Every business, whether it’s a single freelancer, an SME or a major enterprise, needs to promote itself in order to sell its products and services.  This requires an investment of time, effort and money.  The return on that investment will be greater if those resources are focused on the right activities and messages.  In order to achieve that focus the business needs a marketing plan.  How do you create such a plan?  You answer the following questions.

What is our objective?

You need to know what you want your marketing to achieve.  Maybe you just want to increase awareness of your brand with a view to gaining more customers and increasing sales.  Or you might want to launch a new product or service.  Perhaps you want to improve the image of your brand so you can increase prices.  Or maybe you want to emphasise your low prices in order to undercut competitors.  If you don’t know what you are aiming at you are unlikely to hit it! 

What is our offering?

You have a rough idea of what you offer.  But your potential customers/clients don’t.  So, for your own benefit, and theirs, you need to make it very clear exactly what you do.  It’s not enough to just say “we sell outdoor clothing”, or “I offer landscape gardening services” or “we’re a wedding venue.”  You need to list everything that your business does and offers.  And you then have to write down reasons why customers might find each of these things interesting.

The time-honoured way to do this is by listing what’s known as your business features and benefits.  A feature is a fact about your business and a benefit is a description of how that feature helps a customer.  Taking the wedding venue example, “We have 25 bedrooms” is a feature and “this means guests can fall straight into bed once the party is over – no taxis” is the benefit.

It's important you do this.  Otherwise you may leave some key sales points out of your marketing.  And, you features will prove much more appealing to potential customers if you present I conjunction with the benefit.

Who are we talking to?

It’s important to be clear on this – for two reasons.  If you don’t clearly define your target audience how do you know which media will prove most effective at reaching them?  If you are selling expensive men’s watches the target audience will be wealthy men.  It therefore makes sense to advertise in magazines with a lot of readers from that demographic - The Economist and Financial Times, not Woman’s Weekly! 

Secondly, if you don’t know who you are selling to how can you decide which of your features and benefits will prove most appealing to them? You need to understand what kind of promise your target consumer wants to hear.  Start by writing a brief description of the kind of customer you are trying to attract.  For instance, “owner managers of SMEs employing 1-20 people within 50 miles of Bristol” or “mums aged 20-45 with household income of £40,000-£80,000 a year”. 

Next, flesh out those descriptions by asking questions like “what problems do they have that we can solve?”, “what are their hopes and fears, needs and wants?” and “what are they most concerned with – price, quality, convenience, service, advice, peace of mind?” 

The better you understand the mentality of your target audience the easier it is to create marketing messages that they’ll find engaging and persuasive. 

Who are we competing against?

The whole point of marketing is to help your business stand out from the crowd – so it helps to get a picture of where you fit in.  Make a list of your nearest competitors – those businesses operating in the same geographic area and business sector as yourselves whose offerings are similar to your own.  Now compare your features and benefits against theirs.  One way to approach this exercise is to conduct a SWOT exercise – ask “what are our Strengths and Weaknesses, and when we compare these against our competitors what Opportunities can we see and what Threats do we face?” 

The point of this exercise is to find some  meaningful points of difference between you and your competitors – some things that only you offer and which your target audience is likely to find appealing. 

What message should we be communicating?

So far you have been gathering information.  Now you need to start distilling it.  The idea is to boil off everything that is superfluous until you are left with just the essence, a powerful message that is very much to the taste of your target audience and which they find intoxicating. 

First of all, align your features and benefits with what you know your target audience wants.  Now add in what you know about your competitors and your meaningful points of difference.  Hopefully there should be some small area of overlap where you not only offer something that your potential customers want but which your competitors are failing to provide.  For example, your fruit juices are natural, organic and free from preservatives, health-conscious consumers are actively seeking this kind of beverage, but not many drink brands are focusing on this niche.

What is our proposition?

Now you need to take this distilled information and package it in the form of an effective selling proposition.  A great selling proposition should tick three boxes.  Firstly, it must make just one point.  That’s because simple messages go into the mind quicker and stay there longer.  Secondly it must be something you can genuinely deliver and which your audience wants.  Thirdly, it must be as differentiating as possible.   So, taking the concentrated information left after the distillation process, ask “what is the single most motivating and differentiating thing we can say to get our target audience to buy?”

What media should we use?

This should become clearer once you have defined your target audience.  It will also be influenced by the size of your marketing budget.  Basically you want to concentrate your efforts and spend on those channels that do the most cost effective means of delivering your message to the right people.

Action!

If you go through the process of asking and answering these questions it should become pretty clear what you need to be doing.  Now develop this into an action plan broken down by months, quarters and a year so you know what needs to be done when.  For example, you may decide you need to add a new post to Facebook twice a week, prepare a new case study by the end of the month and produce a series of videos over the next six months to showcase your product range. 

Final thoughts

Creating a marketing plan, as you can see from this article, is quite a time-consuming undertaking – and one that requires a lot of thought.  Don’t be tempted, however, to put it off or to rush it.  Without a clear plan you are certain to be wasting a lot of effort and money saying the wrong things to the wrong people – a recipe for disaster!