Seven Pretty Good Marketing Cliches You Can Use for Business Planning

Wow, it’s Q4 already, what happened to the summer? That’s purely rhetorical now, and since the calendar doesn’t lie, it must be time for 2025 business planning. If your company follows a stricter regimen when it comes to the planning calendar, you’re already underway. The rest of us will need to catch up. The good news is that there is plenty of time to do a good job, and to that end we’re offering some help with the marketing planning by way of cliché – but explaining the validity of each one. While this won’t actually create a plan for you, it will help you think through what you need to do to build a winning plan.?

Segmentation, Segmentation, Segmentation?

Those are the three most important words in marketing. You are absolutely correct that there are many different types of customer or client that can benefit from your knowledge, expertise, and experience. But there is an ideal set that will benefit most. And defining and targeting that ideal set will be much easier, less expensive, and more fruitful for you and your marketing efforts.??

Defining, or refining a very narrow, very specific market segment for your business should be first on the business planning list.?

?Never Forget the Four P’s?

The Four P’s – Product, Price, Place (Distribution), and Promotion – are the basics of marketing strategy, and they go hand in hand with the segmentation exercise. Your very narrow segmentation focus will drive a specific set of product and service offerings, and help determine the price points, and how best to promote what you have to offer. If you don’t have that segmentation strategy clearly in focus, it’s going to be difficult to narrow down the Four P’s and come up with a meaningful budget number.?

Repositioning is Hard?

The annual business planning exercise might also generate tweaks to some aspects of the Four P’s – a new product or service offering, for example, or a desire to move into a higher-margin segment. You have to be careful here, since if the changes are not market-driven and segment-compatible, you may find the repositioning exercise is very costly and produces less-than-anticipated results. The market’s perception of a company or firm is often fixed from the beginning, and the company needs to spend to not only promote the new positioning but also to overcome the old perceptions. Product or service extensions are the easiest, repositioning into different pricing segments are the most difficult.?

Your Brand is Your Virtue?

Your brand is what you stand for, what you believe, why you are engaged in business, what you are doing to improve the lives of your customers or clients. It helps to think of a brand like a person: it’s your voice, your posture, your reputation. It’s how you dress, your style, the level of formality. Your brand has to match what your segment is looking for – even more, the brand has to be something likeable and desirable.?

Your brand must be carefully crafted, and flawlessly maintained and defended. Make sure your business planning doesn’t shortcut or compromise your virtue.?

Google, Meta, and LinkedIn are Great Digital Marketing Channels. They’ll Take Every Dollar You Have.?

There’s no better way to reach your target audiences than on the digital platforms. They can help you micro-target and get your content and advertising to the individuals that match your segmentation strategy. The concept of pay-per-click is brilliant; advertisers only pay when someone clicks on an ad. Obviously the only reason someone would click is because they are interested and by their behavior, they must be an ideal target.?

Except it doesn’t always work that way, especially when running complex campaigns. And these platforms are constantly updating the way they work, which means to really utilize the platforms effectively, you need to stay up to date with the changes.??

This all points to the need to work with experts, no matter how small your budget. Fact is, you can easily make a mistake in the design of your campaigns and quickly expend your budget before you know it. And on the topic of expertise, those running your digital campaigns need to be both familiar with the platforms of your target audience and with marketing.??

Test, Test, Test?

Marketing experts know this to be true: the only thing that matters is what works. Rarely does anyone know what is going to work best before trying it out. One of the real benefits of the aforementioned digital platforms is the ability to test, whether it is simple A/B testing to more sophisticated real-time budget-shifting to the content that is performing the best. A commitment to testing should not be viewed as an expression of uncertainty, it should be viewed as a commitment to spending wisely and getting things right.?

Why Buy When You Can Rent??

Renting or leasing is a great way to test something before making a commitment to buy. If you take this concept to the planning for your business and marketing programs in 2025, it makes sense to consider fractional expertise.? Many firms use fractional C-level or similar talent to quickly infuse their organizations with the expertise to help develop the best positioning and execution strategies.??

?Ready to plan for success with digital marketing experts? Contact us and let’s have a conversation about where you are and how to get where you want to be.?

Email - [email protected]?

Website - www.jqlacorte.com?

Phone - 203-571-8067?