The 7 Steps to Marketing Success - Develop a Strategic Marketing Plan

Marketing can feel overwhelming when you’re starting out in business, or are a small business owner, because it’s just one of so many hats you have to wear.

Even when you find the time to think about your marketing it can be really tough to know where to start. Should you get active on social media? Spend time working on your brand? Or how about a website or paid advertising? SEO or influencers? Or should you look at ebay, Amazon or ETSY? Write a blog or post on Linkedin? Arrrgh!

With so much to think about it’s no wonder that many businesses struggle to market effectively and consistently, and that’s why we’ve put together this mini series to hopefully give you a clear track to run on. Over the next few weeks we’ll be looking at the following 7 Steps to Marketing Success:

1). Know your target market

2). Create a strong brand that will appeal to them

3). Develop powerful key messages, copy and images

4). Develop a strategic marketing plan

5). Implement your plan

6). Maximise your existing customers

7). Staying competitive

Step 4: Develop a Strategic Marketing Plan

To develop a plan you need to know what it is you’re planning to do ie what are your goals for the business in the short and medium term.  You’d be surprised how few businesspeople have clearly defined goals (or maybe you wouldn’t. Ask yourself how well defined your business goals are….?) They should be SMART – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely, not vague and woolly. So things like ‘increase sales’ or ‘get more customers’ is no good because it’s too vague. Do you mean one more customer, or 100 more customers, or 1000 more customers? Your goals need figures, facts, measurables

Once you have those clear you can start thinking about the strategies ie the broad-brush ideas for how you might market your business. Some examples might be website, social media, email campaigns, resellers, stockists or intermediaries. Once you’re happy with your strategies (and you may have different strategies for different sides of the business, for instance some businesses sell B2B and B2C, or products and service) then you can start thinking about the tactics for each strategy. The tactics are the actual actions or steps you’d need to take to implement a strategy.

So let’s take the strategy of having a  website as an example. If you’re starting from scratch your tactics might include:

- Deciding what function you expect the website to serve ie an online brochure/shop front or a lead generator, or both (please be realistic with the lead generator idea. If you’re in a crowded market, trying to sell nationally or wider, it’s unlikely to be achievable without paid ads).

- Research web building options

- Decide on layout, number of pages and navigation

- Write copy, and collate your image ideas

- Learn about SEO (search engine optimisation, or in plain English, being found on Google!) – by the way the whole known universe of SEO is potentially being turned on its head because of AI, but that’s for another day.

Anyway back to your plan. Once you have your SMART short and medium term goals and your strategies and tactics worked out, you can put them into a simple, at a glance plan that shows you what you need to do each week for the next few months (I’m deliberately being vague here about how long a plan should run for or what it should look like, because this should be YOUR plan, made for you, to suit your goals, aims, abilities, resources etc, so it’s not for me to start getting too prescriptive) You then need to review your plan regularly, preferably weekly, and hold your own feet to the fire.

Again we run a workshop designed to take you through this very process, because you’d be amazed how many businesses don’t have a marketing plan (yes you’re far from the only one, so don’t feel too bad about it!) and whilst the idea of creating a strategic plan is simple, it’s not easy, and many people need help with it.

Ready to Take Control of Your Marketing?

Don’t let marketing overwhelm hold you back! signup to any- of our free marketing and social media workshop on our website. You can also access our FREE 1-2-1 help and advice any time by giving our Gateway team a call on 0114 224 5000.