A marketing plan is a document with objectives, strategies, and tactics created to achieve business goals. A strategy can be defined as the approach or method one takes to fulfill their goal.
Small business marketing strategies come in many forms, as there is no “right” way to do it. However, this chapter will discuss some ideas you might consider when creating your own marketing plan for your small business!
A comprehensive marketing plan can help keep your business focused on the right things, but it can also be difficult to create. The process of writing a marketing plan relies on understanding your specific goals and how you want to reach them.
Here are the main topics in this chapter in case you want to jump ahead.
Let’s begin with understanding the difference between a plan and a strategy.
Marketing Plan vs Marketing Strategy
Many Small Business Owners are often confused between a marketing strategy and a marketing plan. Although they may sound like they’re interchangeable, there is actually a difference!
- A Marketing Strategy is an overarching plan that sets goals for your business.
- A Marketing Plan tells you how to achieve those goals.
The key here is knowing what it takes to reach your goal, which can differ depending on the market you target or whether you want to make more profit vs growing sales volume.
Below we’ll go over some of the differences between these two concepts so that Small Business Owners can better understand their options when creating a marketing strategy!
What Is a Marketing Plan?
A marketing plan is the execution of your strategy. It’s the roadmap for tactical marketing efforts that help you achieve your goals. Your plan includes everything from where and when to implement strategies to how you will track success to see if it was successful or not.
What Is a Marketing Strategy?
According to the Small Business Association (SBA), a marketing strategy shapes your business strategy and how your company will operate. It’s all about purpose: what you offer, how you offer it, and why your efforts help achieve your company goals. With this defined, developing an effective plan becomes much easier.
If you are looking to grow your business, you must have a marketing strategy in place. Your company’s goals will shape your marketing plan and mission statement, which means that the more clearly defined these two things are, the easier it will be to build an effective marketing campaign for your small business.
Hopefully, you now understand the difference and the importance of creating your marketing plan to find success.
Now let’s discuss how to come up with your marketing plan.
Creating Your Marketing Plan
A marketing plan is a report that outlines your marketing strategy monthly, quarterly or yearly. In addition, your marketing plan should include the following:
Executive Business Summary
The Executive Business Summary is a one-page summary of your company’s marketing plan. This section should include the following information:
- Company Profile Name
- Address and Phone Number
- Product/Service Description
- Target Market Segmentation (a brief description of how you define your target market, the size of this segment, and any key needs they have)
- Marketing Objectives
Your goals will also need to align with your company’s vision or mission statement.
Make sure to keep your executive summary brief and to the point since it’s only the primer to the rest of your marketing plan.
Marketing & Advertising Goals
Once you have written your executive business summary, it’s time to create your marketing and advertising goals.
Marketing and advertising goals are the most important part of any marketing plan. Be sure to take your time with this, be clear about what you want, and set specific targets for website traffic, conversions, or customer success that can actually be measured in real numbers.
Your marketing and advertising goals should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable/Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound.
To increase the success of your business, you must identify key performance metrics and establish goals for those. For example, if one metric includes an increase in followers on Twitter by 10%, then create a goal outlining how many new followers you want to have after 30 days or 60 days.
One of the most important elements in any marketing plan is figuring out what you want to accomplish.
- What are your goals?
- How do they tie into Key Performance Indicators or KPIs?
The more specific and detailed these seem, the better off you’ll be when it comes time to produce content that’s on-brand for your business.
Now let’s take a look at some examples:
Goal #1 – Increase page views by 100% over 3 months
KPI (Page Views): Pageviews/month
Goal #2 – Secure $50K worth of contracts within 6 weeks from launch day
KPI ($ Value Gained) Contract Worth/6 Weeks
To create an effective marketing campaign, you need to understand your objectives and what metrics will help you measure success. While every business has different numbers that they may want to focus on during their campaigns, the following are a few key ones:
- Lead generation through digital content or social media profiles
- Website traffic conversions at checkout pages
- Engagement rates in various online platforms like Facebook or Twitter
Understanding these three things can give insight into how successful your campaign is and any specific areas of improvement needed.
Customer Research
User personas are an important part of a marketing plan that should not be overlooked.
One way to find the right customer for your business is by defining their goals and problems so you can make them happy with what they’re looking for. If you don’t know who wants what, how will you ever serve them?
So get specific! Ask yourself:
- Who is my ideal customer?
- What do they want from my business?
- How does my product solve their biggest problem(s)?
- What are their habits?
- What motivates them?
- What are their ultimate goals:
- What are their daily activities?
- What’s their marital status?
- Do they have children?
- What is their occupation?
- What is their income bracket?
- What does their education look like?
The best way to conduct user research is by interviewing your users, conducting focus groups, or surveying them. Once you have compiled all the data from these methods into a guide for what they like and dislike about your product, it will be much easier to tailor their experience with you accordingly!
