Let’s face it, as a small business owner; it can be a challenge to develop a marketing plan, let alone a digital marketing plan. How do you know if your plan is as thorough and effective as it could be?
To alleviate some of that anxiety, we've produced this guide to help you the small business. It will walk you through the process of developing a marketing plan that leaves no stone untouched.
Let's take a look at the five most important components of a complete marketing plan for 2022.
How to Create a Small Business Marketing Strategy
- Start by Building a Marketing Plan
- Think About Your Ideal Clients and Create Buyer Personas
- Identify Your Goals
- Choose the Right Tools
- Consider Existing Resources
- Audit and Plan Your Media Campaigns
- Create the Content Plan
- Make It Happen
1. Start by Building a Marketing Plan
You may be asking yourself, “I have to have a plan for my strategy?” The short answer is yes, as your marketing plan explains why you will need specific resources, perform certain activities, and establish particular targets over the course of a year. The exact actions you'll take to achieve that objective are outlined in your marketing plan.
The right template can help in creating a marketing strategy that specifies your yearly budget, the projects that your marketing organization must address, and the marketing channels that will be used to accomplish those efforts. And it will link everything back to a business summary to keep you on track with your overall goals. You can use a marketing strategy PPT template to prepare a compelling presentation with your marketing plan and present it to your audience.
2. Think About Your Ideal Clients and Create Buyer Personas
At first glance, it may seem confusing; however, if you own a small business, it’s best to think of a buyer persona as a fictional, generalized representation of your ideal client. In other words, if you can't identify your target audience in a single line, now's your chance.
HubSpot says that “A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.”
Therefore, when creating your buyer persona(s), consider including client demographics, behavior patterns, goals, and motivations. The more detailed you are, the better.
The good news is that you don't need a pen and paper to build your buyer persona. In fact, we have a free buyer persona guide that you can use to create your own. Buyer personas should be at the heart of your strategy.
3. Identify Your Goals
Your marketing strategy goals and objectives should coincide with your business goals and objectives if you want to increase residual income through maintenance agreements; that is a business goal. If you want to gain 20 new large client accounts over the next year, that is a business goal. Your marketing objectives are the goals you want to achieve during a certain period of time. They entail choosing a hard number or metric for you and your staff to work towards. It will also include the details about how you will reach them and why you want to do so.
4. Choose the Right Tools
Once you've defined your goals, make sure you have the tools you need to track their progress. There are thousands of tools out there to help you analyze and track your progress. Below are a handful of the tools we at Cube Creative use to help our clients track their progress, or we can recommend.
- Google Analytics is great for tracking blog and web page performance overall.
- Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) provides small businesses with collaboration tools like Docs, Sheets, Slides, etc. We love the collaboration aspect and routinely use Docs to build out our plans.
- Trello is a great free tool (to start) that gives you a visual board and includes lists and cards. Think of it as a wall with lots of sticky notes that you can move around with ease.
- SEMRush or Moz are two tools that are a must if you want to run a technical SEO audit, track daily rankings, and monitor your competition. You can also research keywords and track your local rankings. At Cube Creative, we have used both. The choice between them may come down to your budget or personal preferences.
- BuzzSumo allows you to evaluate social media data so you can improve your marketing plan. Users will use it to find influencers that can help their business reach a wider audience and keep an eye on comments and trends to make the most of every opportunity.
- Crazy Egg or Hotjar are similar products that they both provide “user focus groups” without your users realizing it. Now that might sound creepy but don’t worry, all the data is anonymous, and it is all to help you better understand the customer journey with heatmaps and mouse tracking recordings.
- Facebook Business Suite is a free way to manage your business Facebook and Instagram account. This allows you to schedule posts and stories for both Facebook and Instagram. You can review your engagements and views for both in one place.
- Social Champ is a great low-budget way to plan and track posts. It is one of the only scheduling platforms for Google My Business posts. Currently, you can post to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linked In, and Google My Business using this platform. It will also allow you to view all your posts by the platform in a calendar format for easier management.
- HubSpot allows you to measure engagements, monitor brand mentions and relevant discussions automatically, and plan your social posts to be published when the right people see them.
5. Consider Existing Resources
Consider what existing resources you have that can assist you in developing your plan. Divide your assets into three categories: paid, owned, and earned media to make this process easier.
Paid Media
Paid media refers to any medium through which you spend money in order to reach your target audience. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all have paid media options that can increase your visibility.
Owned Media
Owned media is any media that you generate, for example, blog articles, ebooks, pictures, and infographics developed by you or for you.
Earned Media
Earned media is another way of saying user-generated content. Earned media includes social media shares, tweets promoting your brand, and Instagram images referencing your small business.
Merge and Purge
Now is the time to do what I refer to as a merge and purge. You will need to gather all of your resources from the aforementioned areas and condense them into a single-vehicle so you can see what you have and how you can connect the three channels to maximize your small business’s marketing strategy.
For example, suppose you already have a blog that publishes monthly content on your website (owned media). In that case, you may think about advertising your blog entries on Facebook (paid media), which consumers may then like and share (earned media). Ultimately, this will assist you in developing a stronger, more well-rounded approach.
If you have resources that don't match your goals, get rid of them (purge). This is an excellent opportunity to clean house or identify gaps.
6. Audit and Plan Your Media Campaigns
Cleaning house leads directly into this phase. You must now determine which material will be beneficial to you and your business goals. Concentrate on your owned media and marketing objectives. Let me say that again for those in the cheap seats, focus on the media you own first!
