Why Your Business Needs a Marketing Plan
Marketing plans are a business essential and play a major role in your long term strategy of client generation, client retention and even customer service. It is crucial for business owners to understand that everything is tied together when it comes to marketing. You can have the best product or services in your area but if no one can find you, it does not matter. Likewise, you can have the best marketing in your area but horrible customer service which will quickly torpedo all of your marketing efforts. Marketing plans deserve your attention and they need to be monitored frequently and fully evaluated at minimum annually. Constructing a well thought out marketing plan can be time-consuming and confusing, but it’s also absolutely essential to the success of your business. Your properly assembled marketing plan will lay out your short and long term goals along with your implementation plans in order to achieve those goals. Businesses that choose to “wing it” and not create a marketing plan face major issues defining their long term goals (because they always seem to change), have less success developing strategic paths to achieve those goals and find it much more difficult to see how all of their marketing efforts are tied together. This leads to marketing confusion, wasted dollars spent on mixed brand messaging, promotional marketing chaos and lost leads – beyond a doubt it will hurt your business more than you think. Marketing plans are important for all businesses – startups, small to large, young to established businesses.
How To Create a Marketing Plan
While business plans are important for laying out details of what your business is going to accomplish, your mission and long term goals – marketing plans are more about how you are going to get potential clients to learn about your business along with selling them the benefits of choosing you instead of your competition. What type of advertising will be best for your business? What will your marketing mix be? Are you going to focus solely online or mix in some offline marketing as well? Who is your target market? And what are the potential outcomes expected with your marketing choices? Those are some questions to contemplate as you start considering the creation of your marketing plan. Below you will find a list of 6 things that will assist you with the development of your marketing plan. This is far from an exhaustive list and typically it is very wise to bring in a business consultant to assist you because it is a fundamental part of your business. When you consider business consultants, especially for your marketing plan it is necessary that they are well versed not only on how to create a successful plan but also how to implement it. We always recommend searching for a consultant with a vast amount of experience in digital marketing because it likely will be your largest source of new clients. SayWhat Consulting offers marketing plan creation and has over 20 years of business consulting, management and marketing experience. Think of us as your Chief Marketing Officer at a fraction of the cost.
1. Identify Your Target Market – The first thing you need to do when creating your marketing plan is to define your target market. If you do not truly understand who your target market is then it will be that much more difficult to find them through the marketing channels. Target markets are a group of potential customers that share common themes which you have identified as likely to benefit from using your company and its services. When you are choosing marketing platforms you can literally break down who will see your advertisements, ranging in age, specific locations and other demographic measures – it is more important than ever to truly understand your target market.
2. Make Sure you have defined your goals and objectives – The second thing you need to do is to identify what your goals are and then develop specific objectives that align with those goals.
3. Identify The Methods of Marketing you will use – The third factor is to identify your marketing platforms, which can include things like email marketing, Google AdWords, Facebook ads, SEO, digital PR, magazine advertising, local advertising and social media to name a few. We also highly suggest focusing on local advertising as it has proven to be effective and also cost effective. Offline advertising is still an effective tool for the right businesses and for many businesses it has proven to be MORE effective than online advertising alone. It is usually ideal to have a marketing mix which includes a variety of marketing platforms with the same marketing message.
4. Evaluate How You Are Measuring Success – The fourth issue that you should address when creating your marketing plan is to evaluate how to measure success for each individual campaign. This allows you to adjust or optimize them if they are not working or add additional funding if needed. It is common and a huge mistake for your business to implement the plan but not evaluate the effectiveness of the marketing. Many companies make the damaging choice of leaving their marketing on cruise control, without knowing if it is actually producing results. There is no perfect marketing plan and things will need to be adjusted. There is a lot of value in knowing what marketing efforts are the most efficient for your company and which are most profitable but without a specific method in measuring and tracking success you are making it more difficult to understand those key metrics.
5. Create an Implementation Plan – Creating the implementation plan includes deadlines for each task in your marketing plan, who will be responsible for completing that task and who will manage all of the moving parts in order to succeed. If you are looking to hire someone to create your marketing plan, make sure they can work with you to develop your implementation plan as well so that everything is under one umbrella.
6. Identify Possible Companies to use in order to implement your marketing plan – There are thousands of marketing companies out there but few will be a good fit for your specific business. It is vital for the success of your marketing plan that you choose the right company. The wrong company can destroy the best of marketing plans. You might want to consider hiring SayWhat Consulting to vet companies for you and find the right company for your needs. The average business goes through 4-5 digital marketing firms prior to finding the right company – it is important you do everything you can to increase the likelihood of your success.
