Customize a Marketing Plan to Fit Your Small Business’s Needs
Introduction
The digital marketing landscape is changing rapidly. It is important to continue evolving and updating your marketing plan to keep up with the times!
The point of a marketing plan is to help you execute your marketing strategies, allocate your budget effectively, and monitor your results. With that being said, let’s jump into the first stage of a marketing plan.
Research
Developing an effective marketing plan starts with researching and understanding your current business model.
This includes your mission statement, target audience, geographic reach, budget breakdown, competition, and a detailed SWOT analysis.
I recommend revisiting and updating your business model at least annually, as changes are inevitable and a sign of growth!
A SWOT, or strength, weakness, opportunity, and threat analysis can provide key insights into your business and its environment. Check out this article on conducting a SWOT Analysis, if you want to learn more. It also establishes a basis for your business that gives everyone the same general understanding.
Also, research your competition and what marketing avenues they are pursuing. If something is working for your competitors, it might be worth considering whether that marketing strategy would be beneficial for you as well.
To improve your marketing strategy in 2025, it is also necessary to assess your current marketing plan and determine what is working and what needs improvement. Use this knowledge to help determine what to pursue and what to leave behind.
Draft
When drafting a marketing plan, begin by outlining your business goals. Use the SMART rule when writing your objectives. SMART stands for:
Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Time-bound
Using this rule when writing your goals makes them clear and actionable, which will help guide the decisions you make in your marketing plan.
An example goal would be, “Increase CTR on our email campaigns from X% to X% by December 2025”.
Now that you have a list of your specific marketing objectives, you can begin drafting your specific action plan to achieve your goals.
Start by dividing your strategies into inbound and outbound marketing techniques.
Inbound marketing aims to have your target clients find your business through organic discovery methods. Some of these strategies include email marketing, blog post writing, social media marketing, SEO, and influencer marketing.
Outbound marketing strategies on the other hand attempt to actively seek out and target potential customers. A few of these methods include billboard advertising, display ads, cold calling, TV ads, and radio ads.
Once you have outlined your goals, and established a list of marketing strategies to achieve those goals the hard part is over! All there is left to do is implement, observe, and analyze your results!
Analyze
Set up a tracking structure to monitor the results of your marketing campaigns and analyze for efficacy.
Use KPIs, or key performance indicators, to determine whether you are on track to meeting your goals. By continuously reflecting and refining your marketing plan based on insights, metrics, and feedback, you can successfully meet your goals and your business will excel!
If you want to develop a unique marketing plan for your business with experts in the field, give Vortex Digital a call at 319.621.0191 for a free, no-obligation consultation today!
