How to create a marketing plan for your small business

Knowing your audience is probably the most important part of a good marketing plan.

And I don't mean who you think your audience is.

Start with the people who are actually buying your product or service. Look at whatever information you have available — sales data, website data, CRM or email data, enquiries, social media, customer feedback, or simply what you've learned from talking to customers.

What patterns can you see?

Who tends to buy from you? What are they buying? Are some products particularly popular with certain customers? Where do your best customers come from? Do they buy once or come back? What questions do people ask before they buy?

You don't necessarily need an enormous research project. Small businesses often have more useful customer information than they realise — it just lives in lots of different places.

And data doesn't have to mean a spreadsheet. Talking to your customers counts. In fact, some of the most useful things you can learn won't appear in Google Analytics.

The important thing is to base your marketing on some evidence rather than an assumption about who you think your customer should be.

Before deciding what marketing you're going to do, decide what you want it to achieve.

"Grow the business" is a perfectly reasonable ambition, but it's not quite specific enough to build a marketing plan around.

Do you want more new customers? More enquiries? More repeat business from existing customers? To sell more of a particular product or service? Enter a new market? Increase awareness locally? Get people to book appointments?

There might be several things on the list, but I'd try to prioritise them.

If everything is a priority, it becomes very difficult to decide where your marketing time and money should go.

Once you understand your audience, come back to your products or services.

What is it about what you offer that will genuinely matter to those people?

This is where I'd start looking for your marketing hooks — the things that give someone a reason to pay attention.

And they may not be the things you immediately think of.

Businesses naturally tend to talk about what they do, how their product works or what services they provide. Customers are usually thinking about something slightly different:

Is this for me? Will it solve the thing I need it to solve? Why should I choose this business?

The better you understand the customer, the easier those questions become to answer.

How much work you need to do here will depend on how established your business is.

If you've been around for years and already have a recognisable brand, this might simply mean making sure your marketing is consistent with it.

If you're newer — or your business has changed quite a bit since you started — you may need to spend more time thinking about how you want the business to show up.

Your brand isn't just your logo and colours. It's the impression people get from your business: what you stand for, what you sound like, what people can expect from you and why they should remember you.

You don't need a 70-page brand book. You do need enough clarity that your website, social posts, emails, advertising and customer communications feel like they're coming from the same business.

Only now would I start talking seriously about channels.

Once you know who you're trying to reach, ask: where can we actually reach them?

That could be Google, Instagram, LinkedIn, email, local events, industry events, partnerships, referrals, community groups, trade publications, networking, direct mail — or something completely different.

This is one reason I'm wary of generic advice that tells every small business which marketing channels they "should" use.

You don't need to be everywhere.

You need to be in the places that give you a sensible opportunity to reach the people you want to reach.

And don't forget the channels you already own. Your existing customer database, website and relationships can sometimes be a much better place to start than trying to build an audience somewhere completely new.

There isn't one marketing budget that's right for every small business.

What you can sensibly spend depends on the size and stage of the business, what you're trying to achieve, your margins, how quickly you want to grow and the resources you have available.

I'd start with what the business can realistically invest and then use that to help make some choices about where to focus.

Spreading a limited budget across too many things usually doesn't help. Sometimes it's better to properly fund one or two activities, learn from them and build from there.

And remember that time is part of your marketing budget too.

Social media might be free to post on, for example. Producing good content several times a week isn't free if it takes someone in the business six hours to do it.

Knowing what you have to work with makes the next step much easier: deciding what you're actually going to do.

Now we can turn the thinking into activity.

You've worked out who you're trying to reach, what you want to achieve, what might resonate with them, where you're likely to find them and how much time and money you have available.

So what are you actually going to do?

For each priority, decide on the activity, who it's aimed at, which channels you'll use, who is responsible and roughly when it's going to happen.

Keep this realistic.

I'd much rather see a small business execute three things properly than write down fifteen marketing activities that nobody has the time or budget to do.

Think about how activities work together. Someone might discover you through Google, visit website, join email list, eventually become customer after email. Another may hear via referral, look online, follow six months, then get in touch.

Marketing channels don't necessarily work in isolation.

Before you start doing the marketing, decide what you'll look at to judge whether it's working.

The right measures depend on the objective.

If you're trying to generate enquiries, followers probably aren't your most important measure. If trying to increase repeat purchases, website traffic alone won't tell much.

Go back to step two and choose measures that actually tell you whether you're getting closer.

You don't need an enormous dashboard.

Pick a few useful measures, establish where you are now, and keep an eye on them.

A marketing plan shouldn't be something you write in January and discover in a folder eleven months later.

Do the work. Look at what happens. Learn from it.

Something you were convinced would work might not. Something fairly small might perform brilliantly. Customers might behave differently than expected.

That's useful information.

A good marketing plan gives you direction, but it should also leave room to learn and change course.

• At its simplest:
• Who are we trying to reach?
• What are we trying to achieve?
• Why should those people choose us?
• What are we going to say?
• Where are we going to reach them?
• How much can we spend?
• What are we going to do?
• Who is responsible?
• When will it happen?
• How will we know if it's working?

If you can answer those clearly, you've got the foundations of a useful plan.

Your marketing plan doesn't need to look impressive.

It needs to be useful.

It could be a spreadsheet, a couple of pages or a well-organised whiteboard. The format matters less than whether the people doing the marketing understand what you're trying to achieve and what happens next.

That's what I'd aim for.