Creating Goals to Measure Success
Every business needs to understand how to measure its success – for some it may be brand awareness and others it might be direct sales. The goals need to align with your long term business growth plan and identifying the goals of what you will consider success is vital. Here are 5 things that you should review when deciding if your marketing has been effective.
1. Tracking Leads– How many leads did you collect via digital marketing, and what specific source? How many from offline advertising? Were these targeted to people who were likely to buy from you? Can you directly attribute these new leads to your new marketing efforts? Were they word of mouth business? This also should include phone calls, not only form submissions or email leads.
2. Email Subscriber Growth – How many new email subscribers did you gain through your marketing efforts? Is there a certain segment that performs better than others, or was it random? It is also smart to track the response rate of those email subscribers by source in order to evaluate their long term value to your business. You can easily track their engagement rate, how often they are on your website, the purchases made and so on.
3. Sales Volume– Are there spikes in sales during certain times of year and products over others? If so, how can that be leveraged in your future marketing efforts? After you marketing plan implementation are there any changes to those historical spikes?
4. Social Media Interaction – How many people are engaging with you on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.? Did these interactions lead to increased sales or interactions with your company? It is important to document your social media followers and interactions prior to marketing plan implementation in order to make it simple to track your growth and success.
5. Website Traffic – Did your website traffic increase? If so, how much of that was from returning visits vs new visitors? How long were they on your website? Did they predominantly visit certain pages within your website? And what were the sources of that traffic?
It can be simple to track results of your marketing efforts if you implement the right training for your staff and also ensure that your web development company is tracking all sources of traffic going to your website through the use of Google Analytics, specific landing pages for your specific marketing efforts and also unique phone numbers. Marketing in itself is a huge topic to talk about but I hope these five points will help put things into perspective when trying to measure success within your marketing department or any other type of business.
Create a 6 Month Marketing Plan if possible
A good marketing plan will help you focus your efforts. You may need to start by mapping out where your business currently is, what its goals are, and who your target audience is. By knowing who you are targeting, you can create engaging content that will be valuable to them. From there, decide on a few tactics that will help you grow—both in terms of sales and audience growth—over time. This could include things like social media content calendars, blogging plans, video strategies, influencer strategies and more.
Every marketing plan should be reviewed at least every 6 months (if possible, but definitely annually) in order to evaluate the success of it. Track your metrics over time to see if you’re hitting goals, and, if not, why not? This way you can make corrections in order to increase the likelihood of success with your marketing plan. Don’t let your marketing plan become another unused document on your computer—make sure it’s current and relevant by updating it regularly. For smaller businesses with smaller budgets we recommend reviewing your marketing plan and results monthly because you typically are much more reliant on immediate results.
Since you have already established what you will consider a success from the development of your marketing plan, reviewing it should not be difficult if you have the proper tracking mechanisms in place. You know what to look for in terms of how many people are visiting your website on a weekly basis, how much online traffic there is overall, and if conversions are increasing. And most importantly, what is and what is not generating revenue for your business. Knowing these metrics allows you to weed out the ineffective marketing and reinvest additional funds in the successful marketing in order to increase your revenues while lowering your costs.
Creating a marketing plan focused on 6 months gives you the ability to adapt quickly to an evolving market. Smaller and newer businesses should even shorten that time frame since they are much more dependent on immediate cash flow. You will also be able to see which tactics are working for your business and how they can improve your overall performance. You can then integrate these new ideas into future plans, making them more efficient. Being involved in the marketing gives you more flexibility in your marketing choices and also allows you to plan for the future of the company, including new products or services – or new markets.
Creating a Budget Which Will Generate the Clients You Need
It is an unfortunate reality that most new businesses are not immediately profitable. One of the biggest reasons for that are flawed marketing choices; another is poor management. If you want your business to succeed, you need to develop solid marketing and budgeting skills early on. The more research you do up front, while also figuring out exactly how much money it will take to operate your business, the more likely you will hit your financial goals and become successful. It is important to fully understand all of your potential costs including marketing, along with projections on expected sales. This is very true for both new and established businesses.
Developing a budget for your marketing plan is vital because it will allow you to figure out exactly how much money you will need and where it needs to be spent in order to generate the maximum amount of clients possible. At first, try breaking up your budget into three sections: short-term expenses, long-term expenses and short-term revenue streams. A short term expense might be your website development and a long term expense might be considered the marketing of that website online. This should help give you a better idea of what sort of sales targets need to be met in order to meet those goals. Budgeting for your business is important and making sure you have enough money set aside to effectively market your business will determine your long term success or failure. A future blog will discuss this subject in much more detail. You can sign up to follow our blogs/newsletters on the bottom of our website.
