The importance of Having a Marketing Plan in your ID Business

So, what’s a marketing plan and why is it important that I have one?

Well, we all know that marketing is needed to attract customers to your business, as without customers, you wouldn’t have a business, right? So marketing is pretty critical to your business, and if something is so critical, then you want to make sure that you get it right and a marketing plan helps you do this.

Before you can develop a marketing plan, you need to set yourself some SMART marketing goals. In case you haven’t come across the acronym, SMART, before then I can tell you that it means, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-based. So, if you are setting a SMART goal about increasing your social media audience, you wouldn’t just say, “ To grow my social media followers”, you would be more specific and set a goal such as “To increase my Facebook followers by 50 by the end of Jan” so you are setting a goal that is measurable, realistic and within a time period.

Once you have set your marketing goals, you need to work out how you are going to achieve them. You need to develop a marketing strategy that includes tactics and actions you can to take to realise those objectives. These actions, how you are going to measure them and the dates by which you want to achieve them form the basis of your marketing plan.

But my business is only small do I really need a plan, can’t I just keep it all in my head and do what feels right on the day?

You can, but unplanned marketing rarely pays back. You will be so much more successful if you follow a pre-prepared plan giving focus and structure to your marketing rather than a haphazard, scattergun approach. A plan allows you to concentrate on specific goals or themes when needed, e.g. when you are building up to a promotion. And, if your marketing schedule is all planned out in advance and you can clearly see what you need to do and when, you will be way more productive, not wasting precious time every day trying to come up with marketing ideas. We’ve all been there, scratching our heads, yes?

As well as structure and focus, another key benefit of having a plan in place is being able to measure progress against it. By measuring and tracking against your plan, you can see which actions work and which don’t so you know to do more of the good stuff and less of the bad. If something isn’t working, you can change your plan accordingly and try something else, but be careful to only change one thing at a time. If you change more than one, you won’t know which one has caused the good or bad result.

So, tracking your progress is key. You need to track regularly, weekly or monthly, whichever is appropriate to your goals, and resist the temptation to give up. You may be finding it hard work, ‘feel’ things aren’t working and want to try something new, but our feelings and emotions can be up and down, day by day so don’t let them cloud your judgement of success.  The stats won’t lie. They will tell you whether your actions have worked or not.

Your marketing plan should be your friend. You should keep it close, check in on it every day, nourish it (by feeding it new actions), care for it and it will work hard for you. It’s not something you prepare on Day 1, stand back and admire, and then put in a drawer to be forgotten about.

So, have I convinced you that you need a marketing plan? Go on, give it a go, I promise that you won’t regret it. And if you want some more help and advice with your business, take a look at our membership here.