I always encourage small business owners to have a business plan. Even if you don’t need or anticipate needing bank or investor financing, a business plan can help keep you focused, on track, and on task. For the same reasons, you should also have a small business marketing plan. One of the first and most important things your small business marketing plan does is help you clearly identify your ideal consumer. If you neglect that important step, you’ll struggle through the rest of your marketing efforts.
Identifying your ideal consumer guides every step of your marketing. Once you know who your target market is, you understand how to price your products and services, what marketing avenues they respond to, where to market, their content preferences, and their product or service delivery preferences. Once you’ve created a profile of your ideal consumer, you can start building your marketing plan with the following five marketing points.
- Marketing Methods
Marketing methods are so abundant, it can be easy to try every one of them. Choose the ones your research indicates your ideal consumer typically responds to. Leave room to test one or two marketing methods that you might otherwise ignore. - Marketing Budget
Start with the lowest cost, most highly effective marketing methods and grow your marketing plan and budget from there. Even if you’re a startup with little to no money for marketing, you should still create a marketing budget based on the number of hours you’ll put into your marketing efforts. - Marketing Strategy
Your marketing strategy consists of researching your target market, researching your competition and their marketing methods, and developing a successful marketing strategy of your own. - Marketing Products
Choose which marketing products give your business the highest visibility. Will your target market respond to digital or print marketing? Will they see banners or postcards more frequently? - Marketing Metrics
Use A/B testing and other marketing measurements to determine which methods most often lead to sales and which don’t perform as well. It’s a simple way to know which to ditch and which to keep in order to maximize your marketing dollars.
Give yourself and your business a competitive edge with a small business marketing plan. It’s a comprehensive guide that details your marketing efforts, measures your marketing results, and creates a blueprint for future marketing objectives. It also helps ensure every member of your team is on the same page and working toward the same goals.