Strategic Marketing Planning For The Small To Medium Sized Business

Eighty percent of small to medium sized new businesses fail within 2 years of their inception. Ninety percent of businesses close after 10 years of operation. While many factors contribute to failure, the lack of an organized, measurable, strategic marketing plan often is the underlying cause. Creating a strategic marketing plan for your business may appear to be a daunting task. Indeed, many business owners do not create a strategic marketing plan or the plan they create is flawed due to the lack of an actionable planning process. "Strategic Marketing Planning for the Small to Medium Sized Business" addresses these issues by providing both narrative marketing theory as well as workbook exercises. This book offers the small to medium sized business owner or marketing staff a hands-on experience that will culminate in the development of a true marketing plan, specifically tailored to an individual business. From developing or refining the company's mission, goals and strategies to implementing tactics and creating budgets, this book provides the information and framework needed to develop a sound marketing plan that will help your business grow.

Eighty percent of small to medium sized new businesses fail within 2 years of their inception. Ninety percent of businesses close after 10 years of operation. While many factors contribute to failure, the lack of an organized, measurable, strategic marketing plan often is the underlying cause. Creating a strategic marketing plan for your business may appear to be a daunting task. Indeed, many business owners do not create a strategic marketing plan or the plan they create is flawed due to the lack of an actionable planning process. "Strategic Marketing Planning for the Small to Medium Sized Business" addresses these issues by providing both narrative marketing theory as well as workbook exercises. This book offers the small to medium sized business owner or marketing staff a hands-on experience that will culminate in the development of a true marketing plan, specifically tailored to an individual business. From developing or refining the company's mission, goals and strategies to implementing tactics and creating budgets, this book provides the information and framework needed to develop a sound marketing plan that will help your business grow.

Two-thirds of rapid-growth firms use written business plans, according to Price, Waterhouse, Coopers 1998 Trendsetter Barometer. The survey also states that firms with written plans grow faster, achieve a higher proportion of revenues from new products and services, and enable CEOs to manage more critical business functions. How to Develop a Strategic Marketing Plan is both innovative and pragmatic in its approach. It explains how to combine the strategic vision of long-term business planning with the action-oriented thrust of a short-term marketing plan. Planning forms and guidelines for customizing your own Strategic Market Plan (SMP) are available for download from the CRC Press website. Just go to the download tab located with the book's description.Actual case histories - from companies such as Campbell Soup, Co., Texas Instruments, Inc., and Quaker State Corp. - illustrate how business-building opportunities translate into strategies and tactics. They demonstrate the compelling relationship between internal organizational functions and external market conditions, the long- and short-term strategic marketing issues and the advantages of developing an SMP.Strategic market planning shapes the future of business. In its broadest dimension it sets in motion actions that impact long term prosperity. How to Develop a Strategic Marketing Plan gives you the tools to generate a credible strategic marketing plan so your organization can survive in the 21st century.

We're told marketing is hard. That it requires months of analysis, weeks of brainstorming, and years of consistent implementation. To succeed in marketing, you need the fortitude of General Patton, the genius of Don Draper, and the cash reserves of Warren Buffet. WRONG. One week. That's all it takes for most small and medium-sized businesses to dramatically improve their marketing. And let's face it, most business owners do very little marketing, and what they do is not particularly effective. Business owners often don't know how to best market their company, or are too busy working to make time to promote it. What they don't realize is that effective marketing doesn't have to be complicated or time-consuming. Mark Satterfield's The One-Week Marketing Plan lays out a step-by-step system entrepreneurs can put in place in just five business days. This “set it and forget it" strategy works all day, every day to bring in new business. Tailored to each company's niche market, this innovative plan can generate a consistent stream of customers for an out-of-pocket expense of as little as $300. Satterfield, founder and CEO of Gentle Rain Marketing, Inc., has more than two decades of experience helping clients in more than 75 niche industries grow their businesses without cold calling or hard selling. Now, in The One-Week Marketing Plan, his strategies and wisdom are accessible and realistic for entrepreneurs, self-employed professionals, and business owners looking to move in a new direction. One week. That's all it takes. So let's get started.

To maintain a competitive edge against other businesses, companies must ensure the most effective strategies and procedures are in place. This is particularly critical in smaller business environments with fewer resources. Strategic Optimization of Medium-Sized Enterprises in the Global Market is a critical scholarly resource that highlights the optimization of management functions, such as working capital and marketing, and how to implement sustainable business management practices in the global world market. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as social entrepreneurship, marketing optimization, and globalization, this book is geared towards business managers, medium-sized enterprises, policy makers, business professionals, and upper-level students seeking current research on the performances of medium-sized enterprises across the world and their broader supply chain.

Examine essential marketing disciplines and weapons!This essential book will show you how to design a strategic marketing plan for any brand, product, service, or business! It explains all of the major marketing disciplines and familiarizes you with the marketing “weapons arsenal.” It also teaches you to conduct a marketing audit, provides helpful sample worksheets and forms and includes case examples, a glossary of marketing terms, and appendixes discussing sources of “marketing intelligence” and professional marketing associations.This single volume provides a step-by-step process (with short, clear examples) of how to develop a custom plan to fit any business. In addition, it defines all of the business terms you’ll find inside and lists additional resources to draw upon. With Marketing Your Business: A Guide to Developing a Strategic Marketing Plan, you will explore: the process of selecting the right strategy by defining your business strategy, assessing the most relevant focal points, and choosing the marketing strategy that will work best for you the arsenal of current marketing weaponry--advertising, budgeting, promotions, pricing, sales, database marketing, public relations, packaging, legal issues, and more! the nature of strategic marketing plans-competitive and environmental assessments, mission statements, slogans, budgeting, goals and objectives, etc. key checklists and 13 sample work forms that will help you formulate your plan and much more! Ideal for use by educators and students as well as businesspeople, Marketing Your Business brings together everything you need to know to develop an effective strategic marketing plan and put it into action!

Does this sound familiar? You’ve tried to grow your business but have produced less-than-desired results. You’ve learned that your working capital, cash flow, financial ratios, and overall profitability are insufficient to afford the costs of needed sales, marketing, and promotional strategies typically called for to find and develop new customers, markets, and products. It’s very common that company executives do not follow generally accepted basic business practices such as knowing product costs and margins, obtaining strategically useful information about customers, conducting market research to identify prospective customers, and understanding competitors’ advantages and disadvantages needed to build effective growth strategies. Based on 21 case studies and 126 reviews of manufacturers’ sales and marketing practices, this book explains the common pitfalls so many companies experience, and it offers common sense, practicable, and affordable step-by-step “how to’s” for cost and profitability analyses on products and customers. It will help you find prospective new customers, conduct smart market research, and decipher and use competitor intelligence. It also provides guidelines for determining the best combination of sales coverage for inside/outside sales and independent reps and for estimating the cost to implement sales, marketing, promotional, and growth strategies.