The second workshop I attended at the Forum on Virtual Assistance (FoVA) was Creating a Marketing Budget & Plan to Help Your Business Grow. The session was presented by Jeannine Clontz, the recipient of this year’s Thomas Leonard International Virtual Assistant of Distinction Award.
A week or so prior to the conference, I received a marketing budget worksheet which I was to fill out before attending, so I suspected this wasn’t going to be one of those sessions where you just sit and listen to the speaker – and I was right. In fact, the budget was only one of seven sections of the worksheet which we completed with Jeannine’s guidance. The others were:
- Developing your Ideal Client Profile
- Locating your Target Market
- Listing what problems our prospects have and how we can solve them
- Listing the different marketing media we will use
- Creating a detailed plan for each medium
- Drafting response e-mails for different scenarios
The whole exercise was quite eye-opening, and I was able to come up with some great new ideas as well as expanding on those I already had.
Since having a documented plan makes it a lot easier to make decisions when various marketing opportunities arise and to respond to inquiries on a timely basis, it tied in very nicely with the workshop on Standard Operating Procedures which I attended next, and which I’ll blog about in an upcoming post.
In addition to the exercises, some of the interesting things Jeannine covered in the workshop were:
- You should plan to spend 5 to 10% of your sales goal on marketing.
- The best testimonials describe measurable results.
- Most clients prefer to pay for individual services or packages rather than an hourly rate, so they’ll know exactly what they’re getting and how much it will cost.
To learn how to create your own marketing plan and lots more about starting and growing a home-based business, check out Jeannine’s book, Enterpreneurial Freedom.