Have you completed your marketing plan? It’s time to share it with your partners.

Do you know the most frequently asked question after someone completes a marketing plan?

“So what’s next?”

Once you’ve completed your marketing plan, it’s easy, especially as a busy small business owner and entrepreneur, to jump right back into the day-to-day activities that keep you engaged throughout the year. In fact, you’ve probably overlooked some elements of your business while you’ve been spending time crafting your marketing plan. Your first instinct is to return to where you left off.

Not so fast.

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You may not have realized it during the process, but you need to share your marketing plan as soon as you’re done. You can’t run your business alone, so you need to share your direction with all of your key business partners, including senior management, important suppliers, and anyone else who contributes to your success.

You need to incorporate them into your thinking so they can contribute to the execution of the plan.

A marketing plan that doesn’t see the light of day isn’t really a plan. You have to put it into action, and you can only do that with the help of your staff.

Most marketers are comfortable with what we call “the creative brief”. It is a document that is shared with creative staff when asked to come up with a marketing campaign idea.

In a creative brief, a team of designers and copywriters are given specific instructions on the target audience, key messages, desired emotions, and a call to action, all of which should be included in the campaign.

While your business partners may not all be “creative,” you should think the same way about sharing information with them.

While you may not be giving them a creative brief, you should educate them on the elements of your marketing plan that you expect from them.

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One of the best ways to do this is to write a business brief.

In a business brief, you literally outline key business objectives, information on target audiences, competitive intelligence, lessons learned from past business programs, and ultimately how you see each business partner contributing to the marketing plan.

The business case will educate your partners on the most important parts of your plan, giving them specific action steps to take for their part of it.

Why not just show them the whole plan, you might ask?

You should, but it’s not enough.

The marketing plan will show them what you plan for the business, but the business briefing will tell them their role in achieving that goal. The business brief will give them specific instructions on what they need to do by the end of the year to make your marketing plan work.

While the marketing plan may set the overall agenda for the year, it’s the sales briefing that becomes each team’s to-do list.

This is why you should write a business brief immediately after completing your marketing plan.

Now go!

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