We will discuss creating your buyer personas more in chapter 4: How to create a buyer persona.
Competitor Research
To truly stand out in a saturated market, competitors’ research is crucial. So the first step to success starts by identifying your competition and what they’re doing that you could surpass them with. Your competitor analysis should typically include:
Identifying who your top 3 or 4 direct competitors are and how much their business overlaps yours (resulting in the potential for joint ventures)
- What do customers think of each company? This will clue you into which brands have greater visibility than others on social media/in person; this information can lead you towards marketing strategies like product placement, influencer collaborations, etc…
- How does your brand position itself against its rivals?
- Is there any way you could make your positioning better based on what the competition is doing?
- What are your company’s strengths and weaknesses compared to your competitors?
- What can they do better than you or vice versa that would help them outsmart a competitor?
- Can we exploit these vulnerabilities with marketing strategies like clever positioning, negative ad campaigns, etc.?
Competitor Analysis is an imperative part of marketing for any small business that wants to stay competitive and top. Please take it as a deep dive with all the strategies they use across their blog/content marketing, social media marketing, SEO Marketing, video marketer, and more. Researching strengths in weaknesses will help you find some great opportunities!
Market Strategy
To offer the best products and services, you need a sound marketing strategy. This section of your plan outlines everything from what kind of people will be targeted to how those customers can find out more about your business. You’ll also want to include information on pricing and product offerings so that potential buyers know why they should buy from you instead of one of the many competitors in the market!
In a full-length marketing plan, this section can contain the eight Ps of marketing:
Product – The goods and services that are marketed
Price – What channels of distribution will you use when selling these products and services?
Place – Where you’ll find these products for sale–whether in stores or online
Promotion – How the product is advertised to potential customers
People – Who are your target customer base?
Process – What steps need to be taken for sale to occur; how does this process work?
Physical Evidence – What are the tangible, physical products that your company sells?
Perception – How does an individual perceive these goods or services; how can you change their perception through marketing campaigns.
Marketing Budget
One of the most important parts of your marketing plan and strategy is the budget. Whether you’re on a shoestring budget or have unlimited funds, it’s good to know how much money has been put aside for marketing initiatives such as advertising, events, and PR. Itemized expenses include outsourcing costs – like hiring an agency- and software programs to help with social media campaigns.
Since small businesses often don’t have the same resources as larger companies, they need to know their strengths and work best. For example, many smaller businesses do not have an in-house marketing department or staff. Hence, it’s necessary to develop strategies that rely on outside sources, such as hiring a digital marketing agency.
Marketing Channels
Your marketing plan will include a list of the channels you’ll use to promote your product. While it might be tempting to rely solely on ad space for promotion (especially if that’s all you have budgeted), there are other ways of getting the word out about what you’re selling and where potential buyers can buy from.
Namely, publishing content related to or featuring your products that educate readers while generating leads and spreading awareness about who they should purchase items from in the future is one way;
using social media as another channel is also worth exploring because this area has become an integral part of our everyday lives – especially among millennials! Plus according to Ambassador, 71% of social media consumers will recommend a service that they like to others.
Consider how many followers certain networks offer before deciding whether those networks will be worth your time, though.
If you’re not sure where to start with any of these things, don’t worry! Remember that there are resources all around us – and fortunately for small businesses., in chapter 7 of this guide: How to promote your business, we discuss different options to spread the message about your product or services online.
Content Plan
The most effective way to turn your marketing strategy into an execution plan is by using a campaign approach. You can think of campaigns as buckets with activities focused on a common theme or goal. This allows you to have the big picture before getting too deep in detail about which new video you will produce, white paper that needs writing and promotion, etc., giving yourself more time for other tasks like looking at data trends over social media analytics insights from third-party sites such as Google Analytics and Facebook Insights.
Campaigns are often a combination of different marketing efforts, which can be difficult to plan. First, you need to balance your time between each campaign, so you have enough resources for all of them–and don’t forget about sleep! If there’s one thing I’ve learned after running campaigns around the clock is just how important it is to take the time for yourself–even if it’s just to power nap during lunch.
Choosing the Right Marketing Methodology
When you are looking to create a marketing campaign, the first thing that comes to mind is which marketing method should be used. Inbound and outbound are two types of marketing strategies that both have their own strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, business owners need to understand the differences between inbound and outbound to decide what type will work best.
Inbound vs Outbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is all about driving prospects or customers to you. It’s achieved through creating content to be found by your target audience as they search for products and services like yours.
Outbound marketing involves actively pursuing prospects not currently in the buying cycle, such as cold calling. Outbound strategies may include pay-per-click advertising or social media ads. Outbound marketing is a more expensive form of marketing, but it can be an effective strategy for actively searching and ready to buy.
