What is a marketing plan and why your small business needs one
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A marketing plan helps you plan for the future – it’s a roadmap that can help you get from where you are to where you want to be. As your business matures, a little structure can help you guide it through the next phase clearly.
A successful, growing business is a business owners’ dream, but as your business grows the path forward may not be as clear as it once was. This is where having a marketing plan based on the broad marketing ecosystem can help take you forward.
As the business owner, pat yourself on the back. This is an exciting time for you and your team, and it’s about to get even more exciting. So, buckle up!
What is a marketing plan?
Often even successful business owners may understand marketing activities but are not confident to determine which are the best tactics to implement, when to engage them, how much to invest and why.
Developed in collaboration with a multidisciplined marketing agency, a marketing plan is a detailed roadmap of strategic, creative and integrated marketing solutions to grow your business. By outlining the marketing strategy that will take your business forward, a marketing plan uncovers insights that help you to better understand:
- who your customers are;
- what problems your product or service is really solving for them; and
- why they choose you over your competitors.
What’s in a marketing plan?
So, what important details will a marketing plan give you and how will it help you chart the best way forward? Here are a few of the most important takeaways that a marketing plan developed by a multi-disciplined marketing agency can arm you with.
SWOT analysis
By unearthing and defining the S trengths, W eaknesses, O pportunities and T hreats that will help or hinder your business on its path forward, your marketing plan will pinpoint the best way forward for your business.
Target market
Your marketing plan clearly defines the audience that most wants and will most benefit from using your product or service and can include details like age group, gender, where they live, hobbies and personal interests.
Unique value proposition (UVP)
Your unique value proposition defines the promise of value that you deliver to your audience. By defining your UVP, your marketing plan defines what it is that you do that no-one else can.
Creating your marketing plan
To uncover the insights needed to create a marketing plan, we’ve found that the best first step is a marketing workshop. This is where your leadership team gets in a room with a multidisciplined marketing team and together discuss and define essentials like:
- who you really are;
- what you really do;
- how you do it differently to your competitors;
- your market;
- your business objectives;
- the internal/external stakeholders;
- your audience and the customer journey; and
- your product.
Marketing workshops are designed to challenge you, and in doing so the process unearths a roadmap of strategic, creative and integrated marketing solutions to grow your business. It’s about working together to decide the best way to get you from where you are to where you could be.
Rolling out your marketing plan
Now comes the truly fun part – rolling out the strategic activities in your shiny new marketing plan and watching them drive your business forward. But you don’t need to do this yourself.
Continuing the collaboration, your full service marketing agency can develop, deliver, publish, and optimise the strategic activities in your marketing plan. Partnering with an experienced, multi-disciplined marketing agency will ensure consistent quality and enable all activities, from creative services to website development to digital marketing , to be delivered by one team.
With a multitude of marketing disciplines under one roof, Icon provides an aligned plan to grow your business, with checks and measures in place to make sure we continue to stay on the right path. Let’s work together to understand your journey and build a pathway to get you there. Call us on 1300 138 984 to get started.
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