You Can’t Manage Your Business Without a Marketing Plan
All businesses, regardless of size, recognize the importance of a well-crafted marketing plan and budget. While larger corporations may have more resources, small businesses must also allocate funds strategically to maximize their efforts. However, budgeting alone is insufficient. To truly achieve business objectives, a comprehensive marketing plan is imperative.
Effective marketing is the lifeblood of successful businesses.
Understanding the importance of allocating a percentage of revenue to your marketing plan is key to driving growth.
- For established companies with loyal customers and steady growth, dedicating just 2 to 3% of revenue ensures a consistent presence in the market.
- However, if your business is continuously expanding its offerings and introducing new products and services, allocating a higher percentage of 5% is recommended to capture attention and generate excitement.
- During periods of increased product development, setting aside 10% of revenue is crucial. After all, innovative offerings need a strong marketing strategy to connect with your target audience.
- The US Small Business Administration advises businesses with revenue under $5 million and profit margins between 10% and 12% to allocate 7 to 8% of their revenue for comprehensive marketing efforts. These budget percentages encompass all promotional channels, ensuring a holistic approach to your marketing plan.
Optimizing Your Marketing Budget Allocation
A well-crafted marketing plan acts as a strategic compass for effectively allocating your funds across various marketing channels. It enables you to strike a balance between consistent investment in proven activities and treating new initiatives as dedicated projects.
To ensure optimal financial oversight, every project needs to have clear objectives and a detailed breakdown of budget categories. Regularly monitoring your expenditures against budgeted amounts is crucial for maintaining control. Equally important is evaluating whether the achieved results align with your expectations and identifying any underlying reasons for discrepancies.
Gaining Insights into Your Target Customers
When formulating your marketing plans, it’s critical to start by answering two fundamental questions: “Who are my target customers?” and “What information are they seeking to make informed purchasing decisions?”
By gaining a deep understanding of your customers’ preferred media outlets, such as magazines, newspapers, websites, social media, and more, you can strategically allocate your resources where exposure to your target market is most substantial. If you’re uncertain about their preferred news sources, engaging directly with your customers and seeking their insights can provide invaluable guidance.
Invest in driving your marketing success by optimizing your budget allocation and harnessing the power of understanding your target customers. Let us help you make the most informed decisions for your business’s growth and success.
Valuing Your Customers as Business Partners
By actively involving your customers in conversations about their information preferences, you demonstrate your genuine interest in their needs. As fellow business people, they will appreciate your commitment to understanding and meeting their expectations.
Add one or several of these projects to your marketing:
- An active email program has the greatest return on investment. Smart companies begin building an email list as soon as they recognize the opportunity. Costs are minimal and even a small response to email offers a high payback. Start your list with established customers and contacts. Give customers and prospects every opportunity to add their name to your email list by adding that as a capability of your website and social media pages.
- Today’s young adults will be tomorrow’s major customers. Plus, they have strong feelings about things that catch their attention. So, they are today’s strong influencers. Don’t ignore them; make one of your projects the beginning of a presence on their favorite social media sites. The top three are Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram. Although Facebook’s use is in decline it is still in the top three. If you are unfamiliar with these social media sites, get help from someone who knows how to make them pay off.
- Video has been of growing interest to many small businesses, but there remains a mystique about making videos. It’s the content and the delivery that makes video a winner. You don’t have to be a Hollywood director to make a good video. They only have to be good, not great. Visitors appreciate a chance to sit back and observe your information with a minimal amount of effort on their part.
Visitors to your site are looking for content, not entertainment
If the content is excellent they will ignore the quality of the video composition. Wistia is a company that offers video services and has a library of very helpful instructional videos. They recently produced a video comparing the results in spending varying amounts of money on the same topic. One video cost $1,000 to produce, a second cost $10,000 and a third cost $100,000. Their point was that clearly there was a production quality difference in the three, but the $1,000 video had as much informational value as the $100,000. Read about their experiment here: https://wistia.com/learn/marketing/just-launched-three-soapbox-ads. I think you will be surprised at how effective the $1,000 video is.
The three project types above will improve your marketing plan. Add one or try all three. The content that you develop for one idea can (and should) be repurposed for the other two.
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