Hello everyone. And welcome back to the building of marketing plan show, where we provide practical advice and guidance that you can apply to your marketing plan right away. As promised in this lesson, we’re going to give you our top 10 reasons why every business coach, entrepreneur, author, financial advisor, pretty much everyone who’s hoping to build an audience and make some money should have a marketing plan.
Now, the first thing we want to do today is actually define what a marketing plan is. So a marketing plan is a document that outlines how you communicate your brand and sell your products to your customers. It is a written guide for your company’s marketing strategy. It includes all the tactics you use to reach your target audience, such as advertising promotions of public relations. This plan will help you identify what your business needs are when it comes to attracting new customers and how much money it’s going to take to do so when executed properly, Marketing plan can be game changer for any business by providing clarity on what messages are being communicated and who they’re being communicated to.
So let’s begin by taking a look at just how important developing a marketing plan really is.
Plans Forces You Think
My first reason for developing a marketing plan is that it, it forces you to think now the act of formulating a marketing plan, it forces you to think about your customers, think about your products and how you make the two of them meet together. Thinking about these things are important and communicating them with your team is equally important and valuable for the process and making sure that everything is coming together and that you’re on the right track and meeting your targets.
Plans Create Measurable Goals
The next benefit or reason why I feel like having a solid marketing plan in place is that it helps you to create measurable goals. Far too many times, many business owners have a goal to sell more or get more customers or get more website traffic like w what does more mean there? These aren’t really smart goals. These are not smart measurable goals. And so when you go through the process of creating a marketing plan, you’re forced to create some throughout that are strategic. They’re measurable, they’re attainable, they’re realistic, and they’re time-bound. And so you definitely want to take the time to do this process, to make sure that you are spending your time and money wisely.
Plans Provide Motivation
All right. So the next benefit or reason why I feel like having a marketing plan is really valuable for your business is that marketing plans can help provide motivation.
When the team sees that you’re coming together to generate ideas and set a plan in motion, it really brings people together. It makes people feel more involved and more invested. And so which therefore creates more motivation for people to do their job. When you have something to visually reach for it and obtain, um, a goal to strive for together. It, it, it, you know, it motivates people when it’s just, Hey, do marketing and don’t suck. That’s not really motivational. That’s scarier. And so when you have a plan in place, which has goal sets, and that are measurable, it provides motivation for your team to be able to work together for and strive for.
Plans Help to Prioritize and Organize your Time
My fourth reason why marketing plans are beneficial is that it helps organize and prioritize your time. Everybody has the same amount of time. Every day. There is a limited amount of time you have to spend and how you spend your time as a business owner is very important as we all know. And so the more that you can be so strategic about your time and make sure that you’re making the most of your time and doing the best things with your time, it’s important. So when you have a marketing plan in place, it helps you save the waste of time from trying different tactics and things that aren’t really meant for your business and your, for your industry. And so gives you attract to follow a path to follow. Um, and especially it’s really helpful when you have, um, a marketing person kind of give you that direction. Then you know, you’re on the right path and you’re not wasting your time and energy.
Plans Help You Make Money
My next fifth reason for developing a marketing plan and how they’re beneficial is that plans can actually help produce you money. Yes. I said it produces money having a marketing plan can help produce money. Is that it sets you up to be investible. If that’s a word, I’m not sure if I’m making up words. When you think about it, at some point in your business, you are going to want to seek help and assistance from investors. And so when it comes to people investing in your business, they want to invest in a business that has their game together, and that has a plan in place. So they know where their money is going. So having a plan in place, that details how you’re going to be generating more customers, and where’s your revenue going to be coming from? It’s going to really level up your, um, your presence and your investability making up words here, but it’s worth it. It’s going to be a tool that you can show investors to say, Hey, I’m worth it. This business is worth it. Here’s my plan and how we’re going to be making money and it’s worth the investment. And so having a good marketing plan in place will actually help improve the likelihood of you landing an investor.
Plans Help to Bring Your Teams Together
The sixth benefit or reason for having a marketing plan is that it helps bring the teams together. So I mentioned earlier about motivation. It also helps bring the team together and brings them on the same page. The importance of consistency in marketing cannot be overemphasized. When you have a marketing plan, then everybody’s going to be on the same page. Everybody’s going to know exactly what their mission is and what their goal is and what their responsibilities are. It’s. And it’s like being able to ensure that all the campaigns that the marketing team is working on is consistent with the marketing plan. And it’s consistent with the business goals, all of it comes together. And so it’s a great one that you can have that if you don’t have a plan in place, then it’s likely that you may develop a strategy or a campaign that’s not consistent with the business goals. And so having a marketing plan in place helps you to ensure that everybody’s on the same page, everybody’s working, going towards the same goals and that all your efforts are being consistent.
