As with all elements of business, it’s important that you start with putting together a plan. Your marketing plan is essential to understanding when, why and how you are going to promote your business and reach out to your customers. All good business plans should cover aspects of your marketing plan
Where the story should begin
Before starting your plan, you need to understand how much investment you have available to put towards marketing. There are endless opportunities to market your business, and it’s very rewarding to see your passion up there in lights, but if you can’t afford to do something then the lights will be switched off fairly quickly.
As a small business, you need to think realistically. Look at your cash flow and work out what you can afford. There are many channels available to you that take more effort than dollars, so starting with a value will allow you to list the channels that are available to you.
What sort of marketing activity is available
Depending on the maturity of your business, there are different types of marketing activity that you should focus on. We marketers can sometimes be a bit cocky and use all sorts of terms and acronyms for what we plan however, everything essentially falls into three categories:
- Awareness: telling people about who you are and what you do. This activity designed to focus on building awareness of your business including, products / services, locations, contact details and contact hours
- Acquisition: finding new customers and getting them to purchase from you – the growth activity. All businesses need to gain customers for continual growth. Acquisition activity is focused on gaining new customers to purchase or engage with your business
- Retention: keeping your customers interested and coming back for more. Once you’ve established a customer base, you need to keep them coming back to you. In all business, it’s recognised that it’s cheaper and easier to keep customers rather than continually gaining new ones.
It’s important that businesses have a balance of all activity. If you are new to the market, be prepared to invest in awareness activity but you can use acquisition channels to assist with this, but gain a greater return. No matter where you start, you need to ensure that you have a strong understand of retention activities that you are going to use to maintain a relationship with the customers that you do acquire in the early stages. Without having a vision of this, you risk losing customers as quickly as you gain them.
Research, research, research……did I forget to say research
When you are working on your own to develop a marketing plan, you need to work hard on understanding what tools are readily available to you. Research is a key in doing this – and you don’t have to pay a fortune. Speak to similar businesses around you and find out what they are doing, read the local newspaper, join the local business network. Most importantly, if you are an existing business, ask your regular customers where they do their research. Companies pay a lot of money getting consultants to run brand research for them but if you have the customer standing in front of you, just engage them in conversation. You will find that they are happy to provide you with insight – may be even thing about a little reward like 10% off their next visit. It will definitely be worth your while.
Be ready to handle media deals
You will find that, when just starting up, your phone will run hot and your letterbox will overflow with inquiries and offers from media sales reps offering you great deals and last minute offers for advertising and marketing activities. You certainly need to start somewhere but, remember this key piece of advice, “If it sounds too good, it probably is”. I’ve seen a number of businesses sign up for special offers that save them thousands of dollars however the channel isn’t suited to achieve the objective/s that they are after. If you aren’t going to get return then even spending $1 is too much.
Having a clearly thought out plan before you start will provide you with the confidence to say no and push back on the offers. You must keep true to the plan.
Understand, when, why and how
For every marketing activity you need to understand when you want it to run, why it’s running and how you are going to manage / leverage the opportunity. Without a well thought through plan, any marketing can be a waste.
Be prepared to change
Like any business activity, marketing is influenced by external and internal factors. One crucial factor to every marketing plan is that you need to be willing to adapt to change. External factors critically affect every marketing plan and you need to be willing to change. Sometimes this may mean cancelling or bringing forward a marketing activity. If you are well prepared, this should be an easy change. If you’ve purchased media, you may have a drop and charge fee to consider however it’s always worth chatting with your media rep to find out what is possible if you have to make a change.
Stay true to your brand
Always consider your brand and how well it resonates in the media that you have selected or are considering. If your brand can not be reflected positively in that channel, it would be worth steering clear. Similarly if your message is complex, ensure you select channels that provide you with the opportunity to convey the full message and not part. Negative experiences can be easily created from misconstrued messages.
Review, review and continually review
The plan that you set out at the beginning of the year will probably need some tweaking. You need to be constantly checking off your marketing plan against your business and marketing objectives and goals. If something is becoming amiss, you might need to change your plan and you need to be prepared to action any changes that need to occur.
Keep it simple….somehow
Okay, a bit of a twist on the old KISS analogy, but with human nature naturally wanting to over-complicate, over-analyse and over-think things, you need to try and keep your plan as simple as possible. You will have hundreds of things to keep you entertained when you are running a business, so the last thing you need to do is over complex anything.
Marketing activity isn’t rocket science and your best approach to planning is – keep it simple (and measurable).
Make sure that everything that you do has an objective and goal linked to it, a budget and timing. Channel planning will naturally fall out of your plan once you understand what you want to achieve and when. I find one of the easiest planning tools to use is a simple excel calendar – list your campaign, budget, objective and simply mark it in the calendar when you want it to appear. This way you are not spending a fortune on special software but something that you can simply use and adjust as required. Your business plan should hold the core foundations of your business goals, your marketing plan should hold the executions to support this.
Don’t re-mortgage the house for that billboard
A proud moment for any business (or marketer) is to see their pride and joy up in lights. You work hard and deserve the recognition but, if it takes your entire business takings for the next 3 months to do it – DON’T DO IT! You need to think small and aim big. There are so many channels available to businesses these day, some which provide a very large amount of exposure for little return. Stay sensible and never sign up for something on the golf course, over dinner and a wine fuelled lunch. I’ve seen one too many wrong deals done as a result of coercive tactics but at the end of the day, a contract is a contract and once you’ve signed, it might be pretty tough to pull out!
And remember – if it doesn’t feel right, don’t do it!
Good Luck!
The Marketing Elf
August 2017
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The Marketing Elf 