Marketing these days is more complicated than ever if you don’t have goals for your marketing.

Define your target market by creating an ideal client avatar.

Create and idea of your ideal client in your mind.  What age are they? Are they a man or a woman? What do they do for a living?  What are their hobbies?  Are they married or single? Do they have kids at home?  Are they empty nesters?  Do they like to travel? Do they like sports?  Where do they hang out?  Who are their friends?

Creating someone to target makes marketing to them easier by giving you guidelines for demographics and how to reach these people.

Define your marketing plan.

First, what amount of money are you willing to spend on marketing in any given time period?  Monthly? Yearly? Quarterly? Weekly?  This will help you define your spend per ad.

Second, where are your marketing dollars going to be most beneficial?

Third, how much effort are you personally willing to put into marketing?  Or do you just want to hire this done by someone else for you?

Making a plan for your marketing gives you guidelines or gives whomever you hire guidelines.

Creating an action plan.

Once you decide who you’re marketing to, what your budget is and where you’re going to spend that money to reach those people, you just have to put everything into motion.  There’s no better way to do this than to create an action plan.  To do that, work towards your goals.

• If your goal is to get 10 new leads to provide quotes to, you’re going to want to run an ad where you get contact information.  Facebook is optimized for collecting leads.  You could also use a leadpage from LeadPages.net.
• If your goal is to get 100 likes on your facebook page, an easy way to achieve this is to run a facebook ad and target your niche market to like your facebook page.  You can invite your friends, family and colleagues to like your page as well.
• If you want to get people in the front door of your business, Facebook Ads may not be your best money spent.  Having an event may be a much better call to action than running a facebook ad.  Then you can run ads on Waze instead of Facebook.