How to Build a Small Business Marketing Plan

If you run a small business, you need a plan for your marketing strategy. Without a plan, you’ll end up marketing in the dark without any tangible results. Marketing without a strategic plan is a recipe for disaster. You cannot have a successful small business if you keep it under wraps. If you do, you may not be in business for much too long. Marketing and exposing your small business is what helps it to grow. Marketing gets your products/services in front of people who need or want them. Usually, good marketing helps to convince buyers that you have the right solution to their problems. Through it, you can sometimes manage to convince consumers that they have a problem that needs fixing and you have the right solution to the problem.

To market successfully, you need a small business marketing strategy. That requires intentional planning. It must also be dynamic enough to be relevant since things move so fast these days. You cannot for instance expect last year’s marketing strategy to still work perfectly for you one year down the road. The reason your marketing plan needs to be up to date and effective at all times. If you want an effective marketing plan for your small business, it will help if you can stick with the following guide to create one.

Clearly Establish Your Marketing Goals: The first thing you do is to establish clear marketing goals you want to achieve and create key performance indicators (KPIs) you can target and accurately measure to determine if you are doing well. Such goals can include the volume of traffic, number of leads/customers, volume of sales and revenue target.
 
Identify Your Audience: Next is to clearly identify your audience. Who exactly do you want to market to if you want to achieve your set goals? Your marketing strategy is doomed to failure without a good understanding of who your audience is. You must put on paper and clearly define who your business is targeting and by what means/channels. You must figure this out correctly because if you don’t, you’ll be marketing in vain without tangible results.

Set Your Marketing Budget: As most marketers very well know, a marketing plan without a budget is a mere wish list. Therefore, you must accurately figure out expenditure costs and what you can achieve by what you spend on marketing. Figure out how much you can allocate in your marketing budget to, for example traditional advertising, email marketing, social media marketing and so on. Be sure the expenditure is measurable against projected results or achievements.

Decide Your Marketing Channels and Tactics: If you factor in the products you are marketing and the characteristics of your target audience, you can decide on the most effective channels to use. Knowing quite well that it is virtually impossible or even prudent to invest in every marketing channel or tactic out there, you must deliberately make choices in favor of what will yield the best results for the type of marketing you want. Depending on your marketing budget, you can pick a handful of channels and strategies to prioritize.

Draw up Your To-Do List and Make Assignments: This is one great way to keep to schedules and targets on formats you can see and use as achievement/progress guides. You can start this by making check-boxes and assigning names to tasks. You then outline everything that needs to happen in tandem with your plan then take each marketing strategy from idea to execution. Each completed achievement is marked off done before you move to the next.

Set Your Deadlines: For your marketing plan to be effective, you must clearly set out dates and even time for when you hope to accomplish your marketing goals. You must be able to clearly define and track all your marketing goals against the deadlines set. If for instance one of your goals is to increase sales and revenue, you must decide how much of that you expect to achieve in the time-frame of one week, one month or by the end of the quarter or the year. These time-frames will help you to know exactly when to track your actual performance against your projections with a view to knowing how well you are doing.

Last Line

If you stick with this plan, your marketing results will amaze you.