Ten Things to Include in Your Marketing Plan

Marketing is such a broad term, covers so many things. Marketing is knowing what you are selling, who you are selling to, identifying your delivery channels and telling your customers about your brand. The following points should be covered in a marketing plan for product sales:

1. What are you selling, give a clear description including whether the item is a necessity or a luxury.
2. Where is your products in price compared to your competition?
3. Where do you expect your potential customers to hear about your product?
4. Who is your primary customer? Your secondary customer?
5. Where will you be selling your product?
6. What are you doing (going to do) to promote your product?
7. What guarantee or warranty are you offering?
8. Do you have a plan for sales follow up?
9. How will you deal with complaints (of course you don't want any, but...)
10. Do you have a sales budget that you can used to measure how effective your marketing plan was? 

and 10.5  Do you have a marketing budget prepared that includes all marketing activities as well as all associated costs?

Ten Tips for Retail Store Owners

The demands of operating a store, keeping regular hours, staffing issues, and getting sales in a slow economy are all challenges for the retail store owner. Some of the following tips may help.

1. Keep in touch with past customers. This may be through a regular newsletter or face book or maybe your own website. Update the information regularly but don't be annoying by sending out hourly updates on a face book or twitter account. 
2. Be selective about the information you share, make it quality and people will be looking forward to hearing from you.
3. Develop a marketing plan for the next six months, the next year and the next two to three years. 
4. Clearly define who your potential customer is and target your marketing efforts to that person. 
5. Cross market with another business that has a similar customer base to yours but who is not in direct competition. For example take out restaurants often find success if they have the local gas bar pass out food coupons with a gas purchase. 
6. If you are selling clothing, shoes or accessories work with other stores selling similar items to promote an event, maybe a fashion show with proceeds to a local charity. 
7. Sales and discounts can be effective. They help you reduce excess or out of season merchandise and offer value for money to your customers. If you have a mailing list, you can invite those folks to a preview sale for "members" only. 
8. Work with any local business association to sponsor an event or to host an after hours event at your store. 
9. Use press releases as a marketing tool. For example January and February are often slow news times so if your have something newsworthy about your business that would be a good time to get the word out through news releases.
10. Always have your store and your store displays looking attractive and inviting. If you have the luxury of a store front window, change your displays often without having them cluttered. If there is too much happening the details are lost and the effectiveness of the display is lost. 

These are just a few ideas for a retail store owner to try. Not everything works for everyone, but nothing will work if you don't try.