Create Strategies for Implementing your Marketing Plan
A marketing plan will not do you any good if you have no concrete strategies for implementing it. This is where marketing tactics come in. A good tactic for generating immediate revenue might be offering specials to existing customers. In order to generate new clients, placing advertisements in your target market’s favorite magazine or on their preferred social platform is most effective. It could be as simple as buying specific AdWords with a specially made landing page. Whatever method you choose (and usually it will be more than one) it is imperative that you are consistent with your marketing efforts. It is common for business owners to attempt a new marketing method and quit after not seeing immediate results – it is important to give any new marketing effort the time it deserves to nurture possible leads and produce results. Search Engine Optimization is a prime example of a marketing method that requires a long term commitment – it is not immediate but if done properly will yield high returns on your investment. Developing strong marketing habits is tough but using them over time will help your business grow faster than ever before. When you think about implementing your plan here are a few factors to consider:
1. Decide if you can implement them or if you need help from a professional company. If you are not an expert at marketing it usually is ideal for you to choose a company to work with to assist you. You should not be doing things your company depends on if you have no knowledge how to effectively implement what needs to be done. Consider the business owner consulting program – think of it as your chief marketing officer at a fraction of the cost.
2. What Methods of Marketing will you use? It is important to look at both primary and secondary methods of marketing. This should include both online and offline marketing – along with local advertising which we would consider more face to face style marketing. There are numerous options when it comes to marketing and creating a marketing mix is typically the most advantageous for your business.
3. Do you have an action plan to get it done? I am not trying to constantly repeat general themes, but creating an actionable plan really is important. It is essential that your plan includes tasks, time frames, resources, responsibilities and names for each step involved in each task or project needed to achieve your marketing goals for your company. You also need contingency plans in case any part of it does not go as planned!
4. Who will be the point person at your company? Ideally it should not be the business owner, depending on your company size. But please understand this does not mean the business owner should not be heavily involved. It is important that one person is responsible for all marketing efforts because it keeps it simple and organized which helps meet deadlines and achieve your business goals. Having more than one person in charge can add confusion, mixed messaging and make things less likely to get done!
5. Trust Your Marketing Plan – You spent a lot of time creating it, a lot of research developing it and the most common mistake we see with small businesses is not giving their marketing plan enough time to actually become effective as mentioned briefly above. It is importantly to not quit your marketing efforts without giving them enough time to succeed. Being realistic from the start helps you avoid rash decisions and having patience will always be rewarded in business – especially when you have done your due diligence building out your business model and marketing plan. Be consistent, have persistence! The biggest key is sticking with your plans because over time it will produce good results for your company! There are exceptions to this of course and times when marketing efforts are blatantly not working (in a very short time frame) but it is few and far between
Marketing usually does not give instant results – there are some methods like paid advertising on the search engines and social media sites, but for the most part there are not instant results. It takes time to develop your brand, it takes time to convert leads and it takes time for the money to start rolling in. But it is also important that you monitor your key metrics that were set up in your marketing plan to ensure those goals are being met which will help you gauge your long term success.
Review Results and Adapt as Needed Monthly
One last thing that is important to note that even in today’s wonderful world of artificial intelligence, streamlined online marketing, apps for just about everything is that you still need to review the actual results of your marketing. This does not mean getting a thumbs up or a monthly email from your marketing service saying that you are doing great – this means looking at the exact metrics you set up in your marketing plan and evaluating all the statistics. If things do not make sense to you then it means you need to either learn more (which is a long term good habit to have for any business owner) or something is not going as planned and it needs to be fixed.
A detailed marketing plan will create positive results for your company both in the short and long term. If you want to run a successful business you have to realize that it is much more than just creating a good product or service, it is also about communicating with your audience in an effective way and having a clear vision of where you want to go. A marketing plan does just that. Click here to learn more about creating a marketing plan.
If you need assistance with developing a marketing plan, Say What Consulting can assist you with all aspects of it, including implementation. Visit our website at www.saywt.com.
Written by David Phillips, CEO and Founder of SayWhat Consulting. With over 20 years of experience, Mr. Phillips has consulted with small, medium and large businesses in marketing, business management, staff training and day-to-day operations. SayWhat assists clients in numerous industries including cosmetic surgeons, plastic surgeons, med spas and attorneys in family law and criminal law. We also assist other industries as well and our primary clients are small and medium sized businesses.