Behavioral Economics March 16, 2010

Filed under: idea,marketing,strategy — entreprenovator @ 9:19 am
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Hi ALL,

I have been busy and unwell the last 1-2 weeks. sorry for not writing for quite a while. But that didn’t deter me to read some good articles on marketing, strategies and business.

Below is the link to a solid brief on Marketing and behavioral economics. It also contain some strategies for your tacticals in your business. i am very sure you will like it. For more of this type of article you should go to mckinsey.com have fun!

http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/A_marketers_guide_to_behavioral_economics_2536

What do you think? You can also subscribe to Mckinsey Quarterly. I highly recommend it! Cheers!

 

EIGHT + ONE Tips on Pricing February 12, 2010

Filed under: business,idea,marketing,strategy — entreprenovator @ 3:57 am
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Marketing Plan Breakthrough S6PEC is READY! Buy it HERE (ONLY USD 19.90 WITH LAUNCHING DISCOUNT)

 

You Need Hands! February 11, 2010

Filed under: business,idea,marketing,strategy — entreprenovator @ 4:48 pm
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I was captured by the following paragraph i read in Paco Underhill‘s “Why We Buy” book. Indeed a very good book especially if you want ideas but for a retail business, this is  a must read. Let me recite the paragraph:

“A woman is carrying a handbag, and that she’s wearing a coat, which she’ll probably want to remove once she’s inside the store, meaning she’ll have to carry that, too. God gave here two good hands but she’s shopping with one. If she selects something, the free hand carries it. Now she’s down to no hands. Maybe, if it’s small and light, she can tuck the purchase under one arm. Perhaps she’ll sling the handbag over a shoulder or forearm. Then she’ll have….let’s call it a hand and a quarter. If she picks one more thing, though, she’ll run out of hands. Only an extremely motivated buyer will persevere. Human anatomy has just declared this shopping spree over.”

What do you get out of that? I said, “I need my hands!!”. And i want to relate that to strategy.

Having extended hands definitely move you faster!

Strategy, in that story is our “business” hands. If we are too occupied or “full” with strategies we are going to get stucked. Just like that woman’s hands. There was one CEO i know that has his hands full of strategies until he can’t carry it anymore. In our hands, we can only carry certain things for a limited time only. then we have to unload.

With our strategies (hands!) also, business can pick and choose what they want and what they do not want. For example for a food retail business, they can choose to sell inside the mall or outside the mall. Both require different strategies. What if they want to sell both inside and outside the mall? Chaos! I have seen in Malaysia, whereby few retail brands try to have “captured both sides” of the mall but fail to do so because people are confuse. Customers are confuse on two things. Firstly, why do you need to have two outlets in the same mall? And which one should i go to? One thing about customers, when we are given options to choose most of the time we fail to choose. Customers go somewhere else to other outlet that has single message per outlet.

On the other hand, for business to business (B2B) businesses, having “hands” definitely very important and have to set it right from the start. i recently learned that large companies operation is very complex. A lot ogf stakeholders and usually steps taken are far too many and planning is on very long range too. Therefore, making sure the “hands” are picking up the right strategies are very crucial.

View Marketing Plan Breakthrough S6PEC HERE

Alternatively, business hands also can be extended. Say you want to expand to new market in new country, you definitely cannot do it alone. We need a helping hand. This is where friendly parties, partners, sponsors and networks play very important role. We need to talk to them, identify and select them accordingly to become our extended hands for our business.

I recently met one CEO of a growing global university and he shared me a story. he said that in some African countries, people are still don’t want to spend on education. people save money under their pillow because they are so worried and have low access to information. they don’t trust bank so much and they live a traditional life. he also added, to set up a global university there definitely a big challenge, but the moment the country wakes up (just like China!), it is going to give a handsome return. So how he plans to do it? Find strong local partners and support them. This is because local partners, most of them have less money and do small trading business. The idea of effective and efficient are definitely alien to them but they are hard working.

I personally found this approach is very interesting and unique. Nevertheless, a good example of extended hands are needed if you want  to go beyond your home base. But what if your hands are still full?

One, is to pray to God for a stronger back and not a lighter loads! Two, you need to prioritize. Prioritization is easy said than done. Even i sometimes overlook prioritizing, especially during busy period. I remember someone said, “when the going gets up, everyone is very happy!’. This refers to stock market bullishness, when it’s up everyone starts to forget basic things. But it certainly helpful to get our priority right.

I normally write down and prioritize based on time, processes and outcome. Lastly i also measure ROI. Sometimes, certain things you do is very painful but it’s going to give the highest ROI, so i choose to do that first. But as for you, you need to decide what’s best.

