How to Do Your 2012 Small Business Marketing Plan the Right Way

You likely don’t have a sales force, individual, or company marketing plan do you?  You just keep doing the same old marketing tasks year after year and kind of think that you have all the bases covered, right? 

Well, you are not alone. Few small businesses have a solid marketing plan and one big reason is that they just don’t know the steps in creating one.  Here are ALL the steps, just so you know them. You have all the tools now to make a plan that best fits your firm.

By the way, these are the same steps for Wal-Mart, Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, Conoco-Phillips, Fanny Mae, General Electric and the other Fortune 500 firms.   They are the same for an individual entrepreneur selling needlepoint over a website---and the same for you and your small business. 

Take note---consider saving this column and sending it to everyone in your company if you think your firm is bordering on marketing chaos.  If it is, send this column to the owners and managers.  They need to create, with your help, a marketing plan, before it is too late.

Step One:  Set Team or Company Mission, Scope and Goals

Top management or the sales manager should establish these, gaining input from within the company, from outside resources such as their ad agencies, media buyers, office managers, marketing consultants, city or county sales statistics, etc.

Mission and Scope

Mission and Scope refer to the nature of the company’s products and actions in relation to its markets and audiences. 

For example, a metal fabricating firm has a different mission and scope than would a realty agent who sold only beachfront mansions.  Mission and scope answer the questions, “What business (or niche) are we in?” and “What markets should we address?”

They include estimates of future products, services and specialties and changes in technology.  For example, designing a better web site or launching a new active blogging program, or online business networking program is an activity that might affect marketing planning, such as launching advertising in SanClementePatch.com. 
Goals

Goals are the results that the team’s operating plan should achieve.  Individual strategies and programs support the plan and by reaching its marketing objectives, the team achieves its marketing goals. 

Goals should be expressed in a way so that the team’s progress towards reaching them can be first benchmarked and then measured.  They should be set high enough to challenge the eager beavers, but not so high that they are unachievable.  Goals are expressed in both dollar and non-dollar terms.

Dollar goals are expressed many ways.  They can be directly related to profit or total sales, commissions, or to factors such as return on Investment (ROI) or simply, in big firms, how much the stock price has gone up.

For, say, realty agents, year-to-year dollar and non-dollar goals often relate to number of transactions, commission amount earned, total sales volume, total rentals, etc.  They can even relate to the success of community service programs undertaken and gain or loss of public recognition and approval.  A goal might be “becoming established as the top realty agent in X and Y city neighborhoods through front door or direct mail farming programs.

Step Two – Getting Organized for Planning

In big firms, many managers organize for marketing planning.  In a small firm, each person could be assigned a certain task.  All departments should be included and each should receive a list of items that top management needs, based on the mission, scope and goals already established.

Some of the main tasks in organizing include assessing what is going on NOW.  There should be an honest situation analysis, a market profile, both what the market is doing now and what it likely WILL be doing.  You need to know the market’s wants, needs and its attitudes toward what you are providing.  What do you have that makes people buy from you instead of from your competitors?  What do you and your staff do better than others?  What do you fall down at doing? 

Is your advertising really positioning you properly in your marketplace?  Are your facilities adequate for now and the near future?  Is your training program adequate?

Once everything is known, quantified and written down about your staff, you can move to the next step, which is the situation analysis.

Step Three - Write the Situation Analysis

The situation analysis gives you facts needed for planning.  It answers basic questions including:

Who are your prospective buyers and sellers?  Where are they?  Local? Other states, a certain city or neighborhood or development? Are they in county industrial parks? Do they belong to business or manufacturing associations where each member’s address, etc. is listed?  Chambers of commerce have great widely varying “hit lists” members. What do they want and need that you sell?  What can your staff give them that they cannot find elsewhere? How can you get them to enter YOUR store as they walk down mainstreet?

Where is your sales staff (or even yourself) now and where do you want everyone to be X years from now?  Why?  What problems do you need to solve to get there?  Is what you are doing now going to get you there? Grab a pencil. You cannot do this stuff in your head.

Who do you compete with?  Are they targeting the same audiences that you are?  How would you define THEIR goals and strategies, strengths, weaknesses, service, marketing approach? Is their sales pitch better than yours? What IS your sales pitch, anyway?

