Your Guide To Creating A Small Business Marketing Plan

You have launched your business and now it's time to promote your product or service. While creating multiple social media posts or sending promotional emails may seem easy enough, disjointed marketing efforts can confuse your target audience and ultimately hurt your business. You need to create a marketing plan.

What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is a strategic roadmap for how you will communicate with your target audience (online and offline) in order to successfully market your product or service. Marketing plans range from very simple to very detailed, depending on what you want to achieve.

According to ArcheMedX Director of Marketing Molly Mabel Bryant, a marketing plan is much more than a list of things you want to achieve. Instead, you should list the results you're looking for - measurable and contextual, such as the sales funnel you've designed or the leads you've created - and describe the high-level strategy you'll use to achieve those results. Developing a strategy can be difficult, but it will help you stay on track and avoid distractions, also known as long range crawling.

Once you have an agreed plan, you can compare each request that comes in against your strategy to determine "Yes, this fits my strategy, so we can add it" or "No, this sounds good in theory, but it's not suitable for the conditions." we have agreed." Strategy, so we're not going to adjust resources," Bryant told business.com.

Types of Marketing Plans

There are several different marketing plans you can use, depending on the specific strategy that works best for your organization. To create an effective integrated marketing strategy, your business needs a combination of the following marketing plans:

Advertising plan
Brand plan
Content Marketing Plan
Customer Acquisition Plan
Direct Marketing Plan
Email Marketing Plan
PR plan
Print a marketing plan
reputation management
Maintenance plan
Search engine optimization plan
Social media marketing plan

Depending on your product placement, you can also develop a custom marketing plan such as influencer marketing or video marketing.

Why is it important to have a marketing plan for your business?

A marketing plan is an essential resource for any small business. Basically, it helps you determine the market needs your product or service fulfills, how your product differs from competitors' products, and who your product or service is. A marketing plan also serves as a roadmap for building your sales, branding and business strategy. This is essential to successfully convey your brand message to your target audience.

Another major benefit of having a marketing plan for your company is that it forces you to sit down and calculate your business goals and how you can actually achieve them, not just measure numbers. When you see your growth results, you can dig deeper to determine what it took to get to that number.

Bryant gives the following example: “Do you need a $100,000 income? How much is this sale? If there are 10, what is the closing price?” We need 100 leads. Now, where did this come from and what strategy would you use? The plan helps you get everything down on paper so you can then make decisions about resources and tactics with a lot of preparation and realism,” said Bryant.

By analyzing your results and resources, you can save time and avoid volume swings by focusing only on the strategies that fit into your marketing plan. A marketing plan not only helps you think realistically about your strategy, it also gets your stakeholders on the same wavelength and holds your marketing team accountable for their decisions.

“When individual goals and objectives are defined for stakeholders and partners throughout the company, it's easier for the entire team to feel comfortable achieving sales goals and gives the marketing team the space and freedom they need to get their job done without a hitch. The need for control,” says marketing consultant Cassidy Dale. Digital Owners and Ethos.

Additionally, Dale says the marketing plan should be easy for your entire team, managers, and external department to understand, and should serve as a simple guide for marketing managers and future team members to understand and implement.

5 Elements of an Effective Business Marketing Plan

The marketing plan must be tailored to your business; However, Deal says that all marketing plans contain five main features:

your business goals
Key Metrics (how you can define and measure success)
Strategy (overview of ways to achieve goals)
Plan (will include implementation details, human resources, departments and software)
Reporting (what program reports to include and/or how they will look like)

We've divided these 5 tasks into 10 action categories to help you create a unique and effective marketing plan for your business.

1. Continue

The executive summary is a great place to give readers of your plan an overview of your business mission or goals, as well as the marketing strategies you'll use. The summary is often written after the rest of the marketing plan is complete to ensure that it includes all the important elements of your plan. If your resume is the only part of your marketing plan that anyone will read (which they most likely will), you need to make sure they understand the most important details.

2. Assign tasks

Not to be confused with a vision statement, a mission statement is a statement that summarizes your company's values and how they align with your overall goals as an organization. Here are some good questions to get you thinking:

What is your company doing today?
What's important to your company?
What do you want your company to do in the future?
What is your corporate identity?
What's your culture?
What value does your company provide to customers, employees and stakeholders?

3. Target market

Defining your target market is one of the most important parts of your marketing plan. Without a defined target audience, the money you spend on marketing will be wasted. Think of it this way: some people need your service or product but don't know it exists yet. Who are these people?

Here are a few more questions to help you think about your target market:

What are the demographics of your customers (gender, age, income, education, etc.)?
What are their needs and interests?
What is their psychological profile (views, worldview, values, lifestyle, etc.)?
How do they behave?
What products are they currently using?

4. Products and services

Don't just list what your product or service is in this section. Think critically about what you can offer your customers and what it means for them.

What do you produce or offer customers?
What are the client's needs?
How does your product or service meet customer needs?
What value do you add to your customers' lives?
What types of products or services do you offer?

5. Sales channels

At this point in your report, you should turn your thinking into real-world marketing theory and practice. Distribution channels are the methods you will use to reach potential customers or companies. Consider all current and potential sales channels in which your target audience is active. Distribution channels that work well for one organization may not work for another. For example, one company might host their website for free on a site like HubSpot and rely on it as their sole sales channel, while another might have an entire team using Pinterest to drive sales. [Learn how a CRM system can help you track leads across different distribution channels.]