I will discuss more on Maven marketing in my next post, how to use it as your extended hands for your business. Cheers!

Marketing Plan Breakthrough S6PEC is READY! Buy it HERE (ONLY USD 19.90 WITH LAUNCHING DISCOUNT)

 

TEN Tips for Successful Marketing Implementation January 31, 2010

Filed under: business,marketing,strategy — entreprenovator @ 5:12 am
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How much do you spend on your marketing initiatives? How much is your ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment)? What is your sales right now? Does your sales increased? Why your sales team not in the field but in the office? When is your new product going to launch? When is the competition going to end? Who is your competitors? Check out the following TEN Tips for Successful Marketing Implementation:

1. Have a plan
- i’ve been emphasizing this for many years; in fact my book Marketing Plan Breakthrough S6PEC is addressing this issue; we need a marketing plan. Without plan, we are directionless and we lose money on daily basis. I recommend you to check out my book Marketing Plan Breakthrough S6PEC for FREE Download the Summary.

2. Over communicate
- often when we implement marketing initiatives, only the marketing department busy with all the collaterals, strategies, PR, CSR, campaigns and they donned everywhere in the company as if they (the marketing deaprtment) is the most important department in the world! They are wrong! If you are a marketing manager or business owner, i suggest you to over communicate and start realizing that your job is to make champions from other departments, not the only champion!

3. Price correctly
- this is exception when you are new in the business or launching a new product line that you never had before. For example if you all the while in IT business, suddenly you diverse into restaurant business, chances of getting wrong pricing entry is high. when you already in the business for quite sometimes, try few types and levels of pricing vs your offerings. Try price discrimination.

Buy Marketing Plan Breakthrough S6PEC here. Only USD 19.90 (WITH LAUNCHING DISCOUNT!)

 

4. Talk to your distributors
- having a network of distributors are really cool but if they are not performing why keep it silent? Most of the time, only 20% of your distributors work hard and sell your product. others are dormant or actively selling your competitor’s product. it is hard to have exclusive distributor nowadays unless you have lots of $$$$ incentives to offer. One way to make them love you is to talk to them. make them important and the secret is “give them target and incentify”.

5. It’s the customer, stupid!
- i’ve repeated this many many times. in fact other marketing gurus also said it. Moreover in my recent reading of Harvard Business Review that the role of Chief Marketing Officer is going to be obsolete because now there is a new trend of Chief Customer Officer especially in MNCs. This customer is KING not going to go away for at least the next 50 years! Unless you plan to do business to years from now, let’s focus on the customers!

6. Advertise Advertise Advertise
- i believe in advertising. advertisement allows you to promote, acknowledge, inform and sell about your products and services. for small business owners and entrepreneurs, advertising will make them a little more like celebrity and they rather shy away and be “the background person!”. I learned it from the hard way. I know a self-proclaimed internet marketing guru that set up a Facebook Fanpage on social media but he himself the only fan there! Advertise!

7. The experience
- let’s don’t even think of launching when your product is not ready. Experience lasts forever same as first impression! At least create the plan on how to approach your launch. I recommend you to read my Marketing Plan Breakthrough S6PEC because i cover this section.

8. Budget wisely
- not having budget at all for promotion is sure way to fail. I realized that many small business owners and entrepreneurs too rigid on allocate some money for promotion. Did you ever wonder why a large pool of customers only go to large businesses or retailers? BEcause these large companies put aside $$$$ for promotion and campaigns. But i don’t think we should do the same, but at least we make and show presence in the market. And never accumulate what you spend on your marketing and business, and end up sum it up and said, “i can buy a new BMW with this $$$$ spent on my business!!” wrong thinking my friend!

9. Give time
- when you do something on your business, it takes some time for people to know you. I have set up this blog almost a year ago, coupled with Entreprenovator blog but only recently i got some traffic and have better presence. I also recently launched my book and i am not in a hurry to make money. Because my bigger goal is to democratize knowledge to the masses especially small business owners and entrepreneurs like you. After all my Marketing Plan Breakthrough S6PEC is only USD 24.50 (ONLY USD 19.90 WITH LAUNCHING DISCOUNT!)

10. Corrective plan
- while usually the final point is more soft like “have faith!”, i rather be realistic. we all have faith but we don’t normally have corrective plan. plan down a lot of ‘what if’s” and ‘how about”. Sometimes what we plan don’t turn out to be as planned. But you can only have corrective plan once you started something. otherwise your corrective plan is counterproductive! You follow?

