Many small time wannabe marketers who write marketing, advertising and sleazy sales books will have you believe that the over all marketing plan is the quintessential reason for success or failure in your business. Indeed business plans and marketing plans are of value but before you start a business you have no idea where it will take you.

As an entrepreneur you may plan to have a certain market mix and then find the customers are leading you a different way, as they want to buy something else and more of it than less.

You cannot fight the flow of such things and you would be ignorant to try, that is if it is profitable to deliver what those customers are lining up for. Many marketing self-proclaimed consults will tell you that; “Prior to purchasing Ads you need to have goals, which come from an Overall Marketing Plan.”

Sure sounds like good advice doesn’t; well it is not and those who make such statements in marketing articles, books, business tapes or seminars are simply not with it and have never achieved greatness in their own marketing. Goals are great indeed, but back tracking from the goals to allocations in advertising expenditures is the wrong way to approach it.

You must make sure that you have a customer base and public desire for what you sell first and determine how much of that trend you can capture and where best to place your ads at the most inexpensive price to attract the most of those potential customers as possible and then tap into those customers for referrals to bring you the rest.

In fact this whole process may take very little advertising dollars and following some MBA BS consultants plan will cost you twice. Once in paying them for bad advice and then in paying too much for advertising that does not win the game. Consider all this in 2006.