1. Goals. You need measurable goals in order to know whether you're effective. (How many new customers? How many new inquiries? By when?)
2. Information flow. Distribution of information necessary for marketing must avoid bottlenecks and points of failure.
3. Budget. (Is there a budget for marketing efforts? With how much advance notice is it decided? Where does it go?) Marketing should have a small pot to work with directly to go to lunch with a media rep or prepare business cards. But more important than that is a budget policy. For instance, do you track customer response to marketing initiative? And compare response to cost?
4. Product pricing. How do you do it?
5. Trade shows. There must be sufficient notice to prepare press releases and schedule media events.
6. Press releases. Have you established relationships with any press contacts? Such relationships can lead to priority treatment for your press releases.
7. Customer satisfaction and fulfillment. If you have repeat or scale-up customers, do you know why? Do you maintain testimonials? Do you offer customers an incentive for referrals or testimonials?
8. Reseller involvement. What sort of marketing are resellers doing? What incentives do you offer them? Are you actively seeking other resellers? If so, where are you looking? Do you invite them to participate with you in trade shows?
9. Web site traffic. Do you have the tools to monitor it? Do you know what to do with that information?
10. Industry trends. Is everybody monitoring the trades to find out what's going on? You could assign individuals certain trades, to prevent "reinventing the wheel," and summarize for everyone.
11. Authority suited to responsibility. Those responsible for the marketing strategy must be allowed some freedom to pursue it, and must be given the tools (especially information and budget) to do so.

A good marketing plan, like a business plan, maps out strategy, using plenty of numbers (in graphs and tables, of course) to establish the advertising budget. It includes the publications you'll use, with contacts in an appendix.

Inexpensive marketing tools include

• business cards
• stationery
• brochures prepared on your PC
• a customer database
• local newspapers, if your customers are local
• trade magazines (though you will often find that one large, expensive ad in a good magazine is more cost-effective than several smaller ads in less expensive ones)
• professional and business organizations and business networking groups
• joint ventures with vendors and resellers
• hosting seminars and workshops

Using your Web site as a primary marketing tool means you must

• make sure the site is working
• select appropriate keywords and use with a META tag
• list the site on search engines and indexes
• write a GOOD description for Yahoo
• consider joining a "pay for hits" service if your customers are highly specialized
• list your Web address on all other materials
• assign a "Web gardener" to update content and weed out everything that's out of date

References

The Womens' Online Business Center has a wonderful tutorial on marketing plans.
selfpromotion.com is the best tool I've seen for moving Web sites into marketing tools.

1. Study your competitors. Your marketing should stand out from the competition. Ask yourself
   • Why did they pick THIS journal over another?
   • What did they emphasize? (e.g. price, performance, humor, applications, etc.)
   • Would their ads appeal to our customers?
   • How much are they spending on advertising?
   • Are their ads well-placed?
2. Spend your money carefully. Large ads in better trades, for instance, will be noticed more frequently than a greater number of smaller ads in smaller publications. Press releases get higher priority from advertisers as well.
3. Take advantage of "beta testing." The First Law of New Technology is "nobody wants to be the first to buy it." You can get them to take it free now and buy more later.
   • The product must be pretty much bug-free.
   • You must make sure the customers actually use it.