Plans Help You to Spend Your Money Wisely
The seventh reason why we should invest in a marketing plan is that it helps you spend your money wisely. Like your time, your marketing budget is finite. You have to be very careful with where and how you spend your money. You don’t most companies who I know, um, and around the world, they don’t have infinite money to spend on just anything, you know, just to try and practice things here and there, just because you have to be a little bit more strategic about where you’re spending your money and having a plan in place gives you that strategy.
So you know, where your money is going and why, and being able to measure more accurately if that money is actually bringing you a better return. So it’s important that you’re very strategic about how you spend your marketing dollars.
Plans Help You to be More Proactive and Less Reactive
Now, the eighth reason for developing a marketing plan and how they’re beneficial for you is that it helps you be more proactive and less reactive when it comes to marketing. It can be a little frustrating. I’ll admit it because there are so many different things to try and test out there. And most companies don’t have the money to spend, to try and keep up with all the changes. And so when you’re being proactive about your marketing, you know, ahead of time, what your expenses are, what, you know, what’s where your, where your funds are going to be allocated to, and how you’re best going to spend your money when it comes to developing a marketing plan, it helps you plan out ahead of time.
What and where do you want your marketing resources, time, money to be spent. And it helps you be more you’re, you’re forced to kind of think of like your calendar of, uh, events coming up. Maybe it’s different specials you’re going to have, and you’re, you’re planning out that content around that plan. And so you’re more proactive, proactive about what you’re planning to communicate to your audience, and less reactive to what’s going on. Now, that’s not to say that you’re not going to be able to react, or you shouldn’t be reacting because trends, um, different tactics come up all the time, you know, different life situations come up all the time that you want to be able to react to. You can’t predict everything, but the more that you are being proactive on and planning out the more space you have, and to be more creative and be able to respond when things do come up, that you weren’t planning on.
And so having a plan in place helps you be again, more proactive about your marketing and less reactive all the time.
Plans Give you a Reality Check
The ninth benefits for having a marketing plan in place is that it helps give you a good reality check. And what that means by that is there are a lot of different objectives that your company may have in place. Maybe you want to focus on building your brand, uh, gaining awareness. Maybe you want to generate more leads or build a more customer base, or just build an online community. All of those are great goals to have, but they’re very different objectives and they’re driven differently, but they’re all driven by marketing. And the momentum is started by marketing. You have this opportunity to develop a marketing plan, to ensure that your business objectives are in line and being driven by what marketing is doing.
It all comes back to making sure that your marketing is supporting your business objectives. And so that’s always something that you want to make sure is instinct aligned with each other. So when you find yourself doing some marketing campaigns and do some marketing tactics that aren’t really doing anything to, reach your, your business goals, then next should be an indication that that’s a tactic or campaign that you shouldn’t be focusing on right now investing in. And so it helps give you a reality check to say, okay, am I doing the right thing in investing in the right ways right now?
Plans Help to Improve Customer Service
And then the last reason or benefit to having a good marketing plan in place is that it helps improve your customer service. And now what I mean by that is, as we should know, customer service is key. How your customers are feeling about you, your brand, your service, your products, all these things are important and valuable to know.
And it’s what keeps things going. If your customers aren’t being satisfied with the way things are going, you’re going to get poor reviews and fewer future customers. And so having a marketing plan in place gives you an opportunity to stop, to think about your customer service plan and how you’re going to better provide better service and value to your customers ahead of time. That way, when things come up, you have that plan to fall back on, okay, we’ve planned for this there’s here is how we should respond to this situation. And so when it comes to having a marketing plan in place and, and having a customer response plan within the marketing plan, you’re going to start getting better feedback, better results, because you’re providing a better service to your customers.
All right, everyone. So there you have it. Those are my top 10 reasons for having a marketing plan in place.
I hope you have learned something today, and it gets some inspiration and motivation for developing your own marketing plan. As always, if you ever need help developing a marketing plan, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me. I would love to hear, you know, what’s going on and provide some insights and guidance on what you can do. And just so you know, coming up in a couple of weeks, our next lesson is going to be talking about my ten reasons why your marketing plan may be failing. So you may already have a marketing plan in place, but it’s not working the way you thought, and you’re not getting the results that you expected. So I’m going to look over and go over with some of the top 10 reasons why I feel like marketing plans, aren’t working for you.
If you didn’t know, we have a live session called the coffee chat, where I get together each month to provide some free content to our business owners and free encouragement, just some, some tips and tricks and trends on marketing things going on. I would love to see you at one of those. You can get information about our coffee chat here.
