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Home Business Management

How To Write A Marketing Plan For Your Small Business

by Larysa Chaplin
June 17, 2021
in Business Management
Reading Time: 5 mins read
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How To Write A Marketing Plan For Your Small Business
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The foundation of a solid marketing plan is a solid marketing strategy. Your marketing strategy should come from the research, questions you ask yourself and your audience, and brainstorming completed during the process of creating your marketing plan. For a small business creating a marketing plan might be quite challenging due to the lack of resources. Thus here are the components of a marketing plan and a step by step flow on how to create an ideal marketing plan for your business.

Components of a Marketing Plan:

  • Brands positioning and the rationale for picking that positioning
  • Target customer(s) and the rationale for picking that target or targets
  • Competitive analysis
  • Product portfolio analysis
  • Product plan
  • Pricing plan
  • Distribution plan
  • Promotional plan
  • Budget outlining how much you will spend against each activity
  • Focus chart (showing what portion of your focus or how many hours will go towards each activity)

Steps to follow:

1. Determine What Your Are Going To Sell And To Who (Your Target Market)

  • Get a clear understanding of what you want to sell and what problem your product or service will solve for your customers.
  • If your product or service does not solve a problem, you will have a hard time selling it.

2. Determine Your Positioning 

  • Determine your points of difference (what do you do hands-down better than the competition?).
  • List what your competitors do better than you.
  • List what you are you do a relatively similar job at when compared to your competitors (this is called your points of parity).
  • Summarize the essence of your product and brand, emphasizing your unique points of difference in a short sentence.

3. Create Your Product Plan

  • Analyse your competitor’s products and services to see what is working and what is not.
  • Survey your customers and prospects to understand better what they are looking for and what they value.
  • Create your product offering based on what customers want and are willing to pay for, not what you want to provide.

4. Create Your Pricing Plan

  • Review the pricing strategies of your competitors to see what is working and what is not.
  • Set your price based on value, not your cost.
  • Analyse your price elasticity.

5. Create Your Distribution Plan

  • Review the distribution strategies of your competitors and determine what is working and what is not.
  • Survey customers and prospects to understand where and how they want to buy. If you can’t survey, brainstorm how you think they would answer.
  • Brainstorm ways to increase the distribution of your product/service.

6. Create Your Promotional Plan

  • Determine the message you want to communicate from your positioning statement.
  • Review the promotion strategies of your competitors and determine what is working and what is not.
  • Review what promotional strategies have worked for you in the past.
  • Select the promotional strategies that will be able to convey your message to your target market best.
  • Create a plan to maximize your referrals.

7. Create Your Marketing Budget

  • Determine the amount you can afford to invest in marketing (the more, the better).
  • List the cost, impressions, estimated conversion rate, the time required and ROI for each marketing method.
  • Select the marketing methods that have a high return on investment and low time requirement.

Your Workflow:

  1. Create A Format To Follow
  2. Select The Necessary Questions You Need To Ask Yourself
  3. Conduct Research
  4. Answer the Questions
  5. Conduct Brainstorming
  6. Finalize The Plan
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Larysa Chaplin

Larysa Chaplin is an Award-winning executive with over 12 years of experience in marketing and business management. Founder of Expert Circle a thought leadership platform that reached over 300k views in just six months from the day it was launched in January 2021. Now Expert Circle expanded its offer to business growth consultancy and services. Larysa specialises in business growth, digital marketing growth and helps her clients get in front of people and win business, build business and professional profiles to increase credibility and position oneself as a thought leader. With Executive MBA, the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) and a PhD under her belt, she managed to build a 20k network of professionals in the UK and worldwide. She has a proven track record of scaling a start-up business from a valuation of £200k to over £4m and readied for VC investment; delivering content marketing strategy which results in businesses being featured in Forbes, Reuters, Bloomberg, FT, Daily Mail, CITY A.M., The Law Society Gazette, CNBC, The Banker, Global Recruiter.

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