Why you need a plan
This can be where you get stuck: you’ve got lots of great ideas but which do you do first? You simply can’t do them all unless you let someone else run your company and you are going to become your full-time marketing manager. So you need to put a plan in place. You are going to have to prioritise activities in order of those which are likely to get you the best results and, if I’m being honest, which are going to be the most fun!
And having a plan isn’t just going to be really valuable for you alone; if you have a team around you then it’s going to be crucial for them too. You might have people helping you who have bags of enthusiasm, and a marketing plan will give them the direction to know what to do with it all.
But writing a marketing plan? That’s going to be hard to do isn’t it? Don’t you need to spend hours with spreadsheets working out return on investments and filling out complicated strategies? Well, I would say that if you’ve trusted me this far, and if you’ve got value from what you’ve learnt, then stick with me. The truth is that you don’t need to have a marketing degree to create a plan. In fact, I would say that it’s actually better that you don’t. When I studied marketing at university many years ago we learnt by studying the marketing plans of huge global companies. They have to carry out lengthy market analysis exercises, they have to project returns on investment and plan in focus group testing before anything ever gets rolled out. All that this is, really, is to make sure that the marketing department avoids all possible blame if the $2 million they are about to spend on a new campaign fails to increase sales. Setting out a plan for your much smaller vegan business as if you are Chief Marketing Officer at Unilever will get you nowhere! It’s why in this course we’ve also avoided some of the more odious exercises that you might find in tutorials for how to create a marketing plan, or at least translate them into tasks that better suits small- to medium-sized business owners like us. The energy they will take is not worth the marginal benefits they will give you as a small business owner, and that energy is better spent elsewhere.
And we’re going to carry on with this approach in putting together your plan of action. I am a huge fan of doing your research, but if you spend longer creating your marketing plan than actually carrying it out then you’re doing it wrong. At most, your marketing plan should be no more than a few pages long and it should be visual wherever possible. In the same way that you should be able to explain what is great about your business and your mission in 30 seconds, you should be able to do the same with your marketing plan. I’ve found the best success with companies who have had a one-page marketing plan stuck to the wall so everyone could follow it. And yes, I’ve also worked with companies whose marketing plans were like novels that I suspect no-one but the marketing director had ever read in full. There’s no point in having some great ideas and actions if they are buried away in a 50-page document that just gathers dust.
I also want to use your enthusiasm and momentum which should be at boiling point by now. Now is the time to get going. Now is the time to get creative. And if you have some fat marker pens and a massive piece of blank paper to hand, even better!
I’ll first outline what we’re going to do over the next section and then we’ll fill in each part as we go. We’re going to:
- Plan out your marketing funnel – how to move people along their customer journey
- Pick your marketing mix – what marketing channels you are going to use
- Put together a timeline of what tasks you need to do – and when you need to do them by
