Selling cigars - all smoke and mirrors? (cont.)

Chapter 3 Developing the marketing plan

Now we're getting down to the nitty gritty. The marketing plan.

When you tell someone they need to do a Marketing Plan they generally freak out. The term seems to bring up thought of tedious research, charts, demographical analysis and lots of boring numbers.

I've done a million (maybe even a zillion) Marketing Plans and here's the low down. Firstly, you need 2 things.

• Budget
• Goal

They're the essential 2.

I've written marketing plans that are thicker than the telephone book. And I've written 1 page marketing plans.

The 1 page marketing plans are best by far. It's because what is written down actually gets done. No-one wants to read a hugely complicated 500=page document of why you should send a thank you gift to a client. Use your head dopey.

Budget

Okay, what's your budget? The vast, vast majority of my clients say "Don't know Brendon" or "Don't have one. Spent all the money on the shop fit out."

(The other thing is, clients never trust their marketing team. They assume if they say the budget is $50,000, then the bill will come to $49,998. Find a marketing person you trust.)

We'll give ourselves a marketing budget of $5,000 plus (and I have no ideas what the margins of cigars would be) 8% of sales.

Goal

We don't want some techo-babble, Uni Professor said this, twisted language goal. We want something like this:

"The goal is to have sales of $30,000 in the first month. Sales are to grow by 5% each month subsequent to that."

Because that's simple, that's measurable and that's achievable.

How do we figure out what we are going to do to market our Cigar Store

Simple. First we do this...click here to read on

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Brendon Sinclair