Pulling it all together

If you have worked through all the exercises in this course, you will now have all the parts of your marketing plan as well as a plan of action to make it happen.  Let’s pull all of it together. 

Your marketing plan should now include:

1. Your company message and elevator pitch from chapter 15.
2. Your definition of how your company is remarkable from chapter 03.
3. Your map of how your product connects with the marketplace from chapter 02.
4. Your customer profile sheets from chapter 04.
5. Your value propositions from chapter 05.
6. Your marketing funnel from chapter 21.
7. Your marketing mix from chapter 22.
8. Your tasks and timeline from chapter 23.

   You may also have a number of extra pages depending on what extra activities you are going to do, which may include:

9. Your website plan from chapter 08.
10. Your content calendar from chapter 11.
11. Your email marketing calendar from chapter 10.
12. Your event strategy from chapter 15.
13. Your personal brand strategy from chapter 17.

Most by now will probably have somewhere around a 10-page marketing plan.  Print it out.  Pin it to the wall.  Give it to your team.  Make this a working document.  If you started out knowing nothing about marketing then you should stop and reflect on what you’ve just done, how much you have learnt.  You’ve created a fully-researched and thought-out marketing plan for your business and that’s a really big thing.  All you need to do now is do it. 

I could now just say “over to you!” and wrap things up here, but I know that the ‘all you need to do now is do it’ bit where many people fail.  You can fall in love with planning.  It becomes something that you do more of to put off actually having to do the work.  There’s also a peculiar matter of guilt we should talk about.  If you run a busy small business then you can feel guilty about taking time away from the day-to-day of running it.  Taking a day out to research your customers is a day when you should be working in the shop or finishing that job for a customer.  BUT YOU NEED TO GIVE YOURSELF PERMISSION TO WORK ON YOUR BUSINESS INSTEAD OF IN IT.  Recognise that time put aside for working on key things will be the difference between finding remarkable success and your business just bumping along.  Don’t see this as taking time away from work, this IS work.  It may be the most important thing that you do in your business.