Honestly, the TEN Tips for Successful Marketing Implementation is just the tip of the iceberg of my book Marketing Plan Breakthrough S6PEC, Download FREE Summary. I highly recommend you to spend just USD 24.50 (ONLY USD 19.90 WITH LAUNCHING DISCOUNT) to get your marketing right and at least manageable. What is USD 24.50 (ONLY USD 19.90 WITH LAUNCHING DISCOUNT!)? sure way to manage and get results of your following $$$$ marketing initiatives!! Isn’t that worth the money? :)

Buy Marketing Plan Breakthrough S6PEC here. Only USD 19.90 (WITH LAUNCHING DISCOUNT!)

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Why Do You Need A Marketing Plan? January 28, 2010

Filed under: business,e-book,marketing — entreprenovator @ 12:34 pm
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When i ask entrepreneurs and small business owners, it is not unusual for not having any marketing plan. I once read that Sir Richard Branson was never had any marketing plan when he started the 1st Virgin business many years ago. In fact in one study of entrepreneurship (i couldn’t recall the name of the study) was that as much as 50% of entrepreneurs and business owners don’t have a business plan and marketing plan when they first started the business. What was the outcome? As much as 90% businesses started by entrepreneurs and small business went busted or failed within a year. I experienced one of the many busts few years ago (with my cafe business) because i don’t really have a proper and “the few solid sheets” called a marketing plan.

Coming back to my questions to entrepreneurs and small business owners, many of their answers sounded like this, “I don’t really have one”, “It’s in my head coz i know the business so well” and worse, “I don’t know what is marketing plan”! If you happen to be in one of these categories, rest assured you are not the only one. And to perfectly honest, that’s the ultimate reason why i turned back to my writing board where i was actually in the middle of writing (rather perfecting!) a personal development programs. i dropped that program and quickly drafted and started Marketing Plan Breakthrough S6PEC because many of you need it, seriously.

But, i don’t specifically mean my own Marketing Plan S6PEC Framework because there are so many versions and gurus out there that can give you the benefit of a marketing plan. Of course i am going to say mine is a lot better because it’s a practical and practitioner’s guide. Other than being a consultant, i also have performed marketing manager role, entrepreneur role, business manager role, investor and student of entrepreneurship (during my MBA!). But that’s not my main point. My main point is for you to have a marketing plan to guide your business. which one? Well it is up to you!

So, to put things in perspective; why do you really need a marketing plan?

Guide
- in a marketing you will think, record and document all your ideas, products and services offering, price, distribution channel, programs, sales direction, customer segment and so on. i have experienced whereby i suddenly realized that my business is not going on the right direction because i didnt follow my marketing plan. have you experienced that? or perhaps you suddenly realized that the thing you do know supposed to be done many months ago because you forgot about it? And you forgot because you don’t jot it down and plan for it? This is what i mean that marketing plan as a guide. I cover this in my Marketing Plan Breakthrough S6PEC.

Ideas
- people said the more you talk about your ideas the more refine it becomes. I think this is true. Did you ever experience when you talk to more people you generated a lot more ideas? When people give you feedback it triggers another dimension of your ideas? If you are, so where do you keep all these ideas? It should be in a marketing plan.

Resource Plan
- in marketing, there is only one thing that’s scarce: RESOURCES. some people have a lot of money but lacked ideas and another group is the other extreme; more ideas and less money. many of us probably the later than the former! In the marketing plan we will tackle things like people to hire, pricing, distribution plan, sales programs budget and so on.

Strategy
- Similar to business strategy, marketing plan will capture strategies required to support your business strategy. For example if your business goal is to achieve 20% increase in sales, your marketing strategy would be to 1) introduce new product, 2) increase price for premium offerings, 3) recruit more distributors and offer commission scheme and so on. Strategy is king. When you can see your business in totality, i can assure you that you will find it easier to manouvre. Marketing plan is the place to address all these issues.

Risk
- in our marketing plan we shouldn’t only concern about making money or positive points, we also should address the risk we are taking. for example it is common for a marketing plan to capture things like, “require additional staff to handle sales call”, “additional investment from the management budget will increase chances of increasing 10% sales target” and many more. Imagine if you can factor your risk earlier and think through it, wouldn’t it be better for you?

Pricing
- I once said in my Marketing Plan Breakthrough S6PEC that, “Price is the key determinants of your profits”. I stand firm to keep it that way. In your marketing plan, you will address pricing plan for your distributors, customers, multiple segments (some business charge differently – price discrimination) and cost price i.e. your raw materials and things like that. Not many address price correctly and bear in my mind that we need to standby few pricing plan to respond to the market. Take for example during festive season, if everyone is lowering price and slashed their price or even ignited a price war, what do you do about that? Follow suit or wait? If you want to follow, how far? If you want to wait, how long? You capture all this in pricing plan.

