Small Business Marketing Plan

So what exactly is a Marketing Plan? How is it different from a Business Plan? Which one is best for a startup or an established company trying to grow? How much detail should be included?

Did you know that a Marketing Plan for a small business can be up to forty, fifty, sixty pages long? It includes market research, how you will go to market, your strategy, positioning, elevator pitch and marketing budget. To be clear, it does NOT include a set of financials or operational strategy. For that, you’ll need a business plan, and we can help you there too.

But here’s what you DO get with a marketing plan:

• Clearly articulated marketing & sales goals
• Market Research
• Competitive Analysis
• Market positioning recommendations based on the market opportunities and competition
• Review of your website and social media presence if you have one, vs. your competition
• How to track your results (KPIs for you to measure)
• Marketing Budget
• Your elevator pitch and tag line
• Our more thorough plans provide options for surveys and interviews, more detailed analysis and creation of your target personas.

You’re busy. You need this business idea to grow. You probably don’t have the 200-300 hours it takes the average small business owner to do this on their own. We can help.

You’ll start by having a conversation with one of our consultants. We’ll ask you questions about your product or service, your growth objectives, what you have done to date and where you’d like to focus. Everything we do is customized to your business so we’ll set the specific objectives for your plan and gather any input materials from you. This will give us a better understanding of where to focus our research. Then you’ll be back to running your business while we jump into developing your plan.

Using industry leading resources we begin our research on your industry and markets. With our more comprehensive plans this may include first party surveys and interviews. We’ll use our analytics software and our expertise to assess your online presence, both your website and social media. Along the way we’ll reach out to you with questions and any low hanging fruit suggestions based on what we’re finding. We’ll assess your target niche and our creative writers will get to work crafting a compelling elevator pitch and tagline. We’ll organize our recommendations into a visually appealing document you may use internally or with partners.

Yes we do those too! A Pitch Deck is designed to present the core elements of your business and the “ask” in a compelling, visual presentation. Depending on the focus, it may be used when pitching investors, partners or for sales. It covers the pain points your businesses addresses, how it addresses them, a brief description of your product or service, what makes you different, key market research attention grabbers, competitive positioning and what you’re looking for.

Just as it takes longer to write a compelling elevator pitch than a page of prose, a Pitch Deck is a carefully thought out, strategic document. That TED talk you just saw took a heck of a lot longer than 18 minutes to prepare!

When working with you on a Pitch Deck we do our homework and include an accompanying document highlighting key market research and competitive analysis findings to help you prepare for questions.