Some business owners make serious mistakes when they create business and marketing plans. One of them is that they focus on themselves and refuse to get into the customers’ mind. It is a bad thing if business owners are not able to profile their ideal customers. Business owners should fail to understand how consumers perceive, feel and think products in the market. Getting into their heads is really essential if we really want to give them things that they need. It is important that business owners know who are they competing with and this factor should be incorporated into the marketing plan. Whatever our niche is, there’s usually a degree of competition that we need to tackle.
They don’t make a list of competitors in the local area and how they should be tackled. It is important to be aware of the advantage that each competitor has. It is important for us to know how to tackle with each of the advantage that competitors are presenting to the market. We should learn how they are able to keep their customers. It is important to regularly to purchase products from competitors to monitor their level of quality and functionality. When new improvements are added, we will be able to respond much more easily. In reality, many business owners don’t understand about an important marketing concept, called positioning.
Business owners may not know how products should occupy a space in the mind of their customers. Unclear positioning will cause our products to fail to stand out in the highly competitive industry. A good positioning will allow our company to remove the “me too” mentality and customers will have a crystal clear idea of what our product really is. If we fail to include unique proposition in the marketing plan, it is likely that we will fail to achieve effective positioning in the marketplace. For newcomers, it is important that they are able to deliver something that’s better compared to the existing competitors in the marketplace.
Marketing plan should include what winning features that will be included in our products. This will allow us to have clearer and better advertising messages. We should think about features that we need to include and whether they can really benefit our customers. By introducing great benefits one after another, we could bring consumers into higher stages of relationship, ensuring that they will become our loyal repeat buyers. A bad marketing plan also has little emphasis on value and business owners may focus more on price. It is true that price is often the most important factor in the buying decision, but customers could perceive whether our product is useful enough. There should be a good balance between price and functionality. Low-priced products can have poor value if they have insufficient functionalit and quality. A product with good value offers functionality that is higher than other products with similar price. If we don’t incorporate values properly, there’s no guarantee that we will have good sales.