Like a lot of people do, I had a lot of knowledge about specific aspects of marketing in college.
While I was at school, I took a marketing class and ended up with an internship as the marketing director for a local nonprofit. It was great! Except that I realized that I had no idea how to build a marketing plan. I excelled at individual marketing concepts (designing a booth for an event, looking over a website for engage-ability, etc.) but creating a cohesive marketing plan was where I fell short.
After college, I realized I wasn’t the only person struggling with creating a cohesive marketing plan. Many small business owners struggle with the components of a marketing plan, so I decided to give you the overview of creating a Marketing Plan with this article.
A Couple Quick Caveats:
This is an overview. Which means that I’m going to be going into some of the detail of the steps in the plan, but not a ton! If you get to the end of this article and you’re still struggling with details of marketing, check out some of my other articles to get more familiar with how Marketing works. I highly recommend checking out www.TheStephanieScheller.com/Marketing
Putting this article into action will take a few hours. Creating your marketing plan will take somewhere between five to ten hours (depending on whether or not you have a funnel and multiple target markets), but I want to encourage you to work through it! Having a solid marketing plan in place reduces your frustration with your marketing, and helps your marketing produce better results for you. It’s time well-invested
The Marketing Plan
There are 4-5 components you’ll need for a comprehensive marketing plan:
Your Marketing Message
Your Target Market
Your Action Items
Your Baseline
(Optional) Your Funnel
Your Marketing Message
Just to clear something up: the marketing message is not your tagline!
A common misconception about marketing messages is that the marketing message is your snazzy tagline like “I’m Lovin’ It” or “Every Kiss Begins With Kay.” The reality is, that is only a part of the marketing message.
The Marketing Message
What you are trying to communicate to your prospective clients through your marketing.
Key in on one of those words in the definition: communicate. Not tell. Talk is cheap. You need to be finding ways to show your marketing message to your clients, not tell them. And your marketing message needs to be tangible and all-inclusive to what you do for your clients that no one else is doing.
For Example:
At Grow Disrupt, our marketing message is roughly a paragraph long. Here’s a brief summary:
“You are phenomenal! You are brilliant and smart! And as a business owner, you just need a 2%-5% tweak to take your business and life to the next level. Let us help you find that tweak.”
That statement isn’t a tagline, it’s not something we’re putting on all our graphics. But it is what we are trying to communicate with all our marketing and publications. It’s what we’re aiming to do with videos that break down difficult and overwhelming concepts in an easy way, and by bringing experts to our events that do the same thing.