Do you need a marketing spark in your business? Have your attempts to attract the attention of your target market become stale? Are your customers yawning at the full line of your product and service offerings and just cherry-picking one or two of them while leaving the rest untouched?

What would you do in this scenario? What changes would you make to get the sales cycle going again? Some might consider making a change of their brand by getting a new logo, building a new web site, or creating a product video that runs on YouTube. Others might shake up their offerings by getting rid of underperformers and pushing a new line of items. Still others might fire their marketing department and hire fresh blood. All of these options may be necessary to get your marketing restarted. However, before you do any of them, you should take account of what you are doing, what you are not doing, and why your marketing efforts are failing to gain the attention of your target.

We provide strategic marketing plans for our clients. It is a process that takes time – which many businesses want to avoid. However it is a necessary step if you are going to get your marketing heading in the right direction. It takes a lot of the guesswork out of marketing by trial and error. It requires the "players” at the company to sit down and think through a process that whittles away the stuff that isn’t working and produces an integrated marketing campaign on which effective marketing can launch.

There are five components to a strategic marketing plan that you should consider

• The strengths and weaknesses of your business

• The features, advantages, and benefits of your products/services

• The expectations of your target market and current customers

• Your competition and what they are doing to gain market share

• Creating a marketing campaign that integrates the facts you discerned in all of the previous four areas.

So many times, I see companies avoid this process and try to get a marketing spark by sheer ingenuity. In some cases, you might get lucky and that works. More often than not, the effort falls short. A strategic marketing plan is a place where your ingenuity can be more effective because it has a focus. It is a great way to get your marketing started again. But it is more than that. It is a roadmap to keep you on track and a way to measure your success.