Let’s take a closer look at these 2 types of strategies.
What Is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is the process of attracting customers by generating content that is relevant to your audience. This strategy involves creating and publishing blog posts, videos, webinars, or other materials to be found via social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.
So What Are the Benefits of Using Inbound Marketing?
The most obvious is saving money on TV commercials, print ads, and radio spots. You’ll also have a higher return on investment because prospects actively engage with your content instead of being interrupted by costly advertising messages. But there’s more! Inbound marketing also allows you to get feedback about what your customers want and need.
The most successful inbound campaigns do two things: They educate potential buyers on their product or service. Second, they offer them the opportunity to buy now without having to leave the website. The goal is for prospects to find out as much information about your company before deciding whether aware of your business. It is the opposite of outbound marketing, which seeks to attract prospects with content they are already seeking and interested in.
For inbound marketing to be successful, it needs a good strategy, connections with other businesses like yours, relationships within social media channels where you have followers or friends who can refer you to others, and finally, a website optimized for user experience.
An effective marketing strategy also has to consider your business’s vision statement or mission statement to decide which type of customers you want to work with. You have the power over who will be reading your company’s message by deciding what kind of content you put out. Creating an effective content strategy will help you beat your competitors since about 70% of marketers lack a consistent content strategy.
How To Create a Small Business Inbound Campaign
Step One: Determine who you want to work with
Step Two: Determine the kind of content that will attract this type of customer. This should be a topic they are already seeking out and interested in, not something new. Optimize your website for user experience, so it’s easy to find what they are looking for.
Step Three: Work on a social media strategy. Social media is the perfect way to interact with your audience while simultaneously providing them with content they want to see and engage in.
Step Four: Develop an email marketing campaign that will introduce new customers to what you have to offer. Keep current ones engaged by giving them exclusive deals or updates about products coming to your store.
Step Five: Create a content calendar. Outline what you plan to publish on your website, when it will be published, and who the target audience is for each piece of content.
Step Six: Create an outline for blog posts relevant to your business or industry so you can have new ideas on hand when time starts running short. 53% of marketers agree that blogging is the top content marketing priority.
Step Seven: Create a lead magnet. A lead magnet is a gift, usually for an email address or contact information.
Step Eight: Create landing pages that will introduce new prospects to your business and provide them with the content they need to make a purchase decision.
What Is Outbound Marketing?
Outbound marketing refers to actively pursuing prospects who are not currently in need of what you have to offer. Outbound marketing is also a disruptive method of getting your message in front of potential customers because it interrupts people when they are surfing the web, watching tv or scrolling though their social media feeds. The message in your advertising is trying to get the attention of people who might not be actively looking for your product or services.
So What Are the Benefits of Using Outbound Marketing?
The main benefit of a small business using an outbound method of promoting its products or services is that it allows your company to grow much faster than relying on inbound marketing.
When it comes to outbound marketing for small businesses, the sky is the limit! You can use various methods and spend any amount you want as long as your budget permits. However, each method has its own benefits and challenges, so testing different methods may be necessary before settling on one marketing channel.
How To Create a Small Business Outbound Campaign
Step One: The first step in creating an outbound campaign is to figure out who you want your promotion to reach. This can be accomplished by looking at the area’s demographics around your business or using the information collected on past customers.
Step Two: Create a list of what these potential prospects would like to hear from you.
Are you trying to reach people who might not be aware of your product or services but should?
Or are you trying to reach your competitors’ customers or clients?
It is a good idea to have two versions of this list, one for those who are more interested in the benefits and features of your services/products and another that focuses on why they should buy them now.
Step Three: Write down all the methods or channels which will be used, as well as what needs to happen with each, including branding, content, and budget.
Step Four: Pick the channels that will work best for your campaign, then assign a team member to charge each channel or set up an automated system if possible.
Step Five: Create a timeline for the campaign.
Step Six: Create effective messages to grab the attention of the type of client you will be going after in step one.
Step Seven: Set up an evaluation system that will allow you to measure performance and adjust accordingly if necessary.
Which Marketing Method Should You Use?
Choosing the right marketing strategy boils down to your goals and budget. If cost isn’t a concern or you have plenty of time on your side, inbound might be the best strategy for your small business.
Outbound is the best strategy to reach a larger audience if you have a budget for advertising.
If you’re looking for leads with an existing budget ready and waiting, inbound marketing may be your best bet.
Final Thoughts on How To Create a Marketing Plan
You now know how to create a marketing plan for your small business and have the tools necessary to put that plan into action. Next, it’s time to start thinking about analyzing your business to improve your marketing efforts in chapter two of The Complete Guide to Small Business Marketing.
We didn’t get into many other aspects today, like understanding what content is best for your audience or posting on social media channels, but don’t worry; all will be revealed in the next chapters.
