3 steps for creating a successful marketing plan

Back to basics marketing advice for small businesses

In this blog I'm going to share the first 3 steps that EVERY small business should take in order to create a successful marketing plan. You can often be bombarded with complex ideas of what marketing is and people telling us what you should be doing. In this blog, I wanted to highlight the 3 fundamental steps you need to take, before building a successful marketing plan.

Marketing is not one size fits all, so the next time someone tells you to post on Instagram at 7am because it works for them - kindly tell them thanks, but no thanks. You need to put in the time to understand who your own target audience is, what channels they are on and use your analytics to develop your own plan for your business.

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Back to basics

1. What is marketing & why is it important?

My first step is an obvious one, but important all the same. In order to implement a successful marketing plan, you first need to gain an understanding of what marketing is and why it's so important.

Marketing by definition refers to the activities a company undertakes to promote the buying or selling of a product or service.

You may have heard about the 4 p's of marketing - place, price, product, and promotion. It means getting products to your customer at the right time, in the right place, with the right promotion and at a price they're willing to pay.

Through marketing, businesses are ultimately trying to achieve a conversion, this could be a sale, a donation, a sign up to a course or a purchase of some kind.

We can take a look at a basic marketing funnel to understand more about how marketing works. At the top of the funnel you are trying to gain exposure, to reach as many people in your target audience as possible. You then work through the next steps, Discovery - where visitors find out more about your services and company, typically this done through your website/google searches/testimonials and reviews. Consideration, after doing research the visitor will decide whether to purchase a product. They may contact you to ask for a quote, or do more digging on your website to find out more information about a product. Finally the visitor decides they are ready to purchase a product/service at which point they convert to a customer.

Different marketing channels and tactics can be utilised at different phases of the process to draw in more potential customers and convert them. Below I've included a simple example of a marketing funnel with some examples for each phase.

2. What do you want to achieve through your marketing?

So now that you understand what marketing is, the next step is to think about what you want to achieve. You've probably heard of SMART objectives before (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely). I'd advise using this format to set yourself some objectives. Examples of objectives could include:

• Double website traffic over the next 12 months by publishing 5 high-quality, targeted blog posts per week.

• Improve our customer retention rate by 5% for the year by implementing cross-selling and upselling strategies.

These objectives should be at the forefront of your mind when developing your marketing plan. They will inform the decisions you make around where to spend your marketing budget and where to invest your time and energy.

3. Who are your target audience?

If you haven't already identified your target audience, this is something you definitely need to do before making your marketing plan. In order to be able to reach the right audience for your products, you need to know who they are. Check out this article on Indeed for tips on how to define your target audience.

Time to make a plan

Once you know who your audience are, you can do some further research to determine what will be the most effective marketing techniques and channels will be to reach them.

This article from Sprout Social is a good place to get started, it gives a good overview of the user demographics for each social media channels including growth statistics.

If you already have a website in place and a customer base, you'll be able to conduct some internal research to find out what is currently working well for you too.

By using the steps above, you should be able to collect the vital information needed to create a well informed marketing plan. Always keeping in mind your target audience and working towards your business goals and objectives.

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Need a little extra help creating your own marketing plan?

Why not book on to my upcoming 2-day Marketing Strategy workshop.

I'll be posting more on my blog to help support you with marketing your small business. But if you need a helping hand to develop your marketing strategy or want more tailored advice, I can help! Check out my services here.