Take a look at your buyer personas next. Assume you work for a firm that repairs widgets. If one of your persona's issues is cleaning and inspecting the widgets, but you don't have any material that represents that, create a 15-second demo video for Instagram to demonstrate how effective your solution is at overcoming that challenge.
Finally, create a content creation plan. The title, goals, format, and channel for each piece of content should be included. Try to include which issue it solves for your buyer persona.
7. Create the Content Plan
So what is a content marketing plan? The content plan is what you want to focus on with your website content. This will often include your blog topics, landing pages, and geographic landing pages. It does take a little bit of time and research to construct, but once you do, it makes everything a lot easier to get started when creating content, delegating, or outsourcing it. Furthermore, it eliminates the need to look at a blank computer screen and trying to come up with ideas on the spur of the moment.
The key pieces are: Being Topical, Timing, Authorship, Providing Multiple Perspectives, and Connection.
Be Topical
Obviously, you must figure out what type of content resonates with your clientele. Going deeper into a subject is a great way to build your visibility and credibility, especially if you're a small local business. Some great topics to start with are answering the questions you are commonly asked. From there, you can dive into cost, problems, comparisons, “Best of” Lists, and social proof.
When you are thinking about your landing pages and geographic landing pages, you will want to create content that you can link to from your blog posts. Try to have these pages created the month before a blog post that would link to them. This gives the search engines time to index the content and time for your to get it posted.
Timing
Determine how frequently you should post content to your blog and create additional pages. Depending on your industry, competition, and geographic area, one blog and one form of a landing page may be enough. For others, you may need something weekly, if not two to three times a week.
Authorship
Here is where most small businesses falter. I am reminded of the poem about responsibility by Charles Osgood:
The Parable of Responsibility
Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody were members of a group.
There was an important job to do, and Everybody was asked to do it.
Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it.
Anybody would have done it, but Nobody did it.
Somebody got angry because it was Everybody’s job.
Everybody thought Anybody would do it, but Nobody realized that Anybody wouldn’t do it.
It ended up that Everybody, blamed Somebody, when Nobody did, what Anybody could have done.
Unknown author of a condensed version of Charles Osgood’s
– A Poem About Responsibility
Obviously, the content has to be written. If you don’t have time for it, delegate it out to a staff member. If you don’t have a staff member who is a good writer or doesn’t want to take on the responsibility, then outsource it.
There are hundreds if not thousands of freelancers and places that you can outsource your content writing to meet almost any budget. Remember that you get what you pay for, so the cheap writer may provide you with really poor content. You have been warned.
Provide Multiple Perspectives
If you've ever followed a blog or website with the same author for very long, you'll notice similarities in their writing style, themes they like writing about, and overall voice. Over time, this becomes stale and repetitive. That is why it is always beneficial to have more voices and professional perspectives in the mix. It keeps things interesting while also making sure your business appeals to diverse people within the buyer persona. If you ever run out of individuals ready to write inside, there may be a moment when an industry expert from outside your organization contributes to content.
Another thing you can also do to help liven up your content is to add quotes from other experts in your field. Just be sure to link back to the website you found or give credit where credit is due.
Connection
While I touched briefly on Connection under topics, let me further expand on it. You will want to think about how you may link your blog’s content to other resources you have. It might be a link to a certain page on your website, such as a landing page or geographic page. It could also be a link to a download link for an eBook that goes into greater detail on a subject. The bottom line is that it allows you to engage prospects more effectively and even call out to them. It also helps the search engines to get lost in your site, which is surprisingly something they want to do!
8. Make It Happen
At this stage, your market research and planning should help you visualize how your approach will be implemented.
The next stage is to tie everything together by including action items into your plans. Make a paper or Google Doc that outlines the actions you'll need to take to carry out your campaign. In other words, define your approach.
When drafting this, keep the long term in mind. A typical strategy plan lasts 12 months. This well-structured schedule should serve as the foundation for your strategic marketing activities.
Remember that your digital strategy is distinctive to your company, and so should the document. As long as the strategy includes all of the required information, you'll be ready to elevate your small business’s brand from meh to outstanding.
Should I Hire an Agency to Help Me
When to hire an agency or outsource some of this is a difficult question. Between the demands of growing your small business and trying to implement everything I have mentioned thus far may seem overwhelming. Therefore you might be thinking, what would it look like to outsource or have an agency take everything over.
As a small business owner, you may be more focused on improving your business's day-to-day operations and trying to grow. When that happens, your marketing may take a back seat. If that is the case, it may be better to employ a Digital Marketing Agency to focus on what they do best: digital marketing. The online landscape is constantly changing, and keeping up with it can be difficult if you're already involved in working “in” the business instead of “on” the business.
Digital Marketing is a powerful solution for small businesses who are in those stages, and it can seem daunting. There's so much that goes into creating and executing the right plan for YOUR business.
Hiring an Inbound Marketing Agency
So you've determined that employing a Digital Marketing Agency or Inbound Marketing Agency is the next step in growing your small business! We make no qualms about it; finding the right agency can be a challenge, as you are essentially bringing someone in to help grow “your baby.”
A good agency should follow the plan outlined at the beginning of this article. Therefore you should have an idea of what they will and should be doing. If in doubt, ask!
It should also be noted that digital marketing is a long-term investment in your business. While there are some “quick wins,” it takes time to develop and implement an effective digital marketing plan. We tell our clients that it will take at least 9-12 months to see real traction, depending on your geographic location and competition.
Final Thoughts
If you are looking for an inbound marketing or digital marketing agency that helps local small businesses, reach out to us for a free consultation. We would be happy to walk you through our process and see if we would be a good fit.
