A marketing plan gives your small business a clear structure for what marketing activities to do, when to do them and why they matter. A good 12-month marketing plan connects your positioning, business goals, target audience and marketing activities so you can spend your time and budget on the things most likely to move your business forward.
Instead of doing marketing because a competitor is doing it, or because you feel like you should be posting more often, a marketing plan gives you a deliberate path to follow.
Direct Answer: How do you create a marketing plan?
To create a practical marketing plan for your small business, follow these five steps:
The result is a marketing action plan that turns your marketing strategy into a practical schedule you can actually implement.
Marketing can quickly become reactive.
One week you might decide to post on social media. The next week you might consider Google Ads. Then you might hear about a new platform or see a competitor running a campaign and wonder whether you should be doing the same thing.
Before long, marketing becomes a collection of disconnected activities rather than a coordinated approach.
A marketing plan provides structure.
It gives you a clear view of what you are trying to achieve, who you are trying to reach, which activities are appropriate and when those activities need to happen.
This doesn't mean your marketing plan needs to be complicated. In fact, for many small businesses, a simple 12-month marketing action plan can be more useful than a lengthy document filled with marketing theory.
The important thing is that the plan helps you move from thinking about marketing to actually doing marketing.
Before deciding what marketing activities you should undertake, you need to understand what you want your business to be known for.
This is your positioning.
Your positioning is about how your business and brand are perceived in the minds of your customers in comparison with your competition.
The objective is not simply to say that you are better. It is to identify where your business can be genuinely different and relevant to the customers you want to attract.
Start by considering:
Your positioning should ultimately influence everything else in your marketing.
Your website, content, advertising, social media, sales conversations and other communications should all reinforce the same underlying position.
This is why positioning needs to come before your list of marketing activities.
If you don't know what you want your business to stand for, it becomes much harder to decide what you should be communicating.
Once you have established your positioning, the next question is:
What are you trying to achieve through marketing?
Marketing should have a purpose.
That purpose might be generating more enquiries, increasing sales, entering a new market, attracting a particular type of customer, increasing awareness or supporting the launch of a new product or service.
The specific objectives will depend on your business.
Your marketing objectives shouldn't exist in isolation from the rest of your business.
If your business wants to increase revenue, your marketing should contribute towards that objective.
If you want to grow a particular service area, your marketing activities should support that service.
If you want to attract a different type of customer, your communications and marketing channels should reflect that audience.
A useful question to ask is:
"What does our business need marketing to help us achieve?"
This keeps your marketing focused on outcomes rather than activity for activity's sake.
It also helps you decide which marketing activities belong in your plan — and which don't.
Now it is time to create the practical structure for your marketing plan.
A simple spreadsheet or planning document is often enough. Start with a list of your marketing activities and then map each one across the 12 months of the year.
This gives you a complete view of your marketing activity rather than forcing you to make decisions one month at a time.
For each activity, identify which month or months it will take place. Some activities may happen once, while others might be repeated monthly, quarterly or at specific times of the year.
For example, you might have ongoing activities such as content creation or email marketing, alongside one-off campaigns, seasonal promotions, events or website projects.
Looking at your marketing over a full year helps you avoid making decisions one week or one month at a time.
It allows you to consider:
It also makes it easier to identify gaps.
If your marketing calendar is empty for three or four months, for example, you can see that immediately.
This is where many businesses go wrong.
They start with the activity.
But the better starting point is the objective.
What are we trying to achieve, who are we trying to reach and which marketing activity is most appropriate for that?
Your neighbour's marketing activity isn't necessarily the right activity for your business.
Your competitor's strategy isn't necessarily the right strategy for you either.
Every activity in your marketing plan should have a reason for being there.
Ask:
This helps you avoid the common trap of creating a marketing plan that contains lots of activity but very little direction.
A marketing activity only works if you can consistently implement it.
There is little value in putting six social posts a week into your plan if your business doesn't have the time, resources or content to sustain that level of activity.
A smaller number of well-chosen activities that are consistently implemented can be far more valuable than a long list of activities that never happen.
The aim is not to make your marketing plan look busy.
The aim is to make your marketing work.
Once you have selected your activities, put them into the appropriate months.
Some activities may happen once.
Others may happen quarterly, monthly or continuously throughout the year.
For example, your plan might include a website review in January, a campaign in March, monthly email communication, quarterly customer communications, regular content creation and a seasonal promotion.
You should also record the expected investment associated with each activity.
Adding investment to your marketing plan gives you another important level of visibility.
You can see:
This means you aren't simply asking, "How much should we spend on marketing?"
Instead, you are asking:
"What are we investing in, why are we investing in it and what are we expecting it to achieve?"
That is a much more useful question for a small business.
At a minimum, a practical marketing plan should give you a clear view of:
You can make the plan as detailed as your business requires.
The important thing is that it remains useful.
If the plan becomes so complicated that nobody uses it, it has stopped doing its job.
It is also important to understand that strategy and planning aren't exactly the same thing.
Your marketing strategy provides the direction.
It helps determine where you want to compete, who you want to attract, how you want to be positioned and what you want marketing to achieve.
Your marketing plan turns that direction into action.
It answers questions such as:
In simple terms:
Strategy determines the direction. The marketing plan creates the structure for putting that direction into action.
This distinction is important because a list of marketing activities without an underlying strategy can quickly become a checklist rather than a plan.
Your marketing plan shouldn't be something that gets created once and then forgotten.
Use it.
Review it.
Update it.
As your business changes, your marketing priorities may change too.
You may discover that one activity is producing better results than expected. Another may not be delivering. Your target audience may evolve. A new opportunity may emerge.
Your plan should give you enough structure to stay consistent while still allowing you to make informed adjustments.
The important thing is to avoid returning to completely reactive marketing.
If you are creating a marketing plan for your small business, remember these five points:
Start with positioning — know how you want your business to be different in the minds of your customers.
Set clear objectives — understand what you need marketing to help your business achieve.
Create a 12-month structure — map your activities across the year.
Choose activities strategically — don't copy competitors or other businesses without considering your own audience and goals.
Schedule and budget your activities — know what you are doing, when you are doing it, how often and what you are investing.
A good marketing plan doesn't need to be complicated. It needs to give your small business a clear, realistic and actionable structure for marketing consistently.
The biggest benefit of creating a marketing plan is not having a document sitting in a folder.
It is having clarity about what your business should be doing and why.
When your positioning, goals, audience, activities, timing and investment are connected, marketing becomes much less reactive. You have a practical framework for deciding where to focus your time, money and energy.
If your marketing currently feels inconsistent, disconnected or difficult to manage, Little Marketing can help you create a practical 12-month marketing plan aligned with your business objectives.
You can contact Little Marketing to discuss your marketing needs.
You can also learn more about why a marketing plan matters for Australian small business and how structure and consistency can improve the effectiveness of your marketing.
Little Marketing has been helping small businesses with practical marketing advice, strategy and implementation for 18 years, helping business owners create marketing that has direction, structure and purpose.
Little Marketing — marketing that helps your small business.