How to Keep Your Marketing Plan Current

Having a complete and current marketing plan in place is essential for a small business to become successful.  When it comes to staying ahead of the competition, small business owners should always review and bring improvements to their marketing plan on a yearly basis.  The lack of a plan can lead a business to a disastrous failure in three to five years.

Here are some steps to help you update your current marketing plan or to create a marketing plan, if you don’t have one.

Step 1: Understand Your Market and Your Competition

The first step is to understand your competition and market. Many small businesses launch a business based on what they think is a great product without understanding what the market wants. Avoid making the mistake of failing to study the market and the competition.

Some factors to consider when you are looking at what your target market wants:

·         The size of the market segment

·         Market share required to break even

·         Who is your competition?  Yes, it’s OK to check out your competition!

·         Consider the demand

 

Step 2: Understand Your Customer

You need to figure out who your target customer is.  Some questions to ask yourself are: Who are your customers? What do they want? What motivates them to buy?  The best way to understand your target customer is to build buyer personas.  Personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers, based on real data about customer demographics and online behavior, along with educated speculation about their personal histories, motivations, and concerns.

Step 3: Develop a Strong Marketing Message

When developing your marketing message, you need to make sure you tell your prospects not only what you do, but you also need to persuade them to buy. You should have two types of marketing messages; the first message should be short and to the point. This is your “elevator speech”, a short 60 second response when asked you what you do.

The second message can and should be more elaborate and detailed.  It will give your prospects all that they need to know about the features and the benefits of your product.

Step 4: Determine Your Marketing Mediums

When determining your target customers, you must also look to see where they are.  Are they on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube or other social media sites?  If your customers are there, then you need to be there too.

Besides social media, small businesses should also plan their marketing/sales campaigns for an entire year.  These can involve email campaigns, direct mail campaigns, and hosting events or sales.

Step 5: Set Your Marketing Goals

It is critical that you set goals for your marketing. Your goals should be measurable, realistic, and achievable.

Step 6: Develop a Marketing Budget

Many of your marketing plans can be free (just your time spent) when looking at using social media.  Other marketing costs that you should budget for are your website (consider updating costs too), any ads in publications, product brochures or pamphlets and tradeshows/events.

Conclusion

Your marketing plan should be a living document.  Review it yearly and keep it current so your business will be successful.