Craft Focus - Dec 2017/Jan 2018 (Issue 64)

40 craft focus Michael O’Connor, PR & Marketing expert from Grey Sergeant, discusses a marketing plan that’s easy to adopt for your business With 2018 just around the corner, it’s time to start thinking about how you will market your business for next year. The idea of a putting a plan into place can be quite daunting but your business doesn’t need a complex marketing strategy – it needs simple examples of these three components. Anybody can put together a marketing plan, and there are dozens of templates and examples available on the web for every type of business strategy. It’s the writing that’s more of a challenge. The first stage to writing an amazing marketing plan is to understand what marketing is, and what it’s not. And that can be difficult because the standard definition of marketing is a little fuzzy. What is marketing? The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) defines the term ‘marketing’ as, “Identifying something that people or businesses want, and are prepared to pay for, or a problem that they would like solved, then developing a product or service that meets that need and then promoting it so that the audience is aware of its existence.” In other words, marketing, at least as defined by the CIM, consists of everything that every business does everywhere and in every situation. The problem with fuzzy definitions is that they result in fuzzy concept and fuzzy planning. Indeed, most marketing plans, especially those built from templates on the web, tend to be all over the place. For a marketing plan to be amazing, it must be tight and focused. That’s only possible if you define the term with enough precision that it’s easy to see whether your plan will hit the mark. With that in mind, here’s the definition that works for me, “Marketing: the removal of obstacles to buying and selling.” Here’s why that definition works: In an ideal world, buyers would always know exactly what they want and what they want would be instantly and universally buyable. At the same time, sellers would always know what goods and services to create, and what they create would be instantly and universally sellable. In the real world, there are many Create an amazing marketing plan for 2018