For small business owners and marketers, building a marketing plan can seem daunting. It’s such a huge function, covering everything from the myriad advertising options out there to email campaigns, sales pitches, customer experience, and referral programs. Where do you even start? In fact, most small businesses don’t have a marketing plan. Why?
Planning takes time, and that's something most small businesses don't have in abundance.
Plans can quickly become outdated.
It’s easier to just try a few (probably “free”) things you’ve heard about or are comfortable doing yourself, see if that works, and hope for the best.
If you're working without a plan, do any of these sound familiar?
You’re doing what’s easy for YOU, not what’s best to reach your ideal customer (do you know who this is?).
You’re always reacting—to competitors, to social trends, or to a shiny new technology.
You’re not sure what to say or how to craft a message that will resonate.
You aren’t sure what is a realistic goal to reach, or how to measure when you’ve gotten there.
You have trouble scaling or delegating marketing tasks because you don’t know what is needed month-to-month.
You’re unsure if the budget you are spending is the right amount and if spending more/less would make a positive difference.
You keep doing the same thing and your customers are changing, which will catch up with you eventually.
If you can relate to these common small business marketing challenges, it's time to build your marketing plan! Your marketing plan is a tool in your business; it’s a guide for the day-to-day work that helps drive revenue, and it provides clarity and validation to key stakeholders like bankers, investors, or partners.
Coming up October 25th, I'll be speaking on this topic at the Western Wisconsin Women's Business Center's 20th Annual Conference (Women's Business Conference). I’ll go over the foundational pieces of a marketing plan and show you how to put a plan together that you can use throughout the year and adjust as you grow. We’ll talk through the customer journey to identify tactics at each step of the way. We’ll align budget and metrics to that same customer journey, and give you a dashboard for tracking it all. And we’ll save plenty of time for Q&A so you can get your burning questions answered.