If there were one silver bullet for marketing, you wouldn’t need someone (me!) to help build your brand and increase sales, because you would just do that one thing and your business would go viral. I always tell people that marketing is like death by a thousand cuts. There isn’t just one thing that works, you have to do a lot of little things that add up to achieving your business goals.

I say this all the time, if you don’t know where you want to be — you’ll often end up someplace else. That someplace else might be good — or it may be way off the mark of where you were hoping.

We receive thousands of marketing messages everyday through email, phone alerts, social media, television, radio, snail mail, driving, friends, family and wandering grocery stores! Most people believe that because they are the target of so many marketing campaigns, they inherently understand marketing and are an expert. I’ll even give you a downloadable cheat sheet so you can become your own marketing expert.

The most important place to start in building your marketing plan, is knowing your business goals. It may seem obvious, but your marketing plan will be tailored to move you in the direction of achieving those goals. If for instance, your goal is to increase awareness of your brand, your tactics will be much different than if your goal is to increase basket size (the average total sale per customer). For most small businesses, every dollar is precious and spending money on marketing can seem wasteful or even useless. This is true if you are spending money in a shotgun approach. If you have all of your tactics lined up targeting the customers who are most likely to buy your product, you can be thoughtful and intentional with your marketing spend and increase your ROI (return on investment).

Complete a market & competitor analysis. This is an essential piece of the marketing plan. Knowing your competitors and the overall market will give you a good idea of where your brand stands and if there is any white space that you can take advantage of or create a unique selling point for your product. A simple internet search can give you a lot of information about your industry, growth, competitors, and other data to consider in your marketing plan. List out your main competitors with their strengths & weaknesses. If you have any notes on their product niche or target customer, add those details here. This is a great article on how to understand your market and a few free and paid tools to help.

Understand your customer and build customer persona(s). You may have heard this term – at its core a customer persona is a profile of your ideal customer. This can typically come in the form of a visual, so you can imagine who your customer is every time you make a business decision and ensure you are thinking about that customer and their wants/needs/pain points. I’ve had co-workers say to me “our customers (for footwear brand) are people with feet”, while this may be true in a macro sense…there are people with feet who would never consider purchasing that footwear brand and connecting with them is like screaming into the void.

If you are struggling to identify who your customer is, think about who your customer isn’t and try and narrow their attributes from there. There are likely a few different customers that would be interested in your product. For example, let’s take a non-profit organization that has three different customer personas; the ideal “donor”, the “volunteer” and the “client”. Depending on the organizations business goals, the marketing plan will need to identify different messages and channels to connect with each of these different customer personas.

Side note: Be ware of anyone selling you advertising — it’s their job to sell the advertising, not increase your business’s sales. They will make it seem like their advertising product is a silver bullet, but we’ve already covered that topic (see above). Unless the advertising product connects directly to your perfect customer, get good at saying no. You get to decide where to advertise and to whom, not the sales person.

Identify your top three marketing objectives (the how you will reach your business goals) and the KPI (key performance indicator) or the measurement on how you will know if you’ve reached your goal at the end of the quarter or year. For example, if your goal is to increase awareness of your brand, you might have a goal to increase social followers by 25% by the end of the year. Your KPI would be total # of social followers. Then identify the tactics you’ll take to help you achieve your objectives/goals. These tactics are things like social/digital advertising, connecting with influencers to build brand awareness, in-person events, marketing campaigns, sales, partnerships, etc.

One of the most important things to remember is your marketing plan is not set in stone. You can iterate, improve and update your plan based on performance (or lack there of) of your tactics. For instance, you may realize that your goal of reaching 10% increase in total social followers was too low and easily achieved, so increase that goal. On the other hand, you may find out it’s harder to reach that goal so you may need to adjust your tactics or adjust your goal. The main thing is to ensure you are keeping track of your campaign performance so can adjust and optimize your marketing spend.

Once you’ve thought through how you are going to achieve your goals and objectives, then you can spend your money in the right places and towards the right potential customers to help reduce waste in your advertising/marketing budget. If you need a template to help get you started, you can download one here.

Below is a sample marketing plan to inspire your own marketing plan.