7 ways to create a marketing plan for your business

I love planning!  I know that with planned, consistent marketing you can drive more customers to your business.  Having a marketing plan ensures that you don’t miss launch dates within your business or key dates throughout the year that you can promote your product or services around.  A plan means that you can budget and include this in your sales forecast for the year too.

But where do you start?

With a blank sheet of paper and your business objectives for the year ahead.

1. Set aside time – half a day/a day, but make sure that this is all you’re going to do, so that you can plan for the year ahead with clear actions.
2. Have in front of you, your business objectives for the year ahead. This will keep you focused on what you’re wanting to achieve.
3. Know who your ideal client/customer is and where to find them. This will ensure when you come to developing your marketing strategy that it meets the needs of your customers.
4. Marketing plan template. Have a template split into months and quarters, so that you can populate this with launch dates and events that your business is attending. Alongside other industry events and awareness days. It will also allow you to compare your plan against your sales forecasts and budgets for the year ahead too.
5. Populate your marketing plan with the content that you’ll use to attract customers and the channels you’ll use to share this content. Not only with your existing customers but also your warm leads and how you’ll convert cold leads to warm leads.
6. Implementation – now you have your plan how will you implement this? Do you have the resources in-house? Will you need to take on some additional support?  Make sure that you do have the resources in place otherwise you won’t hit those business objectives and your launches will not be as successful as they could be.
7. Budget – plan to have a budget to implement your marketing campaigns. Make sure that this is consistent throughout the year as you’ll see results if it’s always on marketing you’re doing.  You’ll need to spend on channels such as SEO, email marketing, social media marketing, events, PR and content creation.  You may also have to build a budget in for web development and market research too.

Your business is now ready for a marketing strategy and plan that will deliver your business objectives next year.

If you have any questions just drop me an email on jennifer@strathcomms.co.uk or call 07738 966588.  Always happy to have an initial chat about marketing and go over any questions you have about the best way forward for your business.

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