A marketing plan helps you develop your products and services that will meet the needs and wants of your target market. Marketing helps your customers see and understand why your products/services are better than or different from those offered by your competitors.
Having a marketing plan helps you:
- define your target market and why they need your product or service
- decide on the messages, channels, tools and activities you’ll use to reach your target customers
- set goals and time frames for marketing activities
- set up a marketing budget
- evaluate if your marketing activities were successful.
- Why do you need marketing?
Marketing is what builds the relationship between you, your business and your customers. If you are a small business, it is vital to build a sound relationship of trust and understanding with your customer. This makes them loyal to you and your brand and loyal customers will not only give you repeat business, they will have enough confidence in you to try out new products or services. They will also recommend you to their friends and family.
Marketing also massively increases the visibility of your brand, so you are more easily recognisable.
- Identify your target market
How do you identify your target market? Take a look at your existing regular customers. Who are they? What are they interested in? What are their problems that you can solve? What other needs do they have?
For example, if you sell baby products, your target market will be parents, parents to be, grandparents etc. You could also target baby shower events and children’s events; childminders; nurseries; soft-play areas; local Mum and baby groups; exercise classes for Mums to be or Mum and baby classes. The list is endless.
Have a look at your competitors – how do they meet the needs of your target market? How can you do it better?
- Conduct a SWOT analysis
SWOT stands for internal Strengths and Weaknesses, and external Opportunities and Threats. Pulling together a SWOT analysis can help you analyse where your business, its products/services, fit within the market and looks at your unique selling position. It can also help you find out how you can improve your business; what you’re really good at and what other businesses do.
Strengths – what do you do well in your business? What do you do better than your competitors?
Weaknesses – What do you need to improve on to remain competitive? What do your competitors do better than you? What is holding you back?
Opportunities – What current trends could lead your business to have increased sales? What can you use to your best advantage?
Threats – What could harm your business? What are the advantages that your competitors have over your business?
I have a FREE worksheet that you can download to help you…Conduct a SWOT Analysis
- Look at your competitors
List your competitors – who are they? If you analyse your competitors, you can find out how they work, what they do and compare them to your business.
What products or services do they sell?
Do they offer a similar product or service to you?
What do they offer their customers?
What do they do to engage with their customers?
Where are they? What are their strengths and weaknesses?
How do they market their products/services…e.g. social media, advertising etc.
The more information you can get about your competitors, the more chance you have of identifying where you fit into the market place and what opportunities are available to you.
- Decide on your goals
Once you know where your business stands in the market place and who your competitors are, you can decide what goals you want to set for your business. What do you want to achieve over the next 12 months?
Make your goals specific – instead of saying, ‘I want to sell more products’, look at your products and decide exactly how much more you want to sell. They might come under different categories. Go back to the baby product scenario…you might sell baby massage products, so a goal could be ‘Increase sales of baby massage products by 20% compared to last year’. You then have a definite goal to aim for…and it’s easier to review every few months because you calculate if you are on track to achieve your goal.
Aim for 4-6 short term goals – things that are fairly easy to achieve. You can always add more throughout the year if you achieve them.
Aim for 2-4 long term goals – things that are a bit more challenging. If you find that one of these goals is too challenging part way through the year, you can always break it down into smaller, more achievable chunks.
- Set your marketing strategies
Once you have set your goals, you can start looking at the short term goals in more detail. What activity is going to help you achieve that goal? What price or process will help you achieve your goals?
When you are trying to decide on which activities to use, choose those that best suit your business and your customers. For example, an advert in a local magazine or newspaper won’t necessarily reach your target market if they are primarily young adults, who generally don’t read this kind of thing. It’s a good idea to go for a few activities that complement each other. For example if your products/services can be for any age, you might go for an advert in a magazine, but also use social media or maybe local radio. You might sell your products at a market or craft fayre, so advertise the event on social media and do links to your products.
- Set your budget
It’s important to know how much you can afford to spend on marketing as not all marketing is free. You need to think hard about how best to spend that budget so you get the maximum benefit. Only spend on your current marketing goals, so that budget is used to help you achieve those goals. Advertising on Facebook, Instagram or in magazines all come at a cost, but if you are reaching your target customers, it will be worth it.
- Ensure your marketing plan is kept up to date
Reviewing your marketing plan on a regular basis is very important so that you not only know if you are on track to achieve your goals, you might also identify new trends in the market that means you have to tweak a particular goal.
It also serves the purpose of scrapping anything that you know isn’t working or changing a goal if you need to.
Looking at your plan helps you to measure how you’re doing against your plan and whether you will be successful.
