Marketing Planning for your small business with Henry Lopez and David Begin, Henry and David discuss the basics Marketing Planning for small business owners.

We recently released a Marketing Planning Overview episode:

Episode 368: Marketing Plan Overview

How to plan your Small Business Marketing & Advertisement:

• As small business owners we typically have small and tight budgets for marketing and advertisement. You may have so many ideas as to how to raise brand awareness and get the company’s name out there.
• We believe you need to have some type of marketing plan for your business. This plan will be driven by your target market.
• The first step is to clearly define your target market, your avatar. If you are trying to be everything to everybody, then your marketing challenge will be significantly greater!
• Methods of defining your target market include studying competitors, conducting surveys, and working with industry consultants.
• Having a target audience then allows you to plan proactively for your targeted spending for marketing, and getting the most for your money.
• What type of customer would you like more of?
• The high-level outline of a basic marketing plan includes a definition of your target market, your value proposition or vision/mission for your business, where you will reach your target audience (Where are they listening? How are they influenced? Who’s opinion do they trust?), what are the messages and tone of the brand (consistency and congruence is critical on this point), what are the methods to be used (i.e. print, online, radio, television), and what is the budget (ideally broken down by month or quarter).
• Advertising everywhere is simply not possible for a small business. Without a plan, it will be much harder to turn down all of the different offers to advertise that come our way every day!
• It’s important to understand the difference between Brand Marketing, and Call-to-Action or Direct Response marketing.
• Have you identified your ideal customer for your small business?

Resources:

Related Episodes:

Marketing Episodes