Like all aspects of your small business, marketing has to be planned and, since many small businesses need more business, a marketing plan to achieve this is often a priority.
The three parts of a marketing plan are:
A goal
A suitable goal must be precise and verifiable. "Increase sales" is not a suitable goal. "Increase sales by 30% in 12 months while maintaining profit margins at present levels" is a suitable goal.
A process
The process is the means by which you are going to achieve your goal. A properly planned process has detailed steps which, when executed, will move your business toward the goal. These steps start with listing the different ways which, together, will result in your business's reaching the goal. Each is then itself broken down into steps and finally individual jobs which can be assigned and scheduled. Then you can get to work.
A feedback mechanism
The best marketing plan is useless if you don't know how you're doing. You have to plan in a mechanism that allows you to check your progress against the verifiable part of your goal. This lets you adjust the process if you're not making the planned progress.
The three parts work together as follows:
If we take the above goal of a 30% increase in sales over 12 months, one planned step could be to find new customers (others could be to sell more to existing customers, to sell more valuable products, to buy a competitor etc.).
To find new customers, you have to identify prospects. One group of prospects is companies similar to your existing customers. To do this, you will need a list of your existing customers and some details. One place to find similar companies is in the Yellow Pages.
Now you have broken down one branch of one planned step to find new customers and you can plan its execution. You can assign or schedule the creation of your existing customer list and the search of the Yellow Pages and assign how many new customers and sales you expect to achieve from this activity. Then, go through the other steps and branches the same way before starting work.
Once a small part of the work has been completed, it is time to check back to see that the planned number of new customers from each planned activity and the corresponding extra sales are being achieved. If an activity is not reaching it's planned goal, perhaps it should be cancelled or scaled down while more resources are given to the more successful activities. This part is the feedback which helps you make sure you achieve what you planned to do.
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