Creating your marketing plan

Creating a marketing plan is vital for small businesses because they need to market their business in order to be successful. Creating a marketing plan will allow you as a small business owner to choose the marketing activities that work best for your small business, but also ones that fit your budget.

Here are the steps on how to create a marketing plan.

Step one:
You are going to need to clearly define your company's goals. You want to have concrete goals because having goals that are attainable is the biggest part of creating your marketing plan. The reason for this is that the goals are going to tell you exactly what you are trying to accomplish for your small business. This is important because if you do not know what it is you want to accomplish then you are not going to know what steps you are going to need to take to reach that goal. Defining your company's goals helps to steer the development of all marketing activities, including but not limited to press related activities, advertising campaigns, and promotions. An example of a marketing goal would be to increase the company's market share by 2% during a twelve month period.

Step two:
You will also need to make sure that you conduct some basic market research. Market research can be done by using the internet, library, focus groups, surveys, research from an established market research company, or some other method. When you are conducting market research you will want to gather information about the target market, such as the existing size and anticipated growth rate, demand of the product or service, etc. You will also need to make sure that you gather information about your potential customers and include a thorough analysis of your competition. The research that you are doing should also include the history of the market and the various trends that are within the market. If your company is launching a new product you might not be able to obtain any historical data, but you can see what historical data is available from similar industries.

Step three:
Now you are going to need to choose your marketing activities. This is the last thing that you will need to do when creating a marketing plan because before you can choose the activities that are going to work the best for your marketing campaign you will need to know what goals you are trying to reach, but you will also need to understand the market so that you know which activities will work the best to accomplish your goals. When choosing your marketing activities you are going to need to consult your marketing budget so that you know about how much money you have to spend on your marketing campaign because price can play a big factor in determining what activities you are going to use. The more traditional types of marketing activities are television, radio, newspaper, and magazine advertisements, while your less conventional activities include online banner bars and buttons, newsletters, press releases, and trade show exhibits. The most important thing you will have to consider when choosing your activities is to make sure that the ads you create reflect the specific marketing goals and objectives.

Something that you will want to keep in mind is that you might want to include a way to measure the effectiveness of the marketing activities that you have chosen. This is an important step that most companies will do, but it is not a part of creating the marketing plan. Companies will be able to determine which marketing campaigns are working and which ones are not. This will enable you to make any changes that are necessary to the activities that you have chosen that are not working as desired, you can either eliminate the activity or you can make some changes to see if it will work better. Evaluating your marketing plan after it has been in place for a period of time will also help you to evaluate the features and benefits of your marketing plan.