How to Develop a Marketing Plan for Your Small Business

• Shanna Goodman is the creator of AMP’D, which helps small businesses build their marketing and brand strategy.
• More than half of small businesses don’t have a well-organized marketing plan, Goodman says, which can waste resources and lose valuable customers.
• To get started, think about the short and long term goals of your business and prioritize action over perfection.
• Leverage social media traffic by linking to your website and use a “lead magnet” to ask customers to sign up for your email newsletter or mailing list.
• Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

An alarming study was released last year indicating that only half of small businesses actually have a marketing plan. Although my job is to help small businesses develop marketing strategies, I recently came to the embarrassing realization that I, too, was operating without a marketing plan.

My marketing agency, Ampersand Business Solutions, helps small businesses grow through strategy and execution. The problem for many small businesses, however, is that ongoing services can be costly because they require a lot of work, time, and energy. My team and I had thought about how best to serve small business owners who don’t have the resources to hire an agency like ours. Using our years of expertise, we have created educational programs for entrepreneurs to teach themselves about digital marketing and called it AMP’D.

My team was busy delivering client work, so I did all the marketing work to make our business visible.

It wasn’t until I got overwhelmed and wanted to do without social media and email marketing tasks that I realized I was only working from ideas in my head.

None of my tactics were a bad strategy, however, I did them all without a plan. This meant that in addition to doing all the work myself, I was probably wasting some of my most valuable resources as an entrepreneur – time and money.

Read more: A marketing manager earning $50,000 quit her job and now earns five times as much as a freelancer. Here’s the email template she used to build a subscriber network of over 100,000 people.

Why Small Businesses Need a Marketing Plan

Creating a plan can be daunting because it takes effort, time, and a willingness to try new things (along with optimizing them when they work and cutting them out when they don’t). Baseball great Yogi Berra once said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up somewhere else. This rings especially true for entrepreneurs trying to grow.

Here are the benefits of creating a marketing plan:

You earn more money. Because your plan is well thought out, you’ll maximize every marketing dollar you spend. You’ll also put measures in place to make sure it’s working and be better prepared to know when it’s not.

A defined orientation forces you to think about where you want your business to go and how to make it serve your purpose, rather than making you a slave to all your various marketing tasks.

You will save time. You’ll spend less time putting out fires if you work proactively.

You will provide more value to your customers, because part of the process of creating a marketing plan requires you to focus on their specific challenges, motivations, and solutions.

You will be better able to prioritize. Your marketing plan will organize your time and prioritize what you do. Remember that if everything is equally weighted as a priority, nothing is a priority.

How to start

First, confront any feelings of being overwhelmed. My good friend, author Susie Moore, likes to say, “Keep it easy. As a habitual over-thinker, this is a mantra that I find useful to share and repeat often.

Consider your intention. What are your long-term and short-term goals? This is important because as a small business owner, one of the benefits of designing our days is that we can approach tasks in order of priority.

Think about the insight you have about your ideal customers. What do you know about their specific challenges and what would motivate them to act?

Prioritize action over perfection. As a recovering perfectionist, this one is tough for me. My natural state would be to tweak something until I’m 100% in love with it. But, I resist that temptation because I know action creates even more action, propelling you into a place of momentum.

Use what you already have in your infrastructure. What are you already doing that you can leverage more?

Read more: The ultimate guide to creating a killer personal brand that increases your revenue and reach, by influencers and branding experts with tens of thousands of followers

How to do more with what you already have

You probably already do Something that works. Try to build on what you already have to simply maximize your efforts.

1. Position yourself as an expert.

• Write regular blog posts on your website, sharing your expertise in 800-1000 word posts. If you don’t know what to blog about, start by writing and answering all the questions you are regularly asked.
• Contact publications in your industry and offer to contribute articles. Many are constantly looking for quality content and being published gives you credibility as a recognized expert in the field.

2. Capitalize on social media traffic to drive traffic to your website.

• Share links to your blog posts and articles on your social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn.
• Follow people on social media who match your ideal customer category to see what they post, the questions they ask, and what’s important to them.
• Join the Facebook groups your ideal customers belong to and provide value. (Don’t just share your links to promote yourself or you will be removed from the group). Also, make sure you can be found if someone wants to know more about what you do. I have strict privacy settings on my personal Facebook, but I use a cover image that shares my website, email address, and what I’m known for.

3. On your website, exchange something of value (a “lead magnet”) for their contact information to build and grow your list of interested potential customers

• Offer something valuable like a checklist or case study and ask them to subscribe to download it. This then allows you to capture those leads and continue to nurture them with regular email marketing, so you can close the sale down the road.
• Send regular emails to people on your list, always providing them with something valuable.

4. Consider running ads using a lead magnet to get people to subscribe to your list.

• In my opinion, targeted Facebook ads (not boosted posts) are the most cost-effective way to get in front of your target audience that currently exists. Use them to advertise your lead magnet to your ideal customers with an opt-in requirement for the download. The ad copy might say something like “Download this free ultimate checklist!”
• Set up Facebook ads for people who have visited your website. It’s called “remarketing” and it makes prospects warmer – and they’ll be more likely to buy – because they already know a bit about you. You need a Pixel FB installed on your website, but it’s something you can hire someone to do very easily and it doesn’t take very long.

Shanna Goodman is the creator of AMP’D, which helps small businesses build million-dollar brands. AMP’D was developed through Goodman’s 15 years of business development experience, including five years as the owner of a branding agency.