This afternoon marked the start of 2010 for me. Even now at the start of December our online printing site (kaizenprint.co.uk) has orders for leaflets and roller banner scheduled in for January. It would be easy to sit back and wait for Christmas to roll in, but as a young entrepreneur looking to grow their online printing business, I began typing out my marketing plan for 2010. 

Online Printing Strategy

I did start off my planning very differently to years gone by. Normally my thoughts are along the lines of: 

How to increase the online printing sales over the next 12 months or how to get back some of the lost custom from the past year? 

This year as a small business owner, an online printer, and now that I am working on behalf of myself, my goals turn quite rightly to profit. 

Ask yourself this question: 

How much do you want to earn next year?

The reason I have this thought in mind, is not because I want to become a millionaire (but £500k would be nice right?), but to set goals and focus these targets into manageable pieces. 

Lets say your target is £15,000 profit for 2010. 

That is £1,250 a month or better still approximately £63 a day (based on 20 working days a month). 

How many products do you have to sell to make £63 profit? 

And this is where the marketing lesson kicks in. How are you going to attract the customers that will buy your products to make the £63 profit? 

Over the past year you will have seen which marketing efforts work best for your business. I personally have concluded that yell.com isn’t working for me. It works for some businesses, not mine! So that’s yell ruled out. 

I do know that email marketing & telesales follow up is working extremely well and as a result, I know that 500 emails & 1 weeks telesales will bring in a certain number of business. To attain the £63 profit I will scale this activity up (or down) accordingly. 

Marketing is not about “spend, spend, spend” and see what works approach. It’s about carefully selecting the actions within your budget and scaling up your activities to encompass a larger target audience. Ultimately, scaling up your activities in one area will increase the economies of scale and so reduce the cost to market each customer. 

With a solid base established, you can then (I say loosely) “try out” new activities. 

2010: A year of opportunities

So back on plan! Today I planned out a base schedule for 2010, which will start during the Christmas break. If all goes to plan, it will help me establish new customers, strengthen the relationships with existing customers and build brand awareness of Kaizen Print.

If you want to have a chat about your marketing plan for 2010, call us on 028 9002 2474 for a chat. We’re pretty good at giving some sound advice for the price of a coffee.