How to Plan your Marketing Strategy

 

Based on my research, most small businesses have no marketing strategy, and quite a few of them don’t even do marketing. Some businesses purely rely on referrals and whatever comes their way. Referrals are great but there’s no predictability.

If you plan your finance, your accounting, you should also plan your marketing strategy because marketing is how you can build a pipeline of prospects whether you run online marketing or offline marketing activities.

There are so many marketing options out there, particularly with digital marketing. From paid ads- Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, or social media, or SEO or referral programs, reward programs or influencer marketing.  

 

In this video, I’m going to share 4 tips on how you can plan your marketing strategy for success.

 

  1. Have a clear aim

This is to identify what you’re going to achieve by exercising your marketing campaigns whether you’re looking to get more new clients,  get more revenue out of existing clients or increase brand awareness.

And allocate a budget, track the performance and set up a time frame, for example, 90 days for $5,000 or more so that you know what to expect by knowing your directions.

My advice here is don’t waste time on things that don’t give you results or try to figure things out by yourself if you are not good at. Delegate it out to your team members or experts outside of your business.

  1. Go after your fish

Go after your ideal clients. The type of clients you’d like to attract and work with.

For example, if you are an accountant, you might offer different types of services in your business. The best thing to start with in your marketing activities is to identify one service you wish to market and go after your audience. Give your prospects value first before asking for a sale such as giving them a quick e-guide, a mini video training or a free webinar to start the relationship first.

This is the easiest way to convert opportunities into clients.

If you’re unsure of where your sweet spots are, or the type of clients you want to deal with, the quickest way to identify them would be to:

One- look at your top clients, what do they have in common?

Two- do a bit of marketing research on your competitors, and check out their social media or use Google.

  1. Start with ONE Strategy

There’re so many options you can do when it comes to your marketing campaigns.

My advice here is to start with ONE strategy.

First, find out what platform you want to use.

Second, identify your go-to-market strategy, how you can get your prospects interested in what you do.

Third, allocate a sufficient budget and follow your timeline so that you know if you’re on track with your marketing performance or not.

If you don’t have enough resources at this stage, try not to do too many things all at once, say jumping from one platform to another because it’s going to dilute your efforts and results. Worst of all, you probably don’t know what works. It could just be a waste of money in the end.

And this leads us to the last step.

  1. Execute & Test

Once you’ve got a plan mapped out, put it out to the market. Often, the first run might not work well. It’s okay. This is where you can start to brainstorm your tactics and test different ways to improve your results.

Marketing is hardly ever – “You do it once, it’s going to succeed”. Often, it requires patience and testing.

So, here you have it. If you’d like to grab the one-page marketing plan worksheet, click on the link or button on the page or post.

I hope you find this video beneficial. Feel free to share or leave your comments.

See you next time.

 

Check out the worksheet here.