Formulated marketing involves the creation of a customized marketing strategy that matches the needs of your small business precisely. Formulated marketing is developed over years of learning the market and your place in it. It relies on research, self-analysis and consumer monitoring to find the right formula.

Purpose

The purpose of a formulated marketing strategy or plan is to coordinate all of your small-business marketing efforts toward one clear goal. Formulated marketing takes time to develop correctly. It takes into account the habits and trends of your past customers, the performance of every marketing initiative you've ever put in place, and the future growth projections you have made for the year to come. Altogether, this type of organized assault on the market is meant to create a seamless relationship between the company and its marketing message. The better you know your market, the better your formulated marketing strategy will work.

Development

Developing your own formulated marketing may be the most difficult part of the process. Your approach to the consumer in every instance must be weighed for its impact and return on investment, and your sales numbers should be directly compared to the marketing that affected them either positively or negatively. For example, let's say your sales numbers were huge five years ago after running a mass-transit ad, but they have dropped in the years that followed, even though you've continued to run the same ad. At the same time, you started general flier distribution, newspaper ads and radio spots, which you believe resulted in a third-quarter spike in sales last year. The jumble of cause and effect must be deciphered and laid out clearly to understand truly in which direction your marketing needs to go.

Implementation

Once you've decoded your past campaigns and understood fully who buys your product, why and how they can best be reached, it's time to implement the strategy. Formulated marketing can be made up of any number of initiatives or advertisements depending on your industry but should always start with those things that worked best in the past. Start your strongest lineup and see what still works. If nothing does, you may be in for a period of trial and error. If one or more things work well, make these your anchors and develop new and better strategies from there.

Problems

Formulated marketing's greatest downfall is the amount of attention and research it takes to get it started. Once under way, formulated marketing plans require nearly as much dedicated manpower and time to keep going. Small businesses that do not have a full-time marketing staff may find the demands of a formulated plan too much to handle. Sure, you can use a somewhat formulated strategy by just knowing what your business needs to succeed and doing it, but if you expect to maintain truly formulated marketing, the demands are high.