To be successful as a small business, you need a marketing plan. How are you going to raise brand awareness and get your product and service in front of prospective customers?
As a small business owner, you have freedom to choose which campaigns to run. However, you may not know how to market a new product, service or idea.
A good marketing plan can help build a pipeline of qualified leads that turn into sales, but limited budget, time restraints and lack of direction can slow you down. A good marketing plan is key.
Answer the Basics
To start your marketing plan, you’ll need to answer some questions. Who is buying what you have? What problems do they have that you can solve? What is valuable about what you have? Which competition is also solving these problems, and what are they doing?
Start your plan with these questions, and you’ll have the foundation for everything else in your plan. Since these questions are so fundamental to your marketing plan, we’ll break them down in more detail.
Who is your buyer?
Businesses make a key mistake by answering this question with “anyone”. With a limited budget, and time restrictions, you need to focus on your target customer to run successful campaigns. You need to solve a specific problem for a target type of person.
Who are they, where do they hang out, and what helps them decide to purchase? If you’re struggling with this, use existing customers as a format, and create a buyer persona to refer to.
What is valuable about what you have?
You need to be aware of your value proposition, in relation to your target customer. What makes you different to your competitors, and how can you stand out for prospects? If you’re not sure, survey your customers to find out why they chose you.
Who is your competition?
Analyze what your competitors are doing to solve your prospects’ problems and try doing it even better. They’ve already done the hard work of researching customers and marketing their products, so you can learn, improve and get ideas for doing the same.
Use these three questions as a foundation for your marketing plan. Now you can leverage your answers and turn them into relevant marketing material for your small business.
Knowing where your customers hang out tells you where to post your content and advertise. Knowing your customers’ problems helps you create targeted content to lead them in the right direction.
Build Out A Marketing Plan
Now you can build out your marketing plan with ideas for content you could create, when you could post them, and where you’ll post. If it’s created with your research in mind, then you’ll know exactly how your customers will benefit.
You can use audio on podcasts, video on YouTube, written posts on your blog, medium or other platforms, then leverage this initial content into social media posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and any others you choose.
This will help you raise brand awareness in an ethical and helpful way and bring a boatload of new prospects to your business.
A Step in The Right Direction
We’ve only scratched the surface of what a full marketing plan could do for your business, there’s paid traffic, organic optimization, content types, engagement strategies and so much more.
If you’re trying to grow your small business marketing and you need help, reach out to an expert at the Archangel group today and we’ll help create a plan for your business.