The best way to gather this data is to assign staff members each a certain number of tasks and have them do local research in that area.  With a staff, you may first have to sell them on the value of even doing a marketing plan, before they will wholeheartedly participate. 

Some tasks might include collecting documented data on your competitors, such as their annual sales, target audiences, states, regions or neighborhoods (whether local or national), sales forces individual and collective strengths, weaknesses, community image, traffic and street access at location compared to yours, etc. 

Put all this in tabbed files or in PC folders.  But organize it well.  The Google Desktop software for finding everything on your computer is an asset here.  This data will form much of the foundation for your objectives.

Step Four – Set Marketing Objectives

After you finish defining the corporate goals and have made a situation analysis, you can lay out your marketing objectives.

Marketing objectives actually provide targets that help you direct your marketing strategies.  Marketing objectives are time-phased sub-goals for reaching your overall team goals.  They answer questions like “what profile do you want for your business next year?”  And “what criteria will best get you there?”

The validity of a marketing objective is tested by asking you whether it will serve the best interests of the firm a whole.  Thus, marketing objectives must fit with each person on the team, and each department ---retail sales clerks, online sales people, OEM and wholesale sales departments, machine operators, delivery people, etc. This is accomplished by having each department head submit and review all marketing objectives before they become concrete.

All objectives need to fit within the framework of the situation analysis and be compatible with each other and with related strategies.  They should be measurable, attainable, acceptable by all the staff members or departments, results-oriented, consistent with one another, flexible (very important...iron clad rules hinder more than help...objectives can change.) Marketing objectives should also be challenging or why have them?

Examples of Objectives:

Gain 30% top-of-head name awareness (as researched in telephone polls) of each sales person’s territory that they service before, say, March 31.

Increase our share of customers in the Willow Glen industrial park by 25% before June 30, ___.

Have our web site show up within the top three positions for “San Clemente + (Generic name of Product you Supply” on Google.com by Sept. 24th.

Increase overall dollar sales volume on our new A and B widgets by 400 units at year’s end.

Hire two new Y territory sales people as soon as our sales volume in Y hits X hundred thousand this year.

Step Five – Develop Strategies, Selecting the Most Viable Ones

A strategy is the plan of how you will use what you have to reach a goal.  There are countless strategies, but you have to pick just a few, so you choose the ones most likely to succeed in reaching your goal(s).  They must be consistent with one another and support the objectives they are supposed to help achieve.  They involve policies, procedures and programs.

A policy broadly defines an action or approach to use.  They often involve self-imposed restrictions.  For example, you want to reduce costs in putting in a new sidewalk leading up to the back door entrance to your building. 

However, your personal policy is to definitely support the needs of impaired people in wheelchairs...so you spend more money than you normally would in building a particularly terrific ramp offering them smooth access directly from the parking lot.  A policy is often an exception to what is otherwise a rule.

A procedure is like the operating instruction you get with a new tool or product to assemble.  It tells you exactly how it will be done.

A program answers who, what, where, when, and how about factors needed to reach a particular goal, plus usually, the budget.

You can generate strategies from a whim or intuition, or better yet, from careful study of what’s available to you, based on your research and reports from members of your sales team.

Be sure to generate many strategies so you explore a wide range of possibilities and don’t just knee-jerk yourself and everyone else into the first “great idea” that pops up.  Encourage many “devil’s advocates,” both inside and outside of the company.

Some strategies for teams of, say Realtors, might include:

Constantly hammer home in ads how we are special...we are the (what?) realty team.

Establish a mentoring program internally so our new agents “get with it” sooner.

Hire web-savvy agents to back up our Internet claims of being first on the Web, locally.

Heavily reinforce that we support local non-profit groups and donate to them. Sponsor a Spring golf tourney annually benefitting Marine families.

Assign one team member or a team to gather statistics having strategic marketing value to us.

Develop separate ad campaigns for each of your target audiences in the correct media, instead of rerunning the same old stuff all the time.

When all the strategies are in, they need to be time-framed on paper in a master schedule so that it becomes apparent what elements dovetail and what ones overlap.  Sufficient lead-time is then built-in for designing ads and mailers, hiring direct mail firms, door-hanger distribution firms and other outsourcing groups needed for a coordinated promotion. Never rush a promotion just to meet a deadline.

