As a small business owner, marketing might not be your passion, but you must know the importance of a strong marketing plan for Smaller Businesses. Instead, your passion lies in your business’s core operation. However, all businesses, including small businesses, need some marketing to reach out to the target audience and create awareness about the brand.
However, your marketing efforts need to be well-thought and carefully planned to optimize the use of the marketing budget and avoid any losses in business. How can you ensure this? By creating a strong marketing plan. Here, we look at all the reasons that make it critical for all smaller businesses to have a strong marketing plan.
Why a Strong Marketing Plan Is Essential for Your Business?
No business can achieve its individual or organizational goals without a strong marketing plan. This is because the marketing plan provides an overview of the market and states everything that needs to be done to achieve the business goals.
A marketing plan acts like a map that helps you to reach your destination. A strong marketing plan, one that is backed with research and facts, allows you to see how you can persuade your target audience or potential customers to buy from you. Another benefit of having a strong marketing plan is building confidence with lenders and showing them that you have a good chance of success in the future.
With a marketing plan, you can keep track of your marketing objectives and understand how the different marketing activities will help your business to achieve its broader goals and objectives. Additionally, you can determine how your business can effectively use the marketing mix—product, price, promotion, and place—to accomplish the marketing objectives within the competitive market environment.
Furthermore, you can appropriately allocate company resources on marketing activities to reach your target audience and drive them to your desired action. Following are 4 reasons that make it critical for your small business to have a strong marketing plan.
1. Get into a Thinking Mode
When you start to create a marketing plan, your thinking mode is automatically activated. This gets you thinking about your customers, your products, your business, and how you can bring all of these things together. It is important to explicitly think about these things. Not only do you need to think about these things, but you also need to discuss them with a team that will execute the plan. All this begins with the creation of a marketing plan.
2. Set Measurable Goals
Another important benefit of having a marketing plan is that it allows you to set measurable goals. Many times, small businesses set goals that are impossible to measure; examples are ‘avoid loss’ and ‘sell more than the previous year’. These aren’t good metrics for gauging business success, and they cannot be measured.
A marketing plan will allow setting measurable goals for your business that your employees can work towards and ultimately achieve. By setting measurable goals with tangible targets, you will help improve employee performance and productivity which will ultimately benefit your bottom line.
3. Align Marketing with Company Goals
As a business owner or leader, it is your responsibility to build a framework for employees that aligns and focuses their work. This framework should include your business’s mission, strategy, and objectives. Including the mission of the company in the framework is important because it explains the purpose of your business and why it exists.
As the leader of the pack, you not only need to set the corporate goals but also need to define the high-level strategies that need to be supported with marketing activities. Once they know the corporate goals and the marketing activities needed to support them, the marketers in your company can develop marketing objectives to support the broader company goals; the marketing objectives are a set of measurable goals that are tied to different marketing activity. Additionally, they are aligned with the corporate mission and goals of the business to take them forward.
Let suppose, the mission of a pharmaceutical company is to create and deliver modern health solutions that let patients recover from severe illnesses. The business strategy of the company is geared towards manufacturing and distributing medical solutions. However, the company also focuses on medical research and finding new treatments. The marketing plan of the company is based on both its mission and the strategy it employs.
Therefore, the marketing strategy and objectives of the company are designed to reinforce to the customer the company’s commitment to innovation and breakthrough solutions in medical treatments.
4. Organize Your Time and Priorities
The reality is that we have so much to do in a day but only a limited number of hours to get things done. This applies to the marketing function as well. Under such circumstances, the best thing that you can do is prioritize your time and work. To do that, you need a plan that ranks all work and/or goals in terms of importance.
With a marketing plan, you will know which marketing goals are most important for your business and need to be achieved first. This way you can allocate most of your time in a day on marketing goals that rank at the top of the priority list. Once you have achieved these goals, you can move down and work on the goals ranked lower on the priority list. This shows that a marketing plan can help you to organize your time and priorities which ultimately benefits your business.
As seen above, there are many reasons for creating a strong marketing plan for your small business. For more articles on the importance of a strong marketing plan and how to create one, keep following us.
by Bobby J Davidson
I love our companies and we love what we do. For more information on the Davidson Family of Companies, visit www.bobbydavidson.com/about. Sign up for my Newsletter at the bottom of this page.