Many business owners go about launching and operating their businesses without any real strategy or marketing plan in place. A well thought out marketing plan will allow you to set measurable goals that you can work towards and determine if your efforts were effective. Without a plan in place, you are basically shooting from the hip in hopes that success will happen. However, in the real world, success is not stumbled upon, but a specific result of a carefully laid out plan that’s put into action.

If you are in business for yourself and desire to implement basic marketing strategies but don’t have the know-how, then below are some marketing tips that you can implement quickly and integrated with your current overall business strategy.

This one-page marketing plan can be used as a guide to point you in the right direction while implementing some useful ideas that may be new to you. This one page marketing plan is designed to assist you with your marketing efforts.

A simple well executed marketing plan can be all that a business owner needs to experience success in their business. However, when it comes to actually mapping out and writing the plan, most business owners continue to ignore this part of their overall business efforts.

Creating a one-page plan can provide an easy to follow outline that business owners can use as a guide without dedicating the time that it normally takes to prepare and implement a full-blown plan.

Key Benefits of a One Page Plan

There are many benefits to a one-page plan including:

• allowing business owners to take a glance at their own current marketing situation and develop a plan accordingly
• providing business owners with an easy to follow check off list to use as a guide
• serving as an outline for a much more fully developed plan that can be written and implemented at a later time
• be developed relatively quickly
• easy to implement – 60 minutes or less!

Your one page marketing plan will require that you research and/or implement the following areas:

• Brand Awareness and Branding

Brand awareness involves ways that you can make your target audience as well as other members of your marketplace aware of your business while increasing its perceived value. Branding is a continual process that involves keeping your product or service in the marketplace so that its easily recognizable by members of your industry. This includes those in your target audience to your competitors.

• Industry Trends

Be aware of what’s going on in your industry – politically, environmentally, or technically. An example is, are there new laws that affect your industry or are there any newcomers that are entering the marketplace, or existing competitors and their role in the marketplace.

• Marketing Goal(s)

Map out your marketing goals and make sure that they are attainable, measurable and effective. Consider whether you will be using digital or traditional marketing efforts or both. When using digital marketing be sure that your plan includes a content development plan, a social media plan and a social media management plan. The plan should also have measurable results that you can use to determine which methods are the most effective.

• Target Market

Determine who your target market is. This is the group that you’re aiming to reach when you send out your marketing messages and other marketing efforts. Segmenting your target market based on demographics like their age, gender, ethnicity, geographic location and… you get the idea, is beneficial to truly understanding your customers.

• Strategies

Map out various strategies as to how you plan to reach your goals in a very general manner. An example of that would be, if you had a goal to increase your followers on all social media platforms, then your strategy could be to offer a free white paper, webinar or other item of value to everyone who opts-in to your email list.

• Identify Your Top 3 Competitors

Select the top three competitors, in your industry and eyeball them to determine where marketplace the market place in comparison. Compare your direct competitors based on factors such as price, location, service offering to determine where you fit in the market. There’s no need in targeting the most well-known at this stage of the game, however.

• Create a Yearly Marketing Budget

Determine how much you can realistically set aside for an annual marketing budget to execute your plan. Your budget is usually a percentage of your overall sales. Generally 4 – 10% but it will vary depending on industry. If you don’t have a large budget to execute everything on your plan, remember that a small focused budget is better than nothing.

• Determine Your Marketing Mix

Your marketing mix includes the 4 P’s of marketing – Price, Product, Placement & Promotion. Afterwards, determine each of these areas as it relates to your product or service.

• SWOT Analysis

Map out how your company fares in each area of your SWOT grid. This would consist of your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Compare each of these areas to your competitors to see where you stand in the marketplace.

• Outline Your Monthly Tactics

Once you have the plan, your tactics will help to implement your plan. Choose very specific marketing tactics that are associated with your strategies and with in your marketing budget. Map out the tactics that you will implement on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Spread out your tactics so that your budget accommodates each tactic and so that your tactics match your sales cycle. A strategy might be email marketing and a tactic might be to send a certain email at a certain time.

Cowlick Studios has 3 great marketing packages that can help you through the marketing plan process as well as implementation. Give us a call or contact us today. You can Download the marketing plan below.