Custom Online Marketing Plan

Besides having a great product or service, continually acquiring the right customers while also keeping them happy will be crucial for long-term business growth. And this is where a marketing plan comes into play.

When you have a plan, you become focused on your business goals. You get a sense of where you’re headed and what should be done to get there. Surprisingly, business owners approach this aspect of their business casually.

You shouldn’t make the mistake of diving right into marketing without a plan, hoping to figure it out moving forward.

Think of it this way. Say, you’re with enough cash to get started on building your dream home. Wouldn’t it be quite ridiculous to take on such a huge project without a proper plan in place? Can you begin to imagine a dozen things that could go wrong in the absence of a plan?

Setting off without a marketing plan is also like driving whilst blindfolded. If you can’t see where you’re headed, you’ll veer off down the wrong path and land in a ditch that will be difficult to get out of.

The ability to be flexible in business is considered a strength. However, when you begin marketing, there would likely be some new concept or idea that seems exciting and worth pursuing. Without a marketing plan to give a sense of direction, you’ll be chasing shadows. And more often than not, you’ll end up far, far away from your target.

Armed with a plan, you’re better positioned to make choices and take actions that align with your overall business objectives.

If you are overwhelmed by the vast Internet marketing world, you’re not alone. Online marketing is a full time job in itself so why take on a job when while you try to run your business? Consider hiring a marketing consultant to design a custom marketing plan for you.

As business owners, there will be potential limitations on available resources. You probably wouldn’t have all the time nor the money in the world. So it’s essential to ensure that your resources are not only well-managed but adequately disbursed. A well-crafted marketing plan includes details of your budget, your schedule, the project timeline, and also the capacity of your workforce.

With a clear overview of your resources as provided by a marketing plan, you’re sure of what budget to set aside, for what specific project activities, and what level of your available workforce capacity that can see it through.

Not only that, but having a marketing plan also ensures that your resources are well-managed and well-spent on activities that are directly related to your business goal. Without a marketing plan to clarify your resources and business objectives, falling into the trap of resource mismanagement is only a matter of time.

Usually, a marketing plan will detail a set of actionable strategies aimed at achieving your business objectives. For instance, if a part of your business objectives is to increase traffic to your company’s website, one of such strategies to be acted upon could involve using search engine marketing as a tool for achieving this.

Since this is a crucial objective, it becomes easier to identify associated metrics for monitoring your marketing plan’s performance. Also, you can quickly identify what platform to use for tracking these metrics. In this case, metrics like new website users, time spent on a page, bounce rate, etc., will be measured to gauge your strategy’s effectiveness.

When it’s then time to assess your marketing performance, the knowledge from evaluating such metrics provides transparency on how your strategies contributed to your overall business objectives. Also, from careful analysis of the data, you can detect flaws in your marketing plan and make plans to correct them. More importantly, you can generate actionable insights essential for making smarter marketing decisions in the future.

When you begin marketing, ideally, you should optimize your marketing activities for two outcomes: “To continually generate new customers” and “To retain existing customers.” As you continually generate new customers, you want to have a retention plan. The lack of a marketing plan makes optimizing for these two outcomes difficult.

Often, when clients and leads start coming in, the mistake most small business owners make is to divert all their resources and attention to these newly acquired customers. While altogether failing to bring in more new customers. As a result, this causes inconsistency in sales resulting in slow business growth.

The presence of a marketing plan makes consistent and continuous marketing possible. And a well-crafted plan also optimizes for both outcomes. The constant influx of new customers means more sales, and a high customer retention rate altogether contributes to a positive business bottom line.

When you take time to brainstorm and develop a marketing plan, you’re enforcing a clear, objective, and strategic approach to your thoughts.

With a marketing plan, you attain clarity on what you want to achieve and how you’re going to achieve it. Not only that, when you have a well-detailed plan, it becomes easier to communicate to staff or team members about their responsibilities and contributions towards achieving the overall business objectives.

Being clear in your thoughts ensures all-round clarity. Not only clarity in communication with team members, but your marketing communications with customers as well. Without a plan, confusion dominates. And where there’s confusion, disaster occurs.

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to build a house without a budget plan? Or have you ever done that before? We really hope you haven’t.

Without a clear budget plan of expenses, a house project can quickly become exceedingly costly than expected and ultimately overwhelming.

Now, you wouldn’t want to be stuck in the middle of building your dream home, would you? The same can be said for marketing without a game plan. If you begin marketing without a clear sense of your business objectives and a defined budget, you might get stuck, the negative margin type of stuck.

The absence of a marketing plan increases the likelihood of you ending up with a bottom line in the red. However, with a well-crafted marketing plan, not only do you get to save money, but you also get to make money.

An optimized marketing plan can bring in more customers for your business while also at a judicious use of your available resources. More customers mean what? It means more money!

Ready to have a peace of mind and put a marketing plan in place? ShiftWeb are online marketing consultants who are passionate about helping small businesses grow.