How to Create a Marketing Plan for your Las Vegas Business

Every plan should have objectives. These will guide you in crafting your marketing strategies and in deciding how much budget to allocate. Having a clear understanding of what you want to achieve will guide you and your team as you make decisions moving forward. Everything you do should be geared towards achieving the marketing goals you initially set.

Your objectives will also serve as benchmarks when you measure the progress and success of your marketing plan. Ideally, your goals should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound.

SMART Objectives

• Specific – Having a generic set of objectives will set you up for failure. If you are all over the place doing so many things at a time, you will lose your focus and end up not accomplishing anything.
• Measurable – Effective tracking can only be done if your objectives are measurable. Are you halfway there? Are you 50% over budget? Measurable goals will help you answer these questions.
• Attainable – Your goal should be challenging but also achievable. Unrealistic goals will discourage you and your team in the long run. Why work hard for something that will never happen at all, right?
• Relevant – Set goals that are relevant to the overall mission and vision of your company. If you want to have 1,000 customers within three years, then your marketing efforts should aim for customer acquisition.
• Time-bound – Without a deadline insight, you will eventually slack off. An end date will motivate you to focus and be disciplined in doing the steps necessary to achieve your objectives.

To effectively strategize your next steps, you should have a clear understanding of where you are at this point. Use the SWOT Analysis Method to analyze your current situation. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. This method of situation analysis allows you to look at factors within your company and, at the same time, to factors outside.

Internal Factors

• Strengths – What are the strengths of your business? Do you have better customer service? Are your products priced better? Is it more convenient to purchase from you?
• Weaknesses – What challenges do you have at the moment? Fewer employees? Low marketing budget?

External Factors

• Opportunities – Do you see a trend that will benefit your business?
• Threats – Is your industry becoming more saturated? Is there a new regulation that makes it difficult for your business to operate?

After doing the SWOT Analysis, you can now come up with your positioning statement. A positioning statement tells customers how your product or service addresses and their needs and why they should choose you over competitors. 

The results of your situation analysis are your inputs to the strategies that you will be making in the succeeding steps.

Next, it’s time to define your target market clearly. The goal of this step is to create an avatar of your ideal customer. You have to personify who you want to serve. This process will allow you to be a more customer-centric business.

You can define your target market by going through the following categories: Demographic, Geographic, and Psychographic.

Know Your Customer (KYC):

• Demographic – This refers to high-level descriptions of your target market mainly composed of: gender, age, profession, marital status, income level, race, education level, and more.
• Geographic – Where is your target market located? Do you intend to focus on potential customers within your local area only? Or do you plan to cater to the entire state or go international?
• Psychographic – To understand your customers at a deeper level, it is beneficial to know them down to their psychographic information. This category includes interests, behaviors, values, opinions, lifestyles, and attitudes.

By the end of this exercise, you’ll have to describe your target market as if you know them. Through this, you can craft relevant strategies and messaging that would appeal to the group of people you have chosen.

he marketing mix consists of the 7Ps: Product, Price, Place, Promotion, People, Process, and Physical Evidence. Now that you know your current situation and who exactly you want to target, you can craft informed strategies.

Crafting your marketing mix strategies

• Product – What are you offering to your customers, and how does it address their needs?
• Price – Will your pricing be cheaper, more expensive, or at par with competitors?
• Place – Where can customers access your product or service? Do you have physical stores, a website, or a mix of both?
• Promotion – How will you persuade people do buy? Do you promote online, offline, or both? What is your branding strategy? What is the messaging that you convey to customers?
• People – Who are the people involved in delivering services to customers? Are they well-trained? Do they follow spiels that are aligned with your brand?
• Process – What processes are required before the customer can buy from you? Is it a customer-friendly process?
• Physical Evidence – How do your customers see you? Does your packaging look good? Do you have a nice store? Is your website impressive?

Now that you have laid everything down, the final step is to establish a marketing budget. As a general rule, companies who are new or are looking to grow should allocate at least 10% of their revenue for marketing. On the other hand, businesses that wish to maintain their position spend at least 5% of their income. Big goals require more effort and investment. Don’t view marketing merely as an expense. In this competitive and evolving world, marketing is essential to keep your business running.