How to Create a Marketing Plan for Your Small Business (2 Ways!)
Do you need to get strategic with marketing your small business and want to put together a marketing plan?
Running a business requires us to wear so many different hats - from accounting to operations to HR - and one of those includes marketing. If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by all the different areas and ways to promote your business (either online or offline), you’re not alone!
It can be a lot to take in, but if you have a plan and approach it with a strategy, it becomes a whole lot easier.
In this blog post I’ll share with you the two best ways to create a marketing plan for your small business, plus provide you with free templates to help you get started! These templates also contain tips and resources for actually putting the plan into action as well.
Table of Contents
Watch this as a YouTube video below or keep scrolling to read!
Why have a marketing plan for your small business?
1. You May need it for securing funding
If you’re looking for investment in your business, it’s likely your funding sources will want to see a plan for how you plan to actually make money in your business (and therefore pay them back!). Marketing is a huge part of this and so it’s important that you have a marketing plan ready to show them.
Whether you’re getting funding from a non-profit, from an investor, or even friends or family, a marketing plan document is a great choice for displaying this professionally.
2. So that your team are all on the same page
If you have a small team in your business, perhaps you have other people who will be working on some of these marketing activities for/with you, and so you’ll want to ensure you’re all on the same page with regards to your goals, messaging, and tactics for each platform.
It’s useful to have a document (or project management system - as I’ll discuss in a moment!), for everyone to be able to reference.
3. To give you focus and a clear strategy for your business
Even if it’s just you running your business, a marketing plan is a useful tool to have to ensure you stay focused with what activities you’re doing to promote your small business. Without a plan that includes goals and strategy, marketing is going to be like throwing spaghetti at a wall and hoping something sticks! So it’s key for keeping you on track as well.
What should be included in your marketing plan?
All of the below sections are included in my free marketing plan document template, with tips on how to fill them out, and more!
Research & Background
The ‘background’ section of your marketing plan should always include details about your brand, what makes you unique, and what messaging you want to focus on when marketing your business. This is going to be a useful reference point for when actually creating marketing materials!
You can also include a section on market research, where you analyse the threats and opportunities in the market around you, and ensure you’re away of other businesses that are similar to yours.
Further reading: Branding exercise - write your ‘Onliness Statement’
Goals & Objectives
I heard Darcel from The Business Manager use this analogy on her Instagram and it’s really stuck with me: approach anything in your business without setting goals is like you attempting to finish a puzzle without knowing what the end image is supposed to look like! You wouldn’t do it, it would be a total waste of time…
So make sure you’ve set clear (SMART) goals and objectives for what you want to actually achieve with marketing your business.
Platform-specific Strategy
Once you have the background stuff out of the way, you can move on to listing all the areas and platforms you plan to marketing your business.
Remember that social media marketing isn’t the only way to promote your business! There are lots of other aspects to content marketing, including email marketing, blogging, video marketing etc., but also plenty of offline and direct marketing avenues to consider as well - including event marketing, PR, or cold pitching.
Remember to check out my suite of marketing online courses to learn HOW to actually use these platforms too!
Tracking & Measurement
There’s no point in just setting goals for your marketing and not having regular check ins to see how you’re doing in achieving those goals, so it’s important that you outline dedicated time to evaluate how your activities are going, and set KPIs (‘key performance indicators’ … aka. statistics to keep an eye on to ensure you’re on track with meeting your goals) to measure regularly.
Budget (if relevant)
If you’re planning on running paid advertising, whether on social media, Google, or even in magazines, you’ll want to outline your budget for these and goals for your return on investment as well.
Two different ways to create a marketing plan
1. Write a marketing plan document (use my free template to help!)
One option is to write out a Marketing Plan document with different chapters & sections, which you can keep as a working document file or export as a PDF to send to relevant parties.
This is a great option if you are needing to show this to outside parties (eg. for investment) as it’s the more traditionally ‘professional’ approach.
You can download my FREE marketing plan document template to get you started!
2. Create a Marketing plan in a trello board
The only issue I’ve found with a Marketing Plan as a document is that I personally found I wasn’t revisiting it enough, and it wasn’t visual enough for me. If you’re visual / creative person and would prefer something more flexible (and you don’t need to show it to anyone for investment reasons), setting up a marketing plan in a project management system - like Trello - is a great option!
I use Trello as my project management system because it’s super easy to use, and I literally have it open all day every day, so it makes sense for me to host all my marketing strategies here where I can easily reference it and make changes.
I’ve included a template for my Trello marketing plan board alongside the document template download!
