Friday, February 18, 2011

Entrepreneur.com: Their Guide to Your Startup, Days 7 to 9.


Here’s another post about Entrepreneur.com’s “Two Weeks to Startup” Series by Kimberly Stansell. I’ve previously written about days 1 to 6, which can be found in the post archives. This post is going to be days 7 to 9, Develop a Marketing Plan, Build Your Support Team, and Execute Your Marketing Plan, respectively. Remember, I’m offering quick summations, reading the articles will give much more valuable info (because if I repeated every single thing that would be plagiarism).


Marketing is essential to introducing your business to the intended target audience. At this point, with research done from day 2 and parts of your business plan written from day 4, the marketing aspect of your business should have already taken shape. With the plan, you go further by figuring the means of promoting your business, e.g. social media, print, or personal.

The article also states a customer service plan needs to be made along with the marketing plan. Customer service plan consists of ways to keep customers and build customer loyalty. For service, retail or client oriented businesses, a detailed policy “[considering] money-back guarantees, buying incentives, and the resolution of customer complaints” is needed.


The title is pretty self-explanatory. The most important point is your team should be defined with broad, important ranges “from contractors and suppliers to advisory board members and employees”. Other than actually interviewing people, look amongst your network for those who have the qualities to benefit you and your business.


Action. The keyword is action. Not only do you execute the plan, but it is now a portion of the job. You can’t just set up the ads, the site, and promotions and then wait. Do the work to reach out to your audience. The article gave more examples of things to do. But essentially the marketing plan is suppose to be a plan well thought out from Day 7. We’re working in days so there’s always room for improvement. Just be prepared, have a plan, and act.

All the articles include links to other sources on Entrepreneur.com and downloadable resources. For a list of the Kimberly Stansell's articles in the series so far, go here.

No comments:

Post a Comment