Do I Really Need to Write a Marketing Plan? In a word YES!

What is a marketing plan?

Planning is the process of anticipating future events and determining strategies to achieve organizational objectives in the future. Even if you are a solopreneur – you know the proverbial chief, cook, and bottle washer, who started the business, owns the business, runs the business and is responsible for the business’ failure or success – you need a marketing plan.

A marketing plan involves creating activities (activities are more fun than tasks) that get your message and/or products out to your target audience. Marketing planning is the basis for all marketing strategies and decisions. You’ve gotta have a plan, you’ve gotta review the plan periodically, and you’ve gotta follow through with the plan in order to succeed. The details of the plan are made up of what you sell (services or products), how you are going to sell it, expected profit margins and price points, and dates of achievement. Your marketing plan is a dynamic, written document that will be your guidebook to increasing your business and sales.

Developing a marketing plan will help define your target audience, create, maintain and grow a customer base, with the ultimate goal of increasing your bottom line. But how do you figure out who your target audience is? To start (we’ll get into more detail in other blogs), you have to ask yourself a few basic questions:

— What are my products or services?
— Who do they serve?

All business owners need to understand WHY they exist, and what their product or service is. If you don’t know the answers to these questions yet, take the time to figure them out. Then write them down, and read them to yourself every day or however long it takes to really understand your mission and message. Putting this info into your marketing plan will help keep you on track.

You can better break down your ultimate goal into smaller activities that jive with your audience’s preferences. A written plan can prevent you from doing 500 things when you really do three, saving you time and, ultimately, money.

Taking time to produce a marketing plan is worth the effort. Any transaction-based business has services or products to sell to their target audience. A good marketing plan will help you craft a message to assist your audience in understanding why these services and products benefit them, and why they are better that the competition.

By specifying objectives and defining the actions required to achieve them, you can compare expected vs. actual performance. This little tidbit of info is important; it tells you how you’re doing, if what you’re doing is working (or not) and how much time/money/manpower you spent to make those activities happen. Knowing these factors is crucial to your business’ success.

Marketing can be one of the most expensive and complicated business activities, but if you know what works, you can become an efficient (and economical) marketing machine.

Knowing what is working from day to day is like getting a million presents under the Christmas tree. Seriously, I’m not exaggerating. Apps and computers make it so easy to find out, too. For instance, if you launch your blog, you can see if traffic came in from your post. Using social media, Google Analytics can let you know if traffic is coming from Facebook, Twitter or other sources. Once you see where your audience likes to spend their time, you can better tailor your advertising and media presence to continue attracting them to your brand.

You’ll know what parts of your marketing environment are a success (bringing in revenue) and which are relative duds (the ones that don’t get any response).

Writing a marketing plan allows you to coordinate the inner workings of your business with your marketing environment, e.g., your website, social media, blog, etc.

Once the marketing plan is written, it serves as a reference point for the success of your future marketing activities.

Meaning, you can better see the relative challenges your business is facing, and fix them. For instance, if you’re a tomato grower you try to create an environment where you’re able to grow vegetables, right? Now, imagine you have one tomato plant that is thriving, but one isn’t. You need to do something to the environment to help BOTH thrive.

Back to marketing plans. If your marketing environment (website, social media, blog, etc.) isn’t allowing your business to thrive, you’ve got to know WHY. This is again where Google Analytics can be of assistance. It lets you know which activities are working. Or not. It gives you the intel you need to better communicate with your audience. Knowing how many people come to your website from your social media posts, which pages they visited and whether or not they made a purchase or contacted you is paramount to your success.

It isn’t just about website visits, though. Don’t get caught up in that number alone. Site visits are nice, but it doesn’t mean much unless action is taken. This is where the tracking of these metrics helps move you closer to having a financial transaction. Look at your website as a key part of your marketing plan. With Google Analytics you can find out if your website actually helps your business, or if you need to change something.

“A clear vision, backed by definite plans, gives you a tremendous feeling of confidence and personal power.” — Brian Tracy

Although it does take time and effort at the beginning, a written marketing plan eventually saves you time, energy and cash because you will have figured out who to target with your marketing, specified your objectives and actions, and understood which parts of your marketing plan are strong and which are weak. By keeping track of all this info in the marketing plan itself, you’ll always have a blueprint with which to build your business.