It’s downright scary that over 60 per cent of small businesses will fail within their first year. Michael Halligan, co-founder of Engage Marketing, says to avoid becoming a statistic, small businesses need to undertake due diligence and plan ahead. This means knowing what’s ahead, how to overcome it, and how to thrive in spite of it.
Planning ahead also applies to existing businesses in a changing industry. Whether traditional markets are shrinking or your customers are buying in a different manner, planning ahead is critical.
It is all about being prepared.
Many start-up founders and owners of existing businesses hesitate when it comes to writing a marketing plan, fearing the tough questions. If you’re reading this and feel uneasy about the thought of analysing the ins and outs of marketing your business, then odds are you desperately need a marketing plan.
Many people write marketing plans to please a bank or investor, but a good plan is all about learning new skills in marketing, and learning more about your business in the process.
Marketing plans by nature push you into the unfamiliar. They help you to explore what successful businesses in your market are doing, recognise the changing forces within your industry and how to best place your business to navigate through them.
A good marketing plan will leave you with a strong idea of your customers, your competitors, the essential ingredients to your brand being recognised and the tools that you’re going to use to get the exposure that you’ve been dreaming of.
There are a few key steps to go through when writing a marketing plan. As great as the end result is, it’s the process of creating a marketing plan that really counts.
It’s that feeling you experience after burning the midnight oil working on your plan, dreaming of all the new opportunities and the sales that will soon follow.
Find a good marketing plan resource and run through the process of creating a marketing plan.
Learn what you need to include, what considerations you need to make and most importantly read about how to answer each area of your marketing plan.
This learning not only helps to create a powerful plan that you can use to market your business in years to come, but it helps to fill you with the confidence and knowledge to quickly and easily execute your essential marketing activities without relying on hiring new marketing staff.
Really want to take things a step further? Sit down and co-create your marketing plan with a marketing agency.
Sitting down with a marketing consultant is a more expensive option but if your business has significant sales potential, it will pay for itself many times over.
A one-on-one marketing session gives you an expert on hand to bounce ideas off, answer questions and provide greater direction to your marketing plan.
The finished plan is generally of a greater quality and of greater use in the future.
The key to any type of plan is making sure you know what your goals are – if you know where you want to be in 12 months, you can start to plan ways to get there.
When setting goals, follow your heart and listen to your head. Following your heart will lead to selling goals that inspire you and fill you with a burning desire to fulfil.
Listening to your head will ensure that the goals remain realistic.
Then to add legs to your goals, match your goals with your tactics. For example, not all marketing tactics will result in sales.
Some tactics are designed to get the phone ringing, others are to build credibility, while one might be to get potential customers to find you on a search engine. Another tactic will get them to do another action such as visiting your website.
Once you have your resource in place, you need to look back at what has and hasn’t worked for you in the past.
If you keep going with marketing activity that hasn’t worked in the past, you’re essentially throwing money down the drain.
A few tips for determining the effectiveness of your marketing:
Subscribe to Google Analytics. This allows you to accurately track the real-world success of your marketing activity;
Ask your customers. Regularly call some of your customers to ask their opinion of your business and its marketing. If possible, ask them how you compare with your competitors;
Train your team. Ask your sales team or other front-line staff to find out how customers heard about you and why they decided to do business with you.
Once you know which types of marketing have been working for you, you’ll have a better idea of what your current marketing plan should look like.
There are very few successful companies that have remained successful despite using the same old boring marketing strategies.
If you’ve fallen short of your marketing goals, don’t just do what you’ve always done. When writing a marketing plan, most of us experience an element of what marketing legend Seth Godin refers to as the ‘the Lizard Brain'.
We revert back to what everyone else is doing or what we’ve always done. It’s safe, so why not? For example, some years ago when we were analysing our agency’s marketing performance, we found that we were failing to influence the small business market beyond our own network.
As a result, we focused on developing content that businesses around Australia could download and learn from.
Today we have many eBooks, a popular blog and regular articles in leading business publications.
Being prepared to question what we were doing in our marketing has led to new opportunities and greater reach.
At the end of this journey you will know more about the ins and outs of your business, have a stronger idea of your brand values and, best of all, have a strong marketing plan that you can begin to execute.
While it can be intimidating to face the reality of creating a marketing plan, the end result is definitely worth it.
About the Author - Michael Halligan is co-founder of Engage Marketing, a marketing firm for small businesses. He is also the founder of Plan Lab, an online app designed to help small business owners learn about marketing while they create a powerful marketing plan. Users can log in at work or at home and start creating a marketing strategy guided by advice from Engage Marketing. www.getplanlab.com