How to Create a Marketing Plan for Your Small Business

Having an effective marketing plan and marketing budget are critical for growing your small business. The great news is that your marketing plan doesn’t have to be complex or expensive to be effective.

Here, you’ll learn the essential steps to create a marketing plan for your own business that reaches your target audience, fits your budget, builds brand awareness, and supports your sales goals.

What is a marketing plan?

Marketing is what you do to gain engagement, generate revenue, and create brand awareness for your business. For example, your social media communications, advertising, public relations, emails, community or industry outreach, charitable events, and more are all part of marketing.

A marketing plan is the guide you create and follow to achieve your goals for brand awareness, engagement, and lead generation. It includes performance-based goals, brand awareness building, specific tactics to achieve your goals, and the budget to make it all happen.

An effective marketing plan helps you stay focused, attract new customers, manage your resources efficiently, and achieve your long-term goals. Your marketing plan can reduce your risk and maximize the success of your marketing efforts and tactics.

How to develop your small business marketing plan

Here are the four simple steps you can take to start creating your marketing plan now:

1. Define your target audience and market landscape

The first step of an effective marketing plan is to define or refine your target audience and understand your market. You can get to know your customers and market landscape by:

• Reaching out to your customers directly to participate in a survey. You can ask your customers to respond to a survey through your social media accounts or emails. There are many free survey apps you can use, like SurveyMonkey, to collect this information anonymously and learn about your customers from their responses.
  
  The specific questions you ask in your survey will depend on your industry and business. You’ll most likely need to include demographic questions, such as your customers’ age, geographic area, and average income, as well as behavioral questions, such as your customers’ interests, habits, price points, and feedback on your products or services.
  
• Create a strength, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis to spot areas of improvement and potential opportunities for growth. This will help you identify any possible threats and capitalize on what’s working well for your business.
  
• Build a competitive analysis to get a deeper understanding of your business relative to your competitors. With this, you’ll be able to understand where your business fits in the market and learn how your competitors are attracting target customers.

Key takeaway: There’s no better source of information for your audience than your actual customers! When possible, reach out to them and to others you think would be your target audience. You may find additional, essential information that differs from your previous assumptions. This can get you on track to creating an effective marketing plan and building a more successful business.

2. Set clear marketing goals with strategies to support them

An effective marketing plan needs to have its own set of goals and tactics. This plan is a simple roadmap aligned with the business goals and measurable benchmarks to pinpoint what works well and where you need to make adjustments. First, you need to set goals, and then you can identify the strategies to reach them.

There are several relatively affordable and quick strategies that you can include in your marketing plan, like leveraging your website, e-commerce, email communications, social media, and personal outreach. You can do many of these yourself, especially since today’s apps have integrated AI capabilities that make them much easier to use.

Here are nine marketing tactics that you can use to support your marketing goals:

1. Create a website: Most consumers say their contact with a business starts by visiting its website. You can find website platforms with easy-to-use templates, AI tools to generate design and content quickly, and low monthly and annual plans. It’s also a good idea to sign up with Google Business Profile to ensure your new website and business are found in Google searches.
   
2. Leverage digital marketing: This includes the promotion you do through the internet and other forms of digital media, such as marketing efforts through social media, search engines, email, websites, mobile applications, or any other digital channel.
   
3. Use email marketing: Email marketing offers one of the best return-on-investment (ROI). It’s an easy way to keep your audience updated on product launches and promotions and can drive traffic to your e-commerce site. Make it simple to sign up through your website and consider incentivizing sign-ups with a promotion or coupon. Then, set a schedule for consistent communications.
   
4. Build a social media strategy: Today, more than 70% of consumers say that social media interaction influences their purchasing decisions. Find out which platforms your target audiences are on, then create business profiles there. Prioritize those that align with your goals, target audience, and budget.
   
5. Capitalize on media releases: Use media releases that attract publicity to build audiences in and beyond your local market. You can add information about special events or promotions and explain why you started your business, who you hope it benefits, and anything else that can make customers feel connected to your brand.
   
6. Build goodwill: Find or create opportunities to build goodwill by going to events and places that your target audiences support. Attend community events like low-cost fundraisers, participate in local small-business promotions, and network in your area.
   
7. Create an introductory video: You can add a brief introductory video to your website and social media sites to explain your business’s story and let your target audience get to know you. Be sure it reflects your brand – many businesses do fine with videos shot and edited on their phones, while others may need something more polished and professional.
   
