Why you need a Marketing Plan for your Small Business

“Marketing Plan? No idea what you’re talking about!”

This is so common, and that is fine, a lot of people starting their own small business wouldn’t know where to start to make a “marketing plan”. But even if it months or years down the track, putting together a marketing plan can help you to really understand your business, your customers, your competition and take your brand to the next level. 

As well as creating a better understanding of your business and industry, a marketing plan helps you to figure out how to best reach your target demographic, improve your risk management, monitor and save your budget, time and resources and stay motivated by having goals to reach. 

So what is included in a marketing plan? Well it can vary slightly depending on your business needs but the main components we believe are most important are the following: 

Your business mission

It is important to completely understand what you are trying to achieve through your business, as all activities you do should align with this mission. It is also helpful here to note your unique selling point (USP). This is what sets you apart from your competitors. 

KPIs

Key performance indicators or KPIs are used to measure how successful your marketing activities are. Think of these as goals to continue to strive for. If you are continuously reaching your KPIs, it demonstrates that your activities are effective. Remember to keep these SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely). 

Identify your target audience

This is SO important. You need to understand who you are trying to reach before you can put in place marketing strategies to reach them. A fun and helpful way to do this is to create “buyer personas”. A buyer persona is an in-depth description of the kind of person you want to attract. This can include job/title, industry, age, location, sex, family members, values, personality traits and much more. You can do up more than one of these if you target a few different kinds of people. Here is an example of a buyer persona for The Climb Collaborative:

Bob Brown the Builder: 

• 38 years old

• Works from home and on work site

• Small business owner

• 3-10 employees 

• Community-oriented

• Young family 

• Straight forward, no fuss attitude

• Motivated and hard working

Competitors

Understanding your competitors is vital to any marketing plan. Having a list of who your main competitors are and monitoring their activity will help you to track what is going on in your market. Remember every competitor will pose a different challenge for your business. All businesses are different and have different strengths. Don’t try and copy other’s moves, stay in your own lane but just be aware of where there is an opportunity to be a leader in areas where others are lacking. 

Content and Strategies

This is where we start to get into more detail regarding your marketing activities. If you are building an in-depth marketing plan, this section can contain the "seven Ps of marketing." These Ps are product, price, place, promotion, people, process, and physical evidence. These will be described further in another blog but for a basic marketing plan the following will get you on the right track to reaching your marketing goals. 

You will need to state the types of content you will be creating whether that be, pictures, videos, blog posts or e-books and where you will be sharing and distributing this to. It is critical that you really think about your audience and buyer personas described above when choosing your marketing channels and explain how and why you are carrying out each activity. 

It is also important to have a plan of how often you will be carrying out these activities and stick to it. Consistency is everything but you must also ensure everything you are distributing provides value so if it works better for you to share great content once a week, do that as opposed to running yourself into the ground, flooding your platforms with average content. 

Here you will link in your KPIs so you can track your activities and ensure they are helping you reach your business goals. For example if your mission is to provide tea to local cafes in your area and your KPI is to reach out to one new cafe every three months your marketing strategy should be helping you hit this KPI. 

Budget

When outlining the “budget” in your marketing plan, remember this is only describing how much money you will be allocating to marketing activities, not your overall business expenses. Be sure to itemise these costs by each individual activity. For example, having your expenses broken down by social media ads, graphic design, flyer printing, Google Ads, events and digital agency, etc. 

Now that you have your marketing plan all set out, be sure to allocate the specific tasks in your marketing strategies to your team member (or yourself if you are a one-man-band) and set goals to get these activities up and running and reach your KPIs. 

Need help putting together your marketing plan for 2020? We are here to help! Get in touch and we can set up a consulting session to work with you on the perfect marketing plan for you and your business.