Who
- The first step in creating a marketing plan is to determine your target market. Are your primary customers other businesses or are they direct consumers of your product? You must understand who your customers are in order to effectively reach them. Your marketing approach will vary according to your target market. For example, your message will be completely different if your target market is teenage girls as opposed to 50 year old men.
Pin Point
- After determining who your clients are you must find a way to get your service or product in front of them. The following questions should be considered.
- Where are they located?
- What are they interested in?
- What other products or services would they be interested in?
- Do they typically earn a specific amount of money?
- What is their typical age range?
The answers to these questions will help you segment your audience. This process is more cost effective for small businesses. Moreover, you’ll have a thorough understanding of who you’re targeting and the ability to primarily focus your efforts on those people.
Competition
- The third step in the plan is to analyze your competition. Research competitors in your industry. Review how their website is set up. Research the company on Google to see what you can learn. The goal is not to duplicate but to take ideas and make them better. Researching competitors will also help you set competitive pricing for your service or products.
Strategy
- At this point you should understand who your customers are and where you can find them. Moreover, you should have an understanding of who your competitors are and some of the things that make them successful. This is where we come up with a step by step strategy. Obviously the steps that you are able to take will depend on the budget allocated to the project. The strategy should include specific steps along with timelines. A very simple strategy can be seen below.
| Tasks | Time line |
| 1.Create content for website (mimic the structure of a few competitors) | 3 weeks
|
| 2.Research Development Companies | 2 Weeks |
| 3.Determine steps to advertise on Groupon | 1 Week |
| 4. Research Basic SEO Practices and Prices | 1 Week |
| 5. Come up with creative ways to be visible to your audience (flyers, outdoor advertising, cold calling) | 2 Weeks |
Three weeks after creating this plan you should have gathered some very useful information, including prices for a few different services that may be useful to your marketing campaign. Remember that we did not spend any money yet. Unfortunately, many people spend thousands prior to doing the most basic level of planning as outlined here. Following this simple 5 step marketing plan can save you a lot of money and grief down the road.
Execution
- The fifth step in this simple marketing plan will consist of setting a budget and executing some of the steps listed above. Let’s assume that your budget for this campaign was $4000. View a price break down of the campaign execution below.
| New Website | $2000 |
| 6 months of outdoor advertising | $300 |
| 6 months of SEO | $1200 |
| 1000 flyers with custom design | $250 |
| 6 months of maintenance / Support as needed | $250 |
Theoretically, you should have earned your first customer and possibly made your initial budget back within 6 months. The next step would be analyzing all of the data possible associated with the campaign in order to see what was effective and what was not. However, analysis will be covered in another article. We encourage all of our clients to go through simple marketing scenarios so that they have an plan in place prior to spending any money. This practice makes success much more likely.
