Want a simple way to come up with your business’s marketing plan? Use these five basic questions to generate a formula that can be used to create the bones of your marketing plan.
WHY?
Why are you doing this? Why is your business important to you? This is your mission for the business, if you can distil this into a sentence or two, this becomes your mission statement.
WHAT?
This is your objective. What exactly is it that you want to achieve for your business and by implementing this marketing plan?
WHEN?
When do you want you to achieve your goals? Do you want to have an income of $200 000 by the end of the year? Set a realistic timeframe.
HOW?
Now this is where the strategy comes into play!
How are you going to achieve your WHAT through marketing? This is question will need more time dedicated to it than the first four as it is going to be a complete breakdown of the exact steps you need to take to achieve your goal and good marketing plan is looking at least twelve months ahead. What techniques, activities and avenues are you going to use to achieve your objectives or your WHAT?
A great way of doing this is creating it backwards from your end goal, retracing your steps until you arrive at where you currently are.
Don’t forget that disgusting “B” word… budget. Boring but vital.
WHO?
Look at the WHO of your marketing plan and it may not just be you, as you first suspect. You might need and want to bring in extra resources and freelancers – there a lot of people out there that have the skills and knowledge that you just don’t have (you can’t know it all!) Don’t hesitate to hire an expert.
Bonus challenge:
Whack on the WHERE question. Where are you going to implement your marketing plan? Is it just your home city? Or are you going to plan some goals that focus on broadening your business’s reach to interstate or overseas or very importantly, the internet?
Thanks for your post! Simple yet powerful tips for a newbie like me! 🙂