Customer Segment
- this is talked about most of the time, but let’s accept the fact that today’s customers are fragmented to smaller niches. Your product and service will not be consumed by only one segment and at critical mass. it is likely to be consumed by smaller segment and multi. no more critical mass, but rather a solid spread of niches. For example, who buy iPod’s today? if Apple only think about yuppies they are making a big mistake because apparently iPod is also used by women and people with active lifestyle. Another example, who buys from hypermarket? if hypermarket only focus on households they may not survive or be successful like today. hypermarket main segment is actually small business restaurant operators that buy in larger quantity compare to households and on daily basis. i’ve been there, i know! LOL

Corrective Plan
- a marketing plan is a living document. trust me, the moment you have it and experience planning your marketing, you will realize this. therefore it is a plan that allows you to assess past strategies and results and at the same time allow you to make necessary corrective measures to fit your business growth. for example, who expected the 2008 financial crisis to hit us so badly? no one other than the few so called “economists” but how did responded to it? Severely. many businesses closed including many giants. but the good thing is, many have a solid marketing and business plans, therefore they make quick corrective actions and moved forward.

Innovation
- i once sat in a meeting of project and business updates and suddenly one of the directors said, actually with all that we have now we can be in the medical device market. Violaaa!!! this medical device company used to service government hospitals and they have all the equipments. it’s just that they never thought of going direct to the hospitals and take the lion share of the business. in that meeting, after going through the company yearly updates, this “innovation” came instantneously and the next year they are pitching about it to the government hospitals directly.

Imagine if you can do all these and manage all these in a marketing plan? Systematic, organized, well thought, innovative and captured all your pertinent business information, don’t you find having a marketing plan is useful for your business?

One thing about my business, i don’t sell templates. I only sell actual content. I believe that template is only to give you the general overview of direction but not how-to do it. That’s why i highly not recommended you choose to download or purchase marketing templates because i have seen them i personally think it won’t help you much. let me share you a recent story about template.

I have childhood friend who wanted to open a small business. i offered him my service at $$$ which is so much below market rate because we have been friends for 20 years. he said no, because he think there is another cheaper way to do it or in other words “resourceful is my middle name” kinda thing. so i let him do that. I offered him five days later that, if he needs me to view the marketing plan i will do it for free over tea. he showed me a marketing template he bought for USD 25 and all he got was a template!!! i scolded him and cursed the site that provided such thing. it was just boxes everywhere and not even a paragraph on how to fill those boxes. well, this is what i mean and i defy to be in that business because that’s cheating. By the way i got to do my friend’s job after that. :)

What i offered is much simpler, richer and with all the things you need. firstly this blog is to help you enhance and as a source to guide you on the marketing plan you purchase. Well, let’s dont talk about purchase yet. would you want to view the actual content or maybe download the Marketing Plan Breakthrough S6PEC Introduction first? Don’t be shy. I think i am one of the the few publishers that allow my customer to read the actual content before purchasing it. I suggest you to download it before you buy it. get some feel and send it around.

to drive home the point, i highly recommend you to have a marketing plan and the better way is to be able to write yourself. this is because to hire a marketing consultant that don’t know your business is very costly. you end up spend longer time to expand and grow your business. or maybe at least when you know, you can start write your own marketing plan then you get the marketing consultant to touch up and give you more ideas.

If you ever need a to know how to develop and use a marketing plan, i will recommend my own product because from my knowledge there is no such guide yet in the market whereby with all the benefits you get in a marketing plan plus the gaps of “the templates” been giving you, my Marketing Plan Breakthrough S6PEC is only USD 24.50 (NOW ONLY USD 19.90 WITH LAUNCHING DISCOUNT!). Seriously, please consider of having a proper marketing plan for your business because it is not easy to take your business to where it is now and you don’t to see it wither, do you?

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Marketing Plan Breakthrough_S6PEC_An Introduction January 26, 2010

Filed under: business,e-book,marketing,strategy — entreprenovator @ 10:07 am
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The truest low budget and high impact marketing; by having a plan

Having a plan let you see the interaction that is taking place and about to take place. It gives you the freedom to choose and the given time.

