How To Write A Marketing Plan

Crafting a marketing plan will help you understand how to get the word out about your offerings. Not only that - as you develop the marketing plan, you’ll also come up with new products and services to provide for your audience. It doesn’t matter if your business is big or small; a marketing plan will help you achieve the results you desire. Your marketing plan can be one page or longer.

Here is a checklist of what you need to do.

* Create a Mission Statement – It can be as simple as describing what you do, for whom, why you do it, and how you do it. It’s just one to three sentences. The best way to create a good mission statement is to look at other mission statements and try to fill in the blanks with your own thoughts for your audience.

* Describe Your Target Audience – You should be able to describe your target audience easily. If you do the research and get to know your audience, you should be able to pick out and describe one of them very intimately.

* Describe Your Niche – The niche you’re involved in is smaller than the entire industry and only of interest to your target audience. For example, you could be a virtual assistant. That is your industry. You like serving business coaches (coaching is your audience’s industry). They are your audience. You like helping them run webinars and anything to do with webinars. That is your niche.

* Describe Your Industry – It’s important to understand everything you can about your industry. It will help you keep up to date on changes and new innovations. Remember that your industry and your audience’s industry are different, so you’ll need to also describe and understand their industry.

* Describe Your Services – Create a two or three sentence description for each of the products or services you offer your audience. You want to be specific when you describe the services. That way you can use that information in other content that you’ll be creating.

* Describe Your Marketing and Promotion Strategies - Choose how you’re going to market and promote the services and products that you’re offering to your audience. Be specific about everything, such as content creation, promoting content, and so forth. The more specific you can be here, the better.

* Describe Your Competition – You must always know what your competition is doing; therefore, you should also describe them and explain how you’re different from them. The differentiation part is essential, because that is how you’re going to stand apart from them.

* Establish Measurable Marketing Goals – When you make goals for your marketing efforts, they need to be in the form of a measurable goal. If you don’t know whether you met them or not, how can you know if you’re succeeding?

* Monitor Everything – Once you put your plan in motion, keep track of it. Note what works and what doesn’t work. That way you can revise your marketing plan as needed, perfecting it over time.

If you want to be successful in your business writing a marketing plan is a necessity. It will guide everything you do to make your business known, including your product and service creation.

If you would like assistance with this or any other aspect of business, please ask for a free consultation.