Entrepreneurs know to employ a variety of marketing techniques because it’s impossible to predict how effective any one method will be until time and money has been spent. A marketing plan will help you to keep track of the various marketing methods and should be considered to be as essential to the success of your business as developing the business plan.
Even though your customer base and business may change over time, a marketing plan should follow the goals that you want to reach during the first full year you’re in business. A marketing plan can be fifty pages or longer, or just a few pages. Regardless of the length, a marketing plan should contain these primary components:
A description of your business’s primary audience. Who is the most likely market? Wholesale or retail customers? Men, women, or children? Local, regional, national, or worldwide?
A list of the marketing methods that will be used to reach this audience. Keep in mind that there are countless ways to reach a single market. If your business caters to more than one market, your marketing plan will become more complex. Despite your focus, you should understand there will be some overlap, since no one lives in a vacuum. This is good news because the more times a prospective customer hears about your business, the more likely he is to remember it the next time he hears it, and the more likely he is to become a customer.
A schedule that lists the months in which the projects will begin and be completed. To allow for long-range planning, creating a month-by-month list makes it easy to schedule marketing projects and to anticipate them. You may want to schedule more time-consuming projects for the months when business is expected to be slow—while you concentrate the easier and more expensive methods, like advertising, for the months where you have more money than time.
The person responsible for carrying out the project. Entrepreneurs who are just starting out have enough on their plates without having to find time to stuff press kits into envelopes. But, while an MBA is not necessary to market a business, it is sometimes easier to get attention if the owner is the one calling reporters to check if they’ve received a press kit. It can also save the owner from having to train an employee. In your marketing plan, write the name of the person who will be responsible next to each project. And a week before the project is due to start, check with that person to see if everything is set to begin.
A budget for each project. In many cases, these figures will have to be rough estimates. Doing the research ahead of time will help you to see if projected marketing costs—from postage to printing to advertising—are in line with your projected revenue. Average the marketing costs throughout the entire year and then compare the costs as a percentage of projected first-year revenues. In some months your marketing costs may run a lot higher than the overall percentage you’ve figured on, but as long as they stay in line for the year as a whole, you’ll be on track.
Without a marketing plan, many business owners will only have hits and misses when it comes to their marketing. The great thing about having a marketing plan is that it can serve as a pretty reliable road map for the first year in the life of your business. Of course, it’s necessary to tinker with it occasionally, but in most cases a quick glance at the plan once a week is enough to stay on track.