Should you consider of purchasing the full version of the Marketing Plan Breakthrough S6PEC, Buy it HERE

 

Marketing Plan E-book – What Say You? January 20, 2010

Filed under: e-book,marketing,strategy — entreprenovator @ 6:30 pm
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This is the full version of Marketing Plan Breakthrough S6PEC for your viewing pleasure. If you would like to purchase the full book please click HERE

Appreciate your feedbacks and brickbats! Entreprenovator rocks! Email to entreprenovators@gmail.com

 

How to Develop Strategy Statement December 6, 2009

Filed under: e-book,marketing,strategy — entreprenovator @ 1:23 am
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1. Understand the industry landscape, what is it all about and who are the competitors.

2. Understand the customer’s needs, segment the customer and find ways to add value with what you want to serve. You can refer to Product Planning section on how to value add your products. Over analyse makes you paralyse, so don’t over do it.

3. Understand what you need (capability) in order to serve that product and value added services to your customer. In terms of money, people, system and other resources. You don’t want to over do it and kill yourself.

4. Be objective and be ambitious a little bit. Come out with 3 – 5 strategies. You can separate them into 2 phases, 1st phase for launching strategies (the 1st 6 months of your business) and 2nd phase is for post launching (6th months onwards).

5. Always check back your strategies with your business goals and offerings. Focus on the primary services first, the extension or extra value added services can come much later. Too much value added service can kill you and your business. Know what you can and cannot do.

6. Don’t worry if someone says you’ve got wrong strategies, you just need to ask them why. It is up to you whether you want to take heed or not. But never ignore them because sometimes we spend too long in the strategies, it can make us blind. They can be your customer too, so open up.

7. Final one, don’t forget that you need to write all your strategies in a piece of paper. If it only lingers in the head, you risk of losing them. Type it into your laptop is much better just in case the paper gets wet when it rains, you always have a back up. It helps bad handwriting too!!

Is it easy? It is supposed to be easy and doable. I believe in making things implementable, after all only results count in business. i will cover this in Marketing Plan e-Book. Watch out for it’s launch somewhere in January/February 2010.

Meanwhile, please also visit http://entreprenovator.wordpress.com
or check me out on Facebook: Mike Entreprenovator

The full version of Marketing Plan Breakthrough S6PEC is READY! Buy it HERE (ONLY USD 19.90 WITH LAUNCHING DISCOUNT)

 

Marketing Plan e-Book Preview December 5, 2009

Filed under: business,e-book,marketing — entreprenovator @ 3:07 am
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Marketing E Book

View more documents from bites consulting.

 

Marketing Plan Breakthrough S6PEC is READY! Buy it HERE (ONLY USD 19.90 WITH LAUNCHING DISCOUNT)

 

One Page – Marketing Plan December 4, 2009

Filed under: business,e-book,marketing — entreprenovator @ 12:57 pm
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A marketing plan supposed to be easy to consume for both management and implementation team. One sometimes wonder why marketing is usually complicated, because we cannot execute anything that is complicated and hardly understood.

This is where many marketing managers that develop marketing plans that are nice to hear but end up just a nice plan. Having been in the industry for quite awhile, i have observed many marketing managers that are unable to see the business in totality and thus cannot accomodate the need of the business in the marketing plans.

As a result, majority marketing plans overly focusing on the media instead of the message. I am not saying the media is not important, but the message need to be handled carefully first. besides, certain message cannot be delivered using certain media simply because that is how our customers have been conditioned with. Take for example SMS alerts, i personally hardly read it. Many of my friends too usually delete it about 90% of the time.

S6PEC, One Page Marketing Plan

In marketing economics, in other words only one time in ten times our message get read by the prospective customers. Hey, thats not even sales yet, and i personally can count how many times i use the sms voucher and redeem it at the counters. I hardly do it. But how come there are many reports saying the sms business or mobile customers are growing exponentially? Yes, the customers are growing as such but only to the messages they want to read and act upon.

I will explain more about that in other posts, and probably give you some content about my Marketing Plan e-Book. Seriously, you should consider buying it because i make it very clear, that today’s marketing is very challenging but it is doable and with the technology available, we can make it work. If you come from big business, you should buy something greater like the software. it’s too expensive and rigid to many of us here. :)

Now, i attached the One Page – Marketing Plan which will give you the overall feel and direction of your marketing direction. This is important because an ideal marketing plan should factor in the business plan as well i.e. financial, resources and administration processes. This is where i meant, that marketing people today sometimes overly concentrating on advertising and public relation in their marketing. We need to do more than that, eyeballs dont translate into sales are useless. We need to make eyeballs become viral and engaging. We need to plan for it!

Marketing Plan Breakthrough S6PEC is READY! Buy it HERE (ONLY USD 19.90 WITH LAUNCHING DISCOUNT)

check this One Page Marketing Plan. for more information please browse http://entreprenovator.wordpress.com or
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