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Blog entry 26: Grow Your Company! Create a 2013 Marketing Plan!

Winter is nearly here and before you know it we’ll all be celebrating the start of a new year. Don’t wait until the New Year is here to create your 2013 marketing plan. Take advantage of the lull of sales and services between Thanksgiving and Christmas and begin strategizing and mapping out your plan for successful growth this upcoming year. After all, your marketing plan is your single greatest tool for growth and profit in your company!

As you begin to strategize your 2013 marketing plan, keep a couple key ideas in mind: purple cow, guerrilla marketing and golden streets. These three concepts helped Holganix CEO Barrett Ersek reach $10 million in sales in five short years in his previous lawn care company.

Becoming a purple cow is an idea by marketing guru Seth Godin in his book Purple Cow. Being a purple cow is all about being remarkable, unique and memorable to your audience. Think about Apple and Whole Foods for inspiration. Apple’s purple cow is their incredible focus on design and user interface while Whole Foods focuses on its customer experience and organic, local foods. Not familiar with either of those companies? Think pop sensation Lady Gaga and her infamous meat dress… how much more crazy unique can you get? Learn more from our purple cow blog entry.

Guerrilla marketing is all about powerful, cheap marketing. It’s an advertising strategy that uses super-low costs like sticker bombing or flash mobs to catch your eye (think purple cows when it comes to catching a customers’ eye). In Barrett Ersek’s previous lawn care company, he started utilizing frisbees with the company logo printed on one side and a business card taped on the other. It was cheap, effective and has long-term shelf life (I still have one sitting in my garage!). Learn more from our guerrilla marketing blog entry.

At Holganix, we are always screaming about golden streets. These are the neighborhoods
where you already have customers and have a good potential to add more customers. By building a customer base on golden streets, your technicians spend very little time sitting and a lot more time working and securing profits. Learn more from our golden street blog entry.

As you start mapping out your strategy, develop a year sales goal and break that goal into measurable chunks. For example, if your sales goal was to capture 600 new customers in 2013 (keep in mind that usually 75% of your customers should come in the spring), break that number down by month (you would need to acquire 50 new customers a month), then by week (12.5 customers per week), which is only about 2 customers per weekday)! It makes measuring the progress of your goal much easier and allows you to keep on track with your ultimate goal. Learn more about developing a 2013 sales goal and breaking it down to measureable bits in this former blog entry. Take a look at a sample plan from Barrett Ersek’s previous lawn care company by clicking on this link.

On a side note, as you grow, make sure your company can handle your growth by investing in a software program like Lawn Assistant by Real Green to get your clients in order. After all, who cares if you gain new customers if you lose the ones you already have? 

So sit down with your marketing person and anyone else you think is relevant and put on your thinking caps. Create your marketing plan now, before 2013 is here, and grow your company. Have any questions about developing a marketing plan? Leave your questions below in the comment box, shoot us an email or give us a call! We are happy to help.