Some examples of sales funnels:

website).
Retailer
Mobile Text Message Marketing
social media
Email
Dealer - agent
Printing (newspapers, magazines, brochures, catalogs, direct mail)
Broadcasting (television and radio)
Press conference
Exhibitions, product demonstrations and marketing events

6. Competitive profile

A key aspect of your marketing plan is developing your unique selling proposition (USP). USP is the features or positioning that differentiate your product or service from those offered by competitors. It's all about differentiating and identifying your company as the sole owner of any product or service. Do a competitive analysis to determine your competitive profile and how you stand against your competitors. In conducting this analysis, it is important to remain neutral.

Here are some ideas to consider:

What's your USP?
Who are your competitors? What do they offer?
What are your competitors' strengths and weaknesses?
What market (or customer) needs are not being met? What can you do to meet those needs?

7. Pricing strategy

Pricing is something to consider when creating a marketing plan. Developing the right pricing strategy will help you sell your products better. You want to consider your current and projected finances when developing a long-term marketing strategy that is realistic and beneficial for your business. Here are some key questions to ask yourself about assessment:

What is a reasonable margin to make a profit and cover production costs?
Is there a market for the product or service at the price you expect?
Are you willing to sacrifice profitability to gain more market share?
What are your marketing and distribution costs?

8. Purpose

Keep your goals in mind when developing your marketing plan. This aspect of your plan should cover specific market penetration and revenue targets. Make sure to keep your marketing goals on-brand with your business. What to consider:

sales quota
Attract a number of new customers
Customer retention rate
the target is getting closer
market penetration
Brand recognition
site traffic

9. Plan of action

Once you have determined all of the above, determine the actual steps you need to take to implement your marketing plan. This includes identifying the right steps, setting goals, segregating tasks, and creating a shared schedule.

It's also important to consider the potential hurdles your business may face and some of the solutions to overcome them. If you don't have a realistic and effective plan for implementing your ideas, your research is useless.

10. Financial projections

The last step allows you to create a realistic marketing budget and get a better idea of what your marketing plan will look like in terms of costs. In addition to setting a budget, consider the overall ROI. Here are some other financial projections to consider:

execution costs
The cost of producing a product or service
current and expected cash flows
expected sales volume
The desired profit from the expected sales

Template for creating a successful marketing plan

The web is full of useful tools, including free and paid marketing plan templates, to help you create a successful marketing plan.

Whether you're looking for a free template maker to create a new marketing plan, a comparison tool to evaluate existing strategies, or a video tutorial to learn more about marketing plans, there's an excellent resource for you. Remember that the best marketing plan for your business is individual.

“Ultimately, you have to develop a marketing plan that meets your team's needs the way you want them to,” says Dale. “Don't push yourself into a plan that doesn't suit your team. Use templates to reduce workload time, but then adapt to a more customized plan.”

Marketing plan template

Free Marketing Plan Templates: Business.com has developed free templates that are fully customizable to fit your business needs. Each chapter contains detailed explanations, examples and resources to help you create a great marketing plan.

Video tutorials on marketing plans

Quick Learning: If you're a visual learner, use one of the many marketing plan video tutorials online to get you started. One of our favorites is this quick guide from marketing guru Neil Patel. Create a six-step marketing plan in six minutes.
A more detailed guide for beginners. If you're new to marketing plans or want a more formal (and longer) video to share with your marketing team, there are other video tutorials on YouTube.

Measuring tools and templates

Smart Insights: In addition to marketing plan templates, some companies like Smart Insights offer marketing benchmarking templates to help you measure the effectiveness of your strategy. They are available with a free membership to Smart Insights.
GERU: Similarly, GERU offers funnel planning, revenue forecasting, and simulation tools to help evaluate shadow business ideas and simulations. This can help you identify areas of weakness in your marketing strategy that need improvement. Although GERU requires users to sign up for a paid account, you can use a free trial to test it.

How to proceed with your new marketing plan

Before getting started with a marketing plan template, it's important to understand how to think about a marketing plan.

A good marketing plan focuses on the customer, defines the services or products you offer, and defines your unique selling proposition. From here, you will take charge of the marketing planning process and develop the best way to present your product or service to buyers who need it.

Dill has developed a simple four-step process for creating a small business marketing plan.

The first step is to hold a marketing meeting with the entire marketing team and executives or stakeholders. This gives them time to raise questions, concerns, and criticisms you might not have thought of so you can return to the board and re-evaluate your strategy or plans.
Then add a timeline for all your tasks and assign team members and any help needed to complete the plan.
Once you've implemented your plan, conduct weekly check-ins in person or via email to keep everyone up to date.
Share weekly progress reports with all stakeholders and managers to ensure you are on the right track.

In addition to developing your own plan, you can work with a digital marketing agency or use online marketing management and pay-per-click services to increase your online presence.

Once you've created a comprehensive roadmap, update it annually. Developing a well-designed marketing plan will set your business up for continued success - it will allow you to prepare for the unexpected and build a relationship between your brand and your audience.

Matt D'Angelo contributed to an earlier version of this article.

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