The pandemic had a few surprising side effects. One of those side effects was that people started new businesses in record numbers. 2021 alone saw the launch of around 5.4 million businesses.
Of course, launching the business is only one part of the puzzle. You need some kind of strategy in place for how you’ll promote your business, products, or services.
Figuring out the marketing is often a struggle for new business owners. If your way through business marketing, keep reading for a quick guide on how to create a marketing plan.
Set Goals
You cannot conduct effective business marketing or company advertising without goals. Just as importantly, you need specific, achievable goals with a clear timeline and metrics for success. A few examples might include:
- Increase leads by 10 percent over three months
- Double followers on social media over six months
- Improve retention by 5 percent for the quarter
These are specific, arguably achievable, come with a timeline, and you can measure them.
Set a Budget
While a lot of current marketing thinking focuses on organic search and organic leads, there is a baseline cost for any kind of marketing. Marketing means content that is often created by third-party businesses or freelancers.
Getting that content means paying for it. Beyond that, you must also consider things like paid advertising options like Google Ads. You can learn more about those options in this blog post.
Setting a budget specifically for that content creation and paid advertising can make paying for them slightly less stressful. It also lets you put a hard cap on your spending that you can actually afford.
Settle on Your Tactics
Setting a budget can actually help you with this part. If you know your marketing budget for the next three months is $1500, you can likely eliminate TV ads from your list of tactics. Unless you produce the whole thing in-house, it’ll just cost too much.
There are, however, a lot of options that include:
- TV and radio ads
- Print ads
- Search engine optimization
- Content marketing
- Social media
- Pay-per-click
- Direct mail
You must evaluate your business and your target customer to decide which options will serve you best.
Implement, Track, and Revise
Once you settle on your tactics, you must break down the campaign into actionable steps that you implement. You need a mechanism in place for tracking the steps and their results. Once you get those results, you must evaluate the results and revise your plan accordingly.
If you see great results with content marketing and bad results with direct mail, you should consider redirecting your money in that direction.
Create a Marketing Plan, But Stay Flexible
You should create a marketing plan to help you and your team stay on track. Still, you shouldn’t become so attached to that plan that you won’t abandon a failing option.
Not every marketing tactic will produce results for every business. You need the flexibility to see when a tactic doesn’t work and move on from it.
Are you looking for more marketing ideas? If so, then check out the posts over in business section.
