Small business marketing plans give structure to help your marketing

Why is having some structure around your marketing, by creating a marketing plan so important for your small business? Here at little Marketing, dealing with business owners for 15 years, we know that marketing will often take a back seat to running a business, payroll sorting out I.T issues, making new products, dealing with customers, the list goes on and on, and marketing will always take that back seat when it comes to those bits and pieces of a business. However, as business owners know marketing generally will have some direct correlation to driving Revenue, yet for some reason it still takes a back seat.

The best way to start to implement your marketing activities is to make sure that there's a plan and a structure in place in doing those. By creating a marketing plan, you get a couple of things:

• First up, when you create a marketing plan it gives you the strategy required to think about how you're going to best position yourself differently to the competition.
• Secondly, it gives you some specific activities and action points so that you know exactly what activities are going to be done and the specific action items that should be done to help Implement them.
• The third, and this is where the structure, is so important, is what we call the timing and investment plan. Given business owners are so busy, and marketing will take that backseat as we mentioned, by having a timing plan around when the activities will happen will give the marketing a better chance of actually being implemented. The second thing about that timing plan is you can actually allocate a resource within your internal team, or outsource it if you need to so that someone is accountable for the activities and for when they're being done.

If you didn't have this overall marketing plan in place it's going to be almost impossible to stay on top of your marketing activities and get them implemented, so the key is having that structure, having the activities and the action items, and then the specific timing plan as to when those activities should be implemented, and who's accountable for getting them done.

Take a listen here as to why structure is so important and alleviates the issue of time being your enemy.