How a Marketing Plan Builds Your Business

It’s time to dust off that old marketing plan that’s been crammed in the back of your bottom drawer next to your business plan,and crack it open. Oh, right - you don’t have a dedicated, stand-alone marketing plan. But that’s okay, because you’ve got it all in your head, right? Wrong. Without a written, comprehensive marketing plan, you’re throwing money away without even realizing it.

What’s So Important About a Written Plan?

There are plenty of reasons why you, savvy businessperson that you are, need a written marketing plan, and the most obvious is that you don’t yet have one. Ask yourself: does the competitor down the street (or online) have a written plan? If they do, then you’re a step behind already and you better catch up. But if they don’t, which is far more likely, then creating one for yourself will give you an instant competitive edge.

A well-written strategic plan will provide you with several necessary insights:

• It makes clear where your money is being spent and where your money should be spent. A good plan includes an audit of your current marketing activity, which accounts for both direct and indirect marketing expenses. It also defines workable budgets for the future.
• It reveals strengths and weaknesses in your tactics, and provides specific ways to fix the weaknesses and maximize the strengths.
• It tells you if your marketing tactics are effectively aligned with your goals.

But even more importantly than holding a mirror to your current marketing activity, a thoughtful marketing plan provides you with a tactical step-by-step plan to reach those business goals. This necessarily sets you in a clear direction, making decisions about which marketing tactics to use, how to implement them, and how much money to spend on them, much easier to make in the heat of day-to-day business.

It’s important to realize just how inefficient on-the-fly marketing decisions can be. Making such last-minute, high-pressure choices will almost always dilute your efforts, which means you’ll yield a lower return for the time and money you’ve invested in those off-the-cuff, time-pressured decisions. Creating a strategic marketing plan that you can turn to in these moments will significantly reduce wasted time, money and resources.

So What Does a Good Marketing Plan Look Like?

Realistically, your plan can be as simple or as complex as you choose to make it. You’ll have to balance your available resources with your ideal plan, of course, and find the level of detail that works best for your business. A full-blown strategic marketing plan, however, should include at least the following elements:

• An analysis of your brand position, market segments, and product delivery strategy
• A set of specific marketing goals and objectives
  
• An audit of your current marketing tactics
• A step-by-step action plan to reach each goal (each action should build on the others to create a cohesive strategy)

There’s more to it than that, but those are the essentials. Without them, your marketing plan is more of a marketing notion. Remember: a plan should be executable, appropriate to your needs, and effective.

Can You Do It Yourself?

If your business is already struggling to come up with the cash flow to execute each individual marketing tactic already, it can be tough to convince yourself that it’s worth dropping the cash on a professional strategist. After all, who knows your business better than you? And you’re no stranger to bootstrapping. A DIY marketing plan is certainly better than none, and it will obviously save you money in the short term (though probably not over the long-term).

Start with a simple, one-page plan that you can put together yourself. It should include:

• Your overall business goals
• A short list of marketing tactics that can best achieve those goals (be picky)
• What steps you need to take to implement those tactics.

You must be aware, though, that this is not an ideal approach and it will not be a reliable plan over the long haul. Creating the above plan successfully is often harder than it sounds. Identifying appropriate, reachable goals, understanding which marketing techniques work best for those particular goals, and then identifying the specific steps you’ll need to take to maximize the effectiveness of your chosen marketing techniques, all require a level of marketing expertise you may or may not have.

If it’s not reliable, then why bother with a one-page plan? In actuality, it’s more of an exercise to prepare you for working with a professional strategist. Preparing such a limited marketing plan for yourself will reveal what you know and don’t know, and where you might need outside expertise. This is important information: the best business owners recognize their own weaknesses, and find ways to correct for them (usually by hiring someone for whom their weaknesses are actually strengths).

A professional marketing strategist will inevitably bring a different set of skills to the table: they’ll provide you with a broader market context, a better understanding of your competitors, insight into the most effective marketing methods available to you, and an understanding of how to combine everything into a holistic, effective strategy. And perhaps most importantly, a professional will bring a level of objectivity you simply can’t achieve on your own. When you spend all day, every day making your business work, it’s easy to lose perspective and begin to see everything through the lens of that business. Hiring someone who has both your best interest in mind, and the ability to see beyond your business, will result in a marketing plan that you can easily implement, and implement successfully.

And Finally...What To Do With That Plan

Whether you choose to handle your marketing plan yourself, or hire someone to help you with the process, it'll be useless if you cram it back in that drawer and let it gather dust. The best way to make sure you actually use your plan is to start with a solid foundation. Take the time to do it right from the start, and implementing it will come naturally.

Once it's written, review it regularly. At the very least, you should be reviewing your marketing plan every quarter, but every month is even better. This will allow you to align your cash flow with your upcoming marketing expenses, make adjustments, and generally avoid being caught with your pants down (as in, I meant to start putting money aside for my new catalog last quarter and now I have no budget!).

Reviewing your plan regularly will also give you the satisfaction of checking off action steps as you take them and making adjustments as necessary. It's awfully rewarding to cross things of your to-do list, especially when you can watch those to-do items turn into sales. And that might be the best part about creating a written marketing plan: seeing that plan turn into reality before your very eyes. Because the very nature of such a plan is to build momentum and, ultimately, build your business.