Planning is the key!
Good news! There are lots of people out there with money to spend on what you sell. And marketing is the activity that connects you and your store to all those people who are spending money on the things you’re selling. Think about that very carefully…
Marketing connects your store to the money
Here’s the problem. There are a thousand different marketing options, a thousand great offers, a thousand nice ad salespeople, a thousand possible ways to market your business. Some of those thousand possibilities would be good for your business – some might not be. But doing a little bit of this, and a little bit of that and HOPING that some of it works is just grasping at straws.
HOPE is not a good marketing strategy!
Your Retail Marketing Road-trip
Think of your marketing like a road trip for just a minute. A road trip from, say, Seattle, Washington to Los Angeles, California.
One type of road trip is to get in your car, pull out of the driveway and HOPE you get to Los Angeles eventually. You don’t really know where you’re going; you just drive around for a while going here a little bit, there a little bit and maybe end up in Arizona until someone points you west again. You’re likely to run out of money, time, and interest before you ever get to L.A.
Just hoping to get there – trying to get there without a plan – isn’t effective or efficient. Do you see where I’m heading here? That type of road trip is like trying to connect your store to the money without a marketing plan.
Now a different kind of road trip would be if you knew you had to get from Seattle to Los Angeles in 5 days and you had $2000 to get there. The first thing to do would be to buy a map and plan out the shortest route between Seattle and Los Angeles. Then you’d figure out how much you had to spend on gas and that would be the first expense that would come out of the $2000.
You’d plan out how many nights you’d need a hotel room and how many meals you’d have to buy. Finally, if you had any money or time left over, you could think about doing something fun like taking the Coast Highway south along the Pacific and through Big Sur. Or maybe stop off in San Francisco.
Do you see how that changes things?
The person with the plan gets the most things done, the best things done, the right things done. They make it to Los Angeles with the least stress and have the most fun. And that’s what a marketing plan can do for you! It’s how you get from where you are now in your business to where the money is…
The right plan leads you down the highway – smooth and fast and straight. Marketing without a plan is like driving the back roads hoping you’ll get from Seattle to Lost Angeles via Bryce Canyon, Utah. You can do it, but it’s not the easiest, fastest or the best way to get there.
If your marketing isn’t working, if you feel like you’re beating your head against the wall, you can make changes. You can create a new road-map, a new marketing plan.
When all the pieces of your marketing plan come together, good things happen. Just remember the key words – Plan Plan Plan.
Talk to you soon ~ Norma