Now you know why it’s so important to have a marketing plan, it’s time to jump into action!
If you find planning your marketing overwhelming, I can help you. Simply message me for a free 30 minute consultation.
These are tasks that take longer than you thought they would, or tasks that have a high risk of procrastination or distraction. Once you can identify these, you can allocate a set amount of time to doing them each day, so you concentrate on just that task and get it done – with a time constraint, there is less chance of being distracted or of taking too long to do it. Tasks could include email, phone calls, meetings and breaks – they are not productive, so give them a limit.
giving any one task your full attention. This can lead to having to revisit tasks as you forgot to do something or made a careless error. In turn, this ends up wasting you more time having to revisit. Turn off email and your phone so you can’t receive messages and emails whilst you’re focusing on a particular task. And put your phone onto answer phone with a message that says you’re busy right now but leave a message and you’ll get back to them within a certain amount of time – could be an hour or just half an hour – whilst you concentrate on getting an important task finished.
you time to focus on the important stuff. Hire someone to either do the mundane stuff that you really don’t have time for, or for the more complicated things that you don’t know how to do, or that you know will take you too long as you’re not experienced in that area. You can also delegate or outsource tasks you absolutely hate doing. There is nothing wrong in delegating or outsourcing; it simply gives you more time to do the things you enjoy or that need to have your undivided attention.
The US President Dwight Eisenhower once said, “What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.” This is where the 80/20 rule (or Pareto principle) can help…80% of results come from 20% of effort, so it’s important to look at your list of tasks and decide what is actually important and just requires a bit of attention. Spend most of your time on the critical 20% and less on the rest…even if it does seem urgent.
after a tomato shaped timer (pomodoro is Italian for tomato). You set the timer for 25 minutes, work solidly until the timer sounds, then give yourself a 5 minute break before going back to do another task for 25 minutes. This is a great technique if you struggle with focusing on a task or structuring your time. This is a great method to use if you want to ensure you only devote a certain amount of time to one task or if you have trouble focussing.
hours a week to plan what you will achieve the following week – set yourself achievable goals by writing a ‘to do’ list – It’s such a good feeling to tick off the items on the list and to feel you have achieved something. And, make sure that your goals are 
To ascertain your business goals or milestones. Your business plan will make you think about what you want to achieve with your business and where you see yourself in a year’s time… in five years’ time or more. You can plan not only your long-term goals, but also some quick wins and short term plans. They are significant events that you want to achieve, such as building a website, launching new products/services, producing a brochure and also things like getting your first 100 or 1000 followers on social media.
To understand and know your customers. Planning makes you look at your customers; who are they? Why do they buy your products and why do they buy when they do? Do they belong to an average age group or geographic region? An in-depth customer analysis will help you understand what makes your customers tick and how you can better serve them and give them what they want.
To determine your financial needs. Do you need to raise money to buy stock and how are you going to do this? Are there training opportunities for you, so you can learn more about what you do, that incur a cost? How will you factor this in? If you need a big financial injection, you will need to look at loans or investors…your plan will then need to be very specific around how you will be able to afford this kind of investment and what your return will be.
To pinpoint your brand. Creating a business plan makes you focus on what your brand is; helps you describe your business succinctly and decide how you will position your brand to your customers and target market.
Physical – everything your customers see and feel when interacting with your business. This can be from the physical environment of your shops, office or wherever you provide and showcase your products or services, to meeting you face to face and how you come across to them, how you act and relate to your customers. It also includes your packaging and your branding.
a particular product, but just saying you want to sell more isn’t enough – you need to be specific, so you have something concrete to aim for. For example, say you have a crafting business and you make rag dolls. An objective might be to sell 40% more rag dolls in 2019, than you did in 2018. This gives you a solid and specific objective.
Once you have your list of objectives, put them into a timeline – what you want to achieve and by when. This makes it much easier for you to review at a later date. I usually put a date in my diary at the beginning of the year to review my business objectives every three months…of course, I’m not always brilliant at keeping to that date, but by having it in my diary, at least it’s a reminder and I do review things…even if it’s a couple of weeks after the date I originally set!
dolls over the next 12 months. You know what you want to do – you know when you want that result. How are you going to sell that extra 40%? These could be some of your options…
The last thing on your list is how will you measure the success of each of your objectives? Sticking with the rag doll example, this is an easy one – each quarter, measure how many more dolls you have sold compared to the same time last year. To achieve your 40% increase over the course of the year, you need to see a steady increase in sales from the new selling strategies you’ve put in place.
choosing your products or services?
– Are you likely to have cash flow problem – if so, how will you deal with it?
necessary.
The Write Way 