Want to create your small business marketing plan for 2023?
In this article, we walk you through the three simple steps to get you off to a great start.
STEP 1: Review Your Previous Year
Before you go headlong into your small business marketing plan for 2023, start by reviewing the previous year. You don’t want to throw away all the good that you did, when it can be re-used. And equally, you don’t want to do again what didn’t work the previous year.
Start your marketing planning by:
- Working out if you met your 2022 goals or not – and why
- Looking at the marketing you did, and what contributed to your success
- Assess what didn’t work
Once you’ve done that, you can now look at what you will, stop, what you will continue with, and what you will continue with but improve.
Grab a pen and paper, and spend some time doing this now.
STEP 2: Set Your Small Business Marketing Plan Goals for 2023
This is paramount when building your small business marketing plan for the coming year.
Marketing is responsible for bringing your business goals to life, and delivering results. So unless you have them pinned down, you will not know what marketing needs to deliver, and therefore what marketing activity you need to carry out.
Your small business marketing plan should focus on goals that will fall into 3 different categories:
- What you want to have
- What you want to achieve
- What you want to develop
Let’s look at some examples
“What you want to have” goals
These are generally material goals, and will be things like building a new website, recruiting new staff and even putting a new CRM/IT solution in place.
Example: To build a new website in 2023, launching in April, that has the capability of generating 25 leads per month.
“What you want to achieve” goals
This is predominantly where Marketing sits, and are activity-based goals. They may include the number of leads you want, the number of sales, the amount of revenue you want to generate. These are at the heart of your small business marketing plan.
Example: To generate an additional 36 customers over 12 month period that collectively generate an additional £90,000.
“What you want to develop” goals
These developmental goals may cover the need to increase your sales skills, your marketing skills, your financial awareness skills. It may include developing your customer experience, or even developing a new product or service.
Example: To develop the customer experience, to increase survey results to an average of 8/10 for satisfaction scores.
So that’s your next step. Set your goals for your small business marketing plan, and make sure they are quantifiable, i.e.:
- How much revenue and when by?
- How many leads and sales?
- What date will you recruit by?
- When will you do your marketing training?
- When will you launch your new service?
STEP 3: Choosing your Small Business Plan Marketing Activity
It’s important that you create a balance with your small business marketing plan, of short-, medium- and long-term marketing activities.
This article will give you a great overview of this.
But in a nutshell, here’s an idea of what is covered under each:
Short Term Marketing
- Offers
- Online Ads
- Sales Calls
Medium Term Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Social Media
- Database Building (for email marketing)
Long Term Marketing
- Search Engine Optimisation
- Product Development
- Branding
That’s just a few examples – but if you solely rely on short term marketing, you will be in a place of desperation – spending too much time in the wrong area, always making bad decisions on pricing, and in a stressful cycle of needing to urgently make sales.
That is not a great place to be, and even more of a reason to create a solid small business marketing plan for this year.
The key is to think about balancing the activity, so you have always got a little of the short-, medium- and long-term activity going on – for the quick wins and immediate sales, but also nurturing clients of the future (they will soon become your sales).
Your next step is to refer back to your small business marketing plan goals, and create a plan of what marketing activity you need to do to make it happen.
NOT SURE WHAT YOU SHOULD BE FOCUSED ON FOR YOUR SMALL BUSINESS MARKETING PLAN?
Book in a one-to-one chat with us today, and we will point you in the right direction, based on your business goals.
We always have a freebie to offer, or a short course that might suit you. Just ask!
Email [email protected] and request a Marketing Success Call.
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