Some of the words from your answers prompted in Step 1 will provide you content and stimulus to utilise in copywriting going forward, such as web copy, profile document and social media posts.

These questions provide an overview of your client and customer perspectives of your business.

Step 2 Your Business & Personal Goals.

Working with small businesses, we understand and appreciate that personal and business goals are intertwined.

In Step 2, we get you to think about and document your goals. By outlining these goals, it will ensure that your marketing plan is aligned to everything you want to achieve for the business and for your personally.

Step 3 Existing and Future Revenue.

As an existing business, it’s aways good to evaluate where existing revenue is coming from, or as a new business, where you think it may come from in the future.

By thinking about this, it allows us to start considering potential marketing opportunities whilst evaluating existing or potential revenue streams.

Step 4 Understanding the competition.

If there’s one thing small businesses neglect, it’s understanding the competition. Without knowing the competition, how are we able to differentiate ourselves from them and be first choice?

By understanding the competition, their offering, and the space they are competing in, the easier it is to define what we do and find a way to position ourselves differently.

Step 5 Existing and Ideal Target Audience.

In this step, we want to define your ideal target audience. This may be an evolving process as you see who the competition targets, and whether what you’re offering or who you’re offering it to should differ. As a result, your existing audience may not be your business’ ideal and targeted audience.

Furthermore, you want to ensure all marketing activities in the next 12 months are targeted to the right people and you as the owner of the business are clear on who you need to target. 

Step 6 Your Service or Product Offering.

Now that you’ve taken a look at the competition and considered who your ideal audience is, does what you offer as a business give you the opportunity to stand out.

By thinking about what you offer as a business will allow you to consider how you can be different to the competition. 

Step 7 Your point of difference.

At this point in the journey, you’ve considered and documented plenty of information and key elements which will allow you to start thinking about your point of difference.

In this step, we want to solidify your point of difference in the least competitive environment. This will then have a flow on effect with how you start to communicate your business and brand to the outside world.

Step 8 What category is your business in?

Now that we’re close to understanding our point of difference, we must define or redefine what category we’re in so as to ensure that you sit in a category with the least amount of competition

This will also help us find a way to position ourselves and communicate differently to the competition.

Step 9 Creating a Positioning Statement.

Given small businesses have limited resources and marketing investment, we need to find a simple and clear way to communicate to a particular audience with a particular offering. Furthermore, in a cluttered world where attention span is limited, we need to define our business within a few seconds.

As a result, we need to create key messaging, or as we call it, a positioning statement, that you can use to communicate your business in a consistent and frequent way and will form a large part of marketing in a way that is different to some of the competition.

Step 10 Deciding on marketing activities.

Now that we have clearly defined our point of difference and positioning statement, you now have a way to communicate to your ideal audience.

In this step, we will prompt you to consider what the activities will be that will speak to your audience or ways that your audience will find you. Whether it’s running Google Ads or putting up some signage out the front of your store, it’s time to get into the detail and make some decisions.

Step 11 Managing the implementation of your marketing plan.

Now that you’ve decided what marketing activities will be in your plan, it’s time to think about how you’re going to implement them.

In this step, we get you to consider who in your team can assist in this process, have someone accountable for it, or if you need to outsource elements of it.

Step 12 Finalising your marketing investment.

In the final step of the process in creating your marketing plan, it’s time to make some decisions on your marketing investment.

We will ensure you take into consideration the marketing activities you’d like to implement, who’s going to implement them and what the internal and eternal investment looks like to help you achieve your business goals.