Marketing A New Product » Percent Increase In Sales Marketing Product Objectives Plan

In small business marketing, setting marketing objectives for your brand or small business each year has been proven as one of the key elements to increasing your relationship with your customers. For every successful big business in the market place you will find marketing objectives have been set well before any money or time is spent on marketing tactics.

Marketing objectives are simply what is required of your key customers (target market) to achieve your sales objectives. To ensure you can achieve your marketing objectives, limit them to a maximum of four, in fact if you only want to set two objectives for the year that is fine. It is also important that when setting your marketing objectives you look at the number of your current and potential customers to ensure your objectives are realistic.

As a starting point look at what you achieved with your customers last year as this will help you to set marketing objectives for the year ahead. Each year you will want your current and potential customers to increase or maintain their relationship with your brand or business and the individual products or services that you sell. Below are some marketing tips that you may want to consider before deciding which marketing objectives you are going to set.

Awareness - before a customer buys your product or service they must become aware of it. Awareness is particularly important if you have a new product or service, if your product or service is only bought occasionally or if your market has many competitors and you need to maintain awareness amongst your target market. For example, your objective may be to increase awareness of your brand by 20% by December 2008.

Purchase - this relates to the initial purchase and the purchase of specific products or services in your range. Purchase is often used to set objectives for a new brand or business and individual products or services. For example your objective may be to increase initial purchase of variant X in your product range from 5% to 9% by December 2008.

Purchase Frequency - this relates to how often your customers buy your product or service. For instance if you have a product or service that has a high gross margin, then you may want your customers to buy it on a regular basis as this could increase the profitability of your business.

Usage - this is different to purchase as the person who buys your product or service may not be the one who actually uses or consumes it. For example, mothers may buy the breakfast cereal but it is the children who are the ones who eat it.

Usage Frequency - this relates to how often your customers use/consume your product or service. By getting your customers to use a little more of your product or service can actually translate into more sales over the year. Big business marketers often do this by introducing larger pack sizes.

Average Transaction Value - this relates to the average amount each of your customers spend per transaction with your business. A simple way of improving the profitability of your business is to encourage your existing customers to increase their average transaction value i.e. purchase slightly more each time.

Distribution - As distribution channels available to customers wanting to purchase products or services grow, then it is important that you ensure your products or services are available in the most important distribution channels. If your product or service is not available in a distribution channel that is important to your customers they may decide to try a competitor's product or service.

Customers - for your small business to grow you may decide to focus on gaining new customers for your business or to retain your most profitable ones.

The key with setting marketing objectives is to make them simple and ones that you can track and measure your success against. It may take a little time at first to decide which ones to focus on but each year as you see your progress, you will know the time spent is worth it. After all why would big businesses set marketing objectives each year if they did not help increase sales, profit and their relationship with their customers?

© Marketing for Business Success Pty Ltd 2008

Two experienced marketers, Susan Oakes and Bronwen Ryan, have taken the secrets of big business marketing and developed the first complete marketing system for small business in software. M4B Marketing Software is both practical and flexible and will assist small business to increase their marketing knowledge and gain a competitive edge. Visit http://www.m4b.com.au and view the demo.

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