It's a new year for marketing

With 2007 peaking through our proverbial windows, it may be time to set some marketing goals for your business. A marketing plan can be for as little as one year and in developing a plan, you lay the foundation to increase your organization's visibility.

For the next few days, I'd like to walk through a potential marketing plan with you. Marketing plans can be elaborate and lengthy documents or they can be quite simple. Let's focus on a simple marketing plan, and for the next few days, let's develop a marketing plan for your business.

Here is a general outline of a marketing plan.

1. What is your objective?
2. What is your budget?
3. Define your target market(s).
4. What methods or vehicles will you use to hit your target market?
5. When do you plan to roll out which portions of your plan?
6. Tweaking or "Is it working?"

Tomorrow, we'll look at some objectives of a marketing plan.