Business Bits - Marketing Plan

Monday, April 05, 2010

Topic- Writing Marketing Plans for Small Businesses


So I've talked a bit about marketing; pre-marketing planning, organizing your base, & setting up Google Analytics to monitor just how & if our strategies are working out.  Now that we've got that under our belt, let's look at writing an an actual marketing plan. This is something I've wanted to do for awhile & hope to complete one sometime this month. I found excellent resources at Inc.com and Entreprenuer.com

{Image from P.S. Paper Goods}

Steps to Creating A Marketing Plan (condensed from Inc.com article):

1. Set Your Objectives : grow your business? add more customers? increase number of repeat customers? establish your brand?

2.
Do Your Research:get to know who your customers are, could be, and what they want.

3.
Define the Strategies you Need: How will you accomplish your objectives?

4. Outline your Tactics: write it out, includes examples & methods

5.
Build in Measurement for Each Tactic: {this is where google analytics or other stat programs are helpful!} identify time periods & quantifiable methods of checking (i.e. 20% more visitors by the end of June 2010)

6.
Develop the Plan and Stick to It: Use your plan & refer back to when making decisions

7.
Implement the Plan – and Stay Flexible: Make a point to review your plan & change if necessarily- are goals not being met? exceeded drastically? tactics not feeling like the fit your core values?


Good luck friends! Love to hear any marketing plan tips or stories...

6 comments :

Pili said...

As usual, the bussiness bits are always interesting reads, and super helpful for other sellers!

jan ~ tomatobaby said...

You always give such great tips Allisa ... perfect resource!

Hey ... I've got something for you too, but you'll have to visit my blog as its a surprise :o) ~j.

Af said...

wonderful tips! thank you for sharing :)

Jeremy Wells said...

Sweet Tips. I'm really trying to open up my marketing mind instead of being so IT based and this really helps :).

You should really think about linking to those other posts you did about pre marketing planning and google analytics because they would be very interesting to read (but lots of people including me are too lazy to search for them).

There also are a lot of Search Engine benefits to linking to other posts inside of a blog post.

Keep up the great marketing posts!

allisa jacobs said...

thanks for the feedback! i've included those links & vowed not to be so blog-post lazy next time ;)

best!

Lil Wildflower said...

Thank you for making it seem so simple! It is such an intimidating and overwhelming thing.