6 Steps To Create A Solid Marketing Plan For Your Small Business

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6 Steps To Create A Solid Marketing Plan For Your Small Business

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When you want to start marketing your small business, you need to use a few strategies to ensure that your company will see results from your marketing efforts. There is a wonderful list of options below that will make it easy for you to save money and time. Plus, you can diversify your marketing to a point that it will help you gain traction locally and globally. Use the list below to ensure that your Marketing Plan makes sense, fits within a budget, and works on every platform you use.

1. Set SMART Marketing Goals

When you are setting marketing goals, you must determine how much traffic you want, how much you want to see in revenue, or how much interaction you want to get online. A digital marketing plan is easy to manage because you can handle everything online, and you should decide that you want to have something like 30% more interaction on social media, 30% more followers on your blog, or 30% more traffic on your website.
You may decide that you want to see your sales rise 15%, or you could work with a marketer to figure out what a reasonable goal is for your business. You can always change your goals around in the future if you want, and the marketing goals ensure that you always have something to work towards.
SMART stands for:

  • Specific: Be specific and define the exact outcome you want to achieve. Being too broad could lead to poor results. Goals such as “Generate more sales,” are not specific enough. A better example would be “Increase sales by 20% by the end of the year”
  • Measurable: If you can't measure it, how would you know what success looks like?
  • Achievable: Set realistic goals. It's ok to set yourself for success, but you also should know what is attainable and what is not.
  • Realistic: Also, make sure you have the resources to achieve the goal. Do you have the right staff, working capital, ideas, equipment, etc?
  • Timely: Set a due date for your goal.

2. Set A Budget

You should set a marketing budget for your company that will help you plan without overspending. When you have a set budget for marketing, you can squeeze all your plans into that budget. If you do not have a budget, you will spend far too much money. If you have set your budget too low, you may not be able to get enough marketing done.
The best plan for setting a budget is to research other companies in your field. When you start with their budget, you can determine how much is reasonable for you. When you have done that, you can adjust your budget going forward. As your company grows, you can increase your budget. Plus, you can partake in more of the options listed below because you have more money to work with.

3. Set Up A Marketing Diversity Plan

You need to decide how to mix up your marketing between content, videos, your website, ads, and social media. Determine what the best mix is for your company based on the clientele that you have. Some companies have a very young audience, and you should use social media to attract more young customers. If you have an older audience, you may want to dedicate more time to email marketing. You could send emails to business clients, but you may need to buy ad space to attract business customers or local customers.
If you want to invest in ads, you need to decide what kind of ad program you should use. Every program is different, and you cannot put all your money into affiliates, PPC ads, or banner ads. A mixture of ads will be much more effective.

4. Plan For Individual Campaigns

When you begin to plan for marketing campaigns, you must focus on a certain product or service for that campaign. If you tell the public to buy your products or use your services, you are not being specific enough. Because of this, you should pick the product that is most popular at that moment. When you are making more money from these products, you can dedicate more money to a marketing plan for less popular products.
You can spread out your campaigns to ensure that you are gaining traction for each product. Your company will make more money, or you can remove the marketing plans that are not working. If this is the case, you can go back to a marketing campaign that you know works until you make the necessary changes.

5. Track Your Results

You must track your results by ensuring that you know who is coming to your website, how long they are spending on the site, and if they have bought anything. You need to know who is looking at your ads, and you need to know which search engines they are using. You can even go so far as targeting a particular search engine because it seems to give you the best results. Plus, you can focus on the search engine that gives you the most voice search hits. Tracking ensures that you can adjust your marketing as the clientele changes.

6. Add Marketing Activities

You must add marketing activities to your calendar because there are contests and events you can host for your customers. When you have contests and events on the calendar, your customers are more like to come to your location, participate online, or follow you on social media. Customers love winning free things, and customers love coming to events where you may give away promotional merchandise.

Conclusion

The Marketing Plan that You Have Created for Your Company should be based on your own tracking and research. Get to know your audience, ensure that you have created the content they like, and stay within your budget so that you do not overspend. Your company can prosper when you have bought into the right marketing plan, and you will save quite a lot of money because you are only doing the things that are working.

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