My dear owners of small and medium businesses, I know this is the alarming question you might ask yourself when you see the title of today’s post. And I would say almost the same thing; with contracts, insurance documents and banks statements, I have more than enough.
Well, let me tell you my dear readers that a marketing plan is very necessary, basically it is our roadmap, our guide, our compass in the marketing of a business. So, to explain a little of what the idea is about I am going to use an example that will be transversal and that will probably accompany us in this series of posts.
I personally love party planning businesses. So, my goal someday (and I’m telling you this as a secret) is to launch a party planning business, specialized in inflatables. Let’s take a first look today at some of the components that will need to be present in that plan.
An important and primary part of our plan would be to define the Mission, Vision and objectives. Our mission could be “To attract a public interested in theme parties” (specifically in inflatables). However, this map needs some more things, for example: our buyer persona that in this case, could be initially the parents of children and teenagers between (0-16 years). Following our route, we come to two key questions: what messages do we want to convey, and how (channels)? This my dear business owner is a key part of this plan. It is clear that in this section we must deploy all our creativity and intelligence. Considering today’s example, we could think of transmitting simple, short, fun and fundamentally, visual messages. It comes to mind that we could mainly use videos and photographs with a lot of color and that awaken emotions such as joy.
Two other essential components that we must incorporate into our plan are the budget (the big headache of business) and Key Performance indicators (KPIs). Designing a viable, real budget adjusted to our objectives is an essential part of any marketing plan. KPIs are very important since we need to know how well we are doing in our business. We need to know if our profiles on networks receive the expected views and that the traffic generated is adequate or we need to correct some things.
For our inflatable party business, we must also evaluate the competition, we must know if we are the only ones offering that service in our environment, what impact and reach the competition has, how their metrics behave in networks, what communication elements work best for them, everything that helps us build a better profile of them and helps us better understand our strengths and weaknesses.
My dear small and medium business owners, it’s time to wrap up today’s post now that you know some of the most important components of a marketing plan and my deepest personal secret (just remember not to tell anyone). I know we don’t want more paperwork in our business, but remember that some is necessary. Our next meeting will be next week and the invitation is out.