Writing a Marketing Plan for Your Small Business

Writing a small business marketing plan helps you identify your market differentiation and shows you how to get a leg up on the competition. Without active marketing plans, businesses may struggle to compete, especially when there's high demand for the goods or services being offered.

Before You Start Writing
It's essential that you're able to identify your target market. Many small businesses think they know who their market is, but stand to lose anything by doing a little market research before you start strategizing. In fact, your business will only benefit from the knowledge you gather, whether it's verifying your existing hunches or finding new customers you didn't know you could have. This is the audience for whom you'll be tailoring your message.

Don't forget to do a little research on the competition either. What message are they sending and how effective is it? If you own a restaurant for example, you'll want to look at your competitors' menus for comparable offerings and the price points they're selling at, whether they offer special promotions early in the week, and how many seats are filled at various times of day. This information helps you determine how to distinguish your restaurant from theirs in any number of ways-from which wines make your list to what time you close.

Your Mission Statement
Begin your marketing plan by drafting a mission statement that concisely describes the nature of your business, the goods or services you deliver, and how you intend to serve your customers. Keep it short and to the point-three or four sentence should suffice. The purpose of your mission statement is to keep you, your partners and your employees focused on the values and goals of your business.

Market Analysis
If you've gone through the exercise of identifying your target market or identified new markets to break into, consider doing further market research-customer surveys or focus groups, for example-and using the findings to further define who your customers are. Depending upon the size and nature of your business, you may want to group those customers by relevant demographic points like age, gender or income.

Then, see if you can break the larger demographic groupings in smaller, niche groups. For example, if you own a plumbing, heating and cooling business, you might find that your customers are mostly homeowners in their 30s and 40s. A closer look at that data might also tell you that the majority of the homes you serviced last year were in housing developments built around the same time, in the same 10-mile radius. Bingo: you've just identified other homes in these neighborhoods as niche market.

Product and Service Offerings
Take some time to look at the products and services you offer and how well they fit your customer profile. If they're not aligning logically with what you believe your niche market is, you'll want to reevaluate one of two things: what you're selling or who you're trying to sell it to. In some cases, you'll identify new products or services to offer in addition to your core line of business; in others you may find it's more cost-effective, not to mention more profitable to scale back your offerings.

Focus on what you do best and what aligns most closely with your mission statement. File the rest of the information you've gathered for future use when you review your business plan.

Set a Budget and Choose a Medium
Effective marketing doesn't have to be expensive, but it does have to be creative and some of the best relationship-building marketing tools don't cost a cent. Take a look at your books and determine how much money you can devote to marketing on a quarterly or yearly basis. If it's relevant to your business, you may want to divide those funds across various product or service lines or different customer demographics.

There are a variety of marketing methods to choose from, but not all methods are effective for all audiences. Starting a blog for your business may seem like a great idea, but if you live an area where internet access isn't widely available yet, you're better off sticking with traditional print marketing to bring in the locals.

Talk with other business owners in your community and keep your eyes and ears open to see what your competitors are doing. If you're still not getting anywhere, consider working with a small business consultant.

Some marketing methods to consider include direct mail and e-mail marketing, print advertising, coupon inserts, newsletters (print and electronic), customer loyalty programs, writing for local newspapers, and participating in trade show and charity events. The more people who know you, the more people will think of you when they want what you've got.

Defining and Measuring Goals
If don't create a way to measure the results, you'll never know which marketing strategies worked best or not at all. You-and your accountant-are going to want to know if that four-color brochure that offers $10 off was worth the cost to produce.

Take time to define the return you want to get from your marketing investment and tailor those measurements to the marketing campaign. If you're relying on print ads, you can offer a discount to customers who present the ad in person. Always ask new customers how they heard you about, and tally the answers. If you're collecting e-mail addresses for an electronic newsletter, include links back to your Web site and watch your site traffic. Use historical sales as a baseline to gauge any increase in sales you can attribute to recent press.

Review and Revise Regularly
Once you start experimenting with various forms of marketing, you'll start to get a sense of what generally does and doesn't work for your business. Review the data you've collected on a regular basis and revise your marketing plan as necessary. Like your business plan (cross link), you should view your marketing plan as work in progress that changes and adapts to the market along with your business. To get idea of how to structure your marketing plan, take a look at this article.