Five Key Parts of the Marketing Plan

Small businesses seem afraid to write a marketing plan. Not sure if it is because the owner feels the business doesn’t need one or whether it’s because they don’t know how. A small business benefits from a marketing plan as much as a big business, and maybe even more.

Defining how you will attract and retain customers and how you can accomplish your goals within your resource limitations (people or budget) is a good exercise for all business owners. Writing your plan makes the goals and tactics more concrete, enabling you to stay on track and achieve results. Create a simple marketing plan that is followed, assessed, measured, and improved upon as time goes on. Unless you are writing a plan to attract funding, the following five areas of the plan are what you need to proceed:

• Defining your ideal customer (target market) - Think about the characteristics of your ideal customer - what is it you like about working with them and why?
• Understanding the competition and what makes you better (differentiation) - There are a lot of people who do what you do so what do you offer that others do not? What do your clients appreciate about what you do? Figure out what it is and lead with that difference in all of your marketing efforts.
• Knowing what you want to achieve with marketing (marketing goals) - Write down your marketing goals and make them specific. Pick one or two that are critical and make them the focus of your marketing efforts. According to statistics, if you write them down, you are 95% more likely to achieve them.
• Defining how you will reach your target (marketing strategy) - Pricing, packaging and promoting your products and services is the heart of your marketing plan. Look at all types of marketing activities that would most likely reach your target.
• Projecting the costs of the marketing activities (marketing budget) - Putting together a quarterly marketing budget for your business helps you keep track of what you need to spend on marketing without it getting out of control.

Here’s a marketing plan tool I developed to help clients put all the details of their plan in a single reference sheet. It reminds you of what you planned to do and keep you moving forward. Feel free to download it and use it but please let me know how it works for you.