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Effective Marketing Guidelines For Start-Ups A lot of research and planning is required before starting a new business. Among all the business strategies, the marketing research aspect of your business plans takes the lead and is considered as an important part of the business plan. By adopting successful market research methods, businesses are able to convert customer’s needs into a desire for acquiring their products and services. Following are some effective ways that help businesses in setting up. Identify Market The initial step of a business plan is to conduct a market research that will help in determining about target customers. This is important because customer’s age, gender, lifestyle, income levels, geographical locations etc. will be having a direct connection with the money a business will be spending for advertising purposes. Keeping all these crucial things in view, trade magazines can be reviewed thoroughly as they provide insights about statistics and current buying trends of customers. Not only this, third party services can be availed as many firms are providing research facilities and have expertise of performing several types of research. Investigating Competition In all facets of business or marketing, it is important that competition should be closely monitored and there is a need to understand what marketing strategies, the competitors are using. Analyze all the weaknesses and strengths of competitors and design strategies accordingly so that it can outshine them. Pricing of Products and Services Considering cutting prices of products and services is not the only solution to beat your competitors. For getting an edge over them, prices should be compared just like a customer and close attention must be paid over price and cost of raw materials. Keeping low price of products and services might have both positive and negative impacts over customer purchase decision. Therefore a thorough research will enable businesses to take the lead over prices. Networking Getting reach to first customer is never an easy task for an entrepreneur or small business. For this reason expertise of others working in a similar field can be hired. This technique proves to be extremely helpful in the initial stage of business set-ups. The best way to increase networking is to attend corporate gatherings of your competitors where entrepreneurs get chance to learn from them. Another great way to start business is referrals that support a lot in establishing a successful business. Web Presence Creating own website is affordable and extremely necessary for small businesses as well as for large organizations. Websites plays a crucial role as they allow customers to get complete information about
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products and services, a company is offering. A website also helps in portraying the reliability of the company and whether one should consider purchasing goods and services from them or not. Reference: http://www.researchomatic.com/Marketing-Planning-104467.html
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