When it comes to growing your business successfully, then you’re really not going to survive for very long if you’re not putting a consistent effort into quality marketing.
The thing with marketing is that a lot people get really confused and overwhelmed by it – especially nowadays with so many so-called gurus and influencers overtaking social media and proclaiming that they have the next big thing in marketing and that everyone should just drop what they’re doing because “that’s dead” and then follow suit.
The problem is, another guru comes along 5 minutes later saying the same thing – this time about another strategy or tactic and it just continues on like this until nobody really knows who to listen to anymore.
Marketing actually isn’t complicated at all, but it definitely takes some time to plan and understand what’s going to work for you when it comes to your marketing efforts, so in a bid to hopefully stop you feeling anymore overwhelmed and confused than you already are and help you stay focused on the path that’s going to get you results by just keeping things simple and avoiding all the noise and hype that’s trying to fight for your attention, then in this post we’re going to share with you how to create a marketing plan for your small business.
Know your business:
Before you can even go ahead and start thinking about anything to do with your marketing plan, then you’re going to need to be sure that you know what your business is. This might sound a bit obvious when you first hear it – it’s your business, so how could you possibly not know it? Well, you’d be quite surprised just how many business actually struggle to clearly explain what their business is, what solution it provides and what makes it different.
This is going to be a real problem when it comes to marketing, because marketing is all about telling your story and letting people know what your business is all about, so you really need to be clear on this and be able to articulate it in a way that makes sense to people and that actually matters enough for them to care about what you when it comes to how it can benefit them.
Know your market:
Knowing your business is great, but you need to know your market inside out as well. For example, if you’re marketing to people looking for serviced apartments in southampton or London, then you need to know what kind of solutions and experiences they’re looking for and what kind of language is going to draw them in.
Set objectives:
Every good plan should have clear objectives, so making sure to include these is going to make following your plan so much easier. For example, are you marketing to launch a specific product? If so, how much do you want to make from that? How many new people do you want to reach as a result of your marketing efforts who you could perhaps retarget in future campaigns?
Identify your marketing channels:
Planning out where the marketing is actually going to get done is what often holds people back because there are so many options and they think they have to be using them all, and they just get overwhelmed and don’t know where to start, but the best way is to consider where your ideal clients are going to be hanging out and what kind of content they enjoy consuming. Then choose a maximum of 3 marketing channels to start with – you can always increase this later.
Identify your marketing tactics:
Your marketing tactics are what you use to get attention to your marketing, so are you going to be using things like Facebook ads, email funnels, webinars, etc? Again, there’s no right or wrong way to approach this, but if you’ve done your research, then you’ll quickly be able to identify the tactics that will best fit in your marketing plan.