8. Consider paid ads for targeted opportunities: These tend to be more expensive, but they can be highly effective. You can also consider options at a lower cost but still effective, such as community-based weeklies instead of major daily newspapers.
   
9. Don’t forget about direct mail: With most businesses using digital channels, there are renewed opportunities to reach target audiences through the mail. Vendors like Vistaprint and FedEx Office can help you create attractive postcards or other mailings while decreasing costs.

While it’s important to set goals with strategies to support them, it’s just as important to set these goals on an attainable timeline. Here’s an example of short-, mid-,and long-term SMART goals that you could apply to your business:

1. 30-day marketing goal: Achieve a five times increase in your target audience engagement online.
   • Strategy: Create and launch a website with e-commerce and analytics capabilities.
   • Tactics:
     • Research online platforms and select one that is simple to develop and launch.Take photos of real people using your products to use on the website and social media for “social proof.”
     • Send weekly email updates for newly available products and media releases to news outlets.
2. 90-day marketing goal: Grow your email list from 120 recipients to 900.
   • Strategy: Ask in-person and online visitors to join.
   • Tactics:
     • Build a sign-up incentive on the website’s home page and promote it to in-person visitors.
     • Offer a limited-time, promotional “Buy One, Get One at 50% off” deal to incentivize visitors to sign up.
     • Create a video explaining your business’s backstory and include it in your email outreach to introduce your business and new products and request feedback and ideas.
       
3. 120-day marketing goal: Gain ten strategic partnerships to co-market offerings.
   • Strategy: Build an expanded list of partners.
   • Tactics:
     • Offer special promotional items like limited-edition products to partners.
     • Create special emails that your partners can send to their network to promote why they should purchase from your business.
     • Plan a join event, workshop, or webinar with your partners to co-promote your products or services.

Key takeaway: Creating effective SMART goals ensures that they’re realistic, measurable, and achievable while also supporting your overall business goals.

3. Budget for your marketing plan

You can create a simple marketing budget that reflects your goals, strategies, and tactics. There’s no set rule for a marketing budget, but allocating 5-10% of your annual business budget is a good target.

Let’s look at an example of what your marketing budget could look like:

Domain-name purchase for website (one year):	$20
One-year website subscription with e-commerce capabilities:	$360
Photography (employee and customer submissions):	$0
Email-list development (in-person and online solicitations):	$0
Projected cost of incentive for email-list development:	$1,600
Introductory video (self-shot but professionally finished/edited):	$1,200
Additional staff time for marketing:	$2,080
Total marketing budget:	$5,260

While cost is important for budgeting, also take into account the time investment you’ll need to make for each strategy. It may not appear as a line item on your budget, but it will have an opportunity cost that you may need to address.

Key takeaway: Your marketing budget must support your goals, and each line should correspond to your plan, allowing for enough time to complete it.

4. Implement your plan and analyze your results

Now it’s time to put your plan in action and measure your results!

Create a calendar of daily, weekly, and monthly tasks and clearly identify who’s responsible for each task’s completion. This is easy to manager with apps and software programs like Trello, Monday, HubSpot, and Hootsuite, which can automate key tasks and provide analysis. You can track and benchmark progress by using key performance indicators (KPIs) such as website traffic, conversion rates, and customer engagement.

It’s also important to review the plan and budget regularly, assess ROI, and then change the marketing plan’s strategies accordingly.

Key takeaway: It’s not enough to simply create a plan – you need to launch it and analyze your results. You should include the time and resources needed for this. Depending on the size of your team, analyzing results may be up to you, or it could be an employee’s responsibility. Whatever the case, make sure it gets done – without it, you may spend time and financial resources on efforts that aren’t achieving your goals or may miss opportunities that lead to even greater success!

An effective marketing plan is essential for success – be sure to fund yours sufficiently

Now that you’re on the road to creating an awesome marketing plan, don’t let it gather dust! It’s all too easy for a thoughtful and effective plan to be put on the back burner due to insufficient resources – and that can undermine all the great work that you’re dedicating to your business.

Pursuit can help. We’re a leading small business lender in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Illinois, Washington, and Nevada. We have a line of credit and business loan options that can help you finance your plans and thrive.

Contact us to learn more.