To get more customers through your doors and profits to your bottom line, your business must first have a healthy and strong marketing plan and take your business out to the international market.

In most established enterprises, operations and finance systems are usually the strongest processes while the marketing plan is usually the weakest. Few if any resources are consistently directed toward adding and retaining customers, yet the steady flow of new and repeat customers is the oxygen that keeps a business alive.

A healthy, strong marketing plan has six components. Almost any business weakness can be strengthened by initiating and installing one or more of the following six processes:

An International Marketing Plan Example: The Strategic Marketing Plan Outline Includes

   •  Marketing Research and Analysis
   •  Customer Retention
   •  Public Relations
   •  Strategic Marketing
   •  Database Marketing
   •  Direct Marketing

Making these processes part of your regular business operational procedures will insure your marketing plan is good, and now make sure your plan is working which will return constantly full of new and repeat customers. If you aren’t using all six of these strategic marketing processes, how can you expect your business to stay healthy or grow?

More than likely, your business got to its present size by using just one or two of these marketing processes.

Imagine what would happen to your business if you were applying all six of these marketing processes. Shouldn’t the health and well being of your business be just as important to you as a child’s health is to his parents? Now is the time to give your business a “check up.” Get a second opinion.

At the very least, a “check up” will confirm what you already know. At best, a second opinion may surprise you with the cure…

For information how to write a marketing plan visit the Marketing Software part of this site to download more information about tools for constructing Marketing Plan that is guaranteed to produce Marketing Breakthroughs.

A Strategic Marketing Plan Example:

1. Executive Summary

   a. Synopsis of Situation
   b. Key Aspects of the Marketing Plan

2. Situational Analysis

   a. Market Characteristics
   b. Key Success Factors
   c. Competition and Product Comparisons
   d. Technology Considerations
   e. Legal Environment
   f. Social Environment
   g. Problems and Opportunities

3. Marketing Objectives

   a. Product Profile
   b. Target Market
   c. Target Volume in Dollars and/or Units

4. Marketing Strategies

   a. Product Strategy
   b. Pricing Strategy
   c. Promotion Strategy
   d. Distribution Strategy
   e. Marketing Strategy Projection

 Direct Marketing: The purpose of direct marketing is to produce customers who spend substantially more money with your business than you spent on the media space or time to acquire them.

Why do you invest in direct marketing? Are you trying to reach prospects and convert as many as possible into paying customers or are you buying direct marketing creative and copy because you have an advertising budget to spend?

Your answer to this question will determine what type of return on your investment, if any, you can expect from each of your direct marketing campaigns.

Before planning to acquire new customers via direct marketing and in order to get the highest possible return on your direct marketing investment, you must first determine what your existing customers are worth to your business.

Only then, after you determine their economic worth, or their Lifetime Market Value ( LMV ) - what the average customer will spend with your company over the life of the relationship - can you begin to accurately forecast how much money you will have to acquire each new customer.

More often than not, business owners and managers establish their direct marketing creative and copy budget based on a percentage of annual sales. However, setting a direct marketing creative and copy budget based on a percentage of sales has no direct correlation between acquisition costs and profit potential in the average new customer relationship.

A direct marketing budget based on a percentage of sales instead of on your customer’s LMV is flawed by design. How can you begin to budget for the acquisition of new customers when you have no idea what your present customers are worth?

A simple formula for regaining control of your direct marketing budget without having to determine what your average customer’s LMV is to look closely at what you are spending on average to acquire customer transactions now.

To do this, determine how many transactions you have in a year. Then divide your annual number of transactions into your gross annual sales. This will give you the average value of each customer transaction.

Once you have your average transaction amount, deduct your average cost of goods and all other related costs of sale. Add your average costs together and subtract them from your average transaction value. The remaining number is the maximum amount of money you can afford to spend to acquire each new customer transaction and still remain profitable.

By determining your maximum allowable transaction acquisition cost, you can then determine exactly how much more money will be available to acquire each new customer relationship based on your average customer’s Lifetime Market Value.

To get your money’s worth from any direct marketing campaign, you must determine what an average customer is worth before you budget or spend any money on direct marketing to acquire them