But wait...we’re not done with strategies yet... they need to each be broken up into their sub-programs, which can include advertising, publicity, sales promotion, charity work, coordination with the Chamber of Commerce/other local non-profits, special seasonal promotions, routine recurring tasks, budgets, etc.  These then need to be time-framed and individually costed-out within the larger period of the master schedule. 

You will also need to assign person-hours to each strategy, based on the personnel available.  Above all, make each activity in the master program assigned to an individual by name.  This establishes responsibility for actually getting things done.  Without doing this, little will get done.  Trust me.

Step 6. Tactics

Tactics come into play, too.  To have a sale at your store is a tactic. To set yourself up as a discount store is a strategy.

Too many firms spend hours in long strategy meetings agonizing about what to do next. Traditionally, firms who spend a lot of time in strategy meetings are not very good planners. They often have a siege mentality because they ARE constantly under siege by competitors in "me-too" kinds of markets. But it is quite easy to turn the tables on an entrenched competitor in a "me-too" marketplace if you use the right tactics. Lacking them, you get nowhere.

To find good tactics, usually you have to discover those things that you can do that your competitor can't. And when you employ those things, they are often referred to as "guerrilla tactics." Typically, firms are too close to the trees to spot potential guerrilla marketing tactics. That's often why they bring in an outside consultant who can see the forest better, i.e. clearly and objectively. It’s why they hire 40-year, outside marketing consultants like me.

Good planners, however, don't etch their plans in concrete. They are willing to try new things as immediate opportunities present themselves. Compared to doing nothing new to market products, it is often better to "fire, ready, aim" than it is to "ready, aim, fire."

Write down who does what and who reports to whom on each program, so everyone knows the chain of command before strategies get launched. 

When you have the overall master program done, write it all out and distribute it to everyone on your team.  Invite them to comment, make suggestions, changes, and mark all over it for you.

Sound like work?  Well, few will do everything here, but this at least shows you the scope of program planning that hardly anyone, except larger firms, does anymore.  Still, you are now starting to see what goes into the preparation of a true marketing plan and you can adopt from this material as you see fit.

Step Seven – The Marketing Plan Written Out

There are no rules here for length.  A successful and complete plan is one that meets the requirements and objectives of your operation.  Most firms, even entire offices or regions of a smaller franchised national firms, lack a comprehensive local marketing plan, so don’t feel bad if you’ve never had one before.  Most smaller firms just do the same old thing, year after year, never stopping to even brain storm, let alone research, what they MIGHT be doing better.

Bottom line?  Plans should make it clear what each person should be doing at all times during the year, working towards the success of one or many strategies, objectives or goals.  Studies show that the simplest plans are often the best ones.

Just be sure to make sub-plans for each broad category such as advertising, public relations, publicity, sales promotion, direct mail, etc., and a budget for each that is based on the strategies that you have approved.

Step Eight – Telling Others about the Plan and Getting it Going

Sadly, many firms research, write and print up beautiful marketing plans, introduce them with a golden cover and much grandeur, then forget all about them a few days later and go back to the same thing they were doing before. However, remember that shopworn old definition of insanity:  “Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result each time.” 

Well, if what you have been doing has not been working, it is time to do something different...maybe radically different.  That’s where a careful assessment of your operation, a search for new possibilities, and a marketing plan that takes advantage of those possibilities, may be right for you.  Best of all, you don’t have to wait...you can begin today.

The marketing plan sets the direction for your company for a specified period and assigns responsibilities to individuals who will make the plan work (or not).  Personnel will be more likely to accept your plan if they had a part early on in helping develop it, which is why you use “bottoms-up” research results and the input that they provide, rather than “top-down” dictating by you and other bosses when making one of these plans.

In some companies, if security or privacy is an issue, only parts of the marketing plan, once finalized, need to be given to certain members of the team,.  In such cases, people only need to get the part that concerns them and any attendant budget.  A semi-formal meeting, A SPECIAL MEETING, perhaps in the clubroom of a nice local restaurant or golf course, is often good for presenting the basic final plan to everyone.  Remember, If you don’t make it a big deal, they won’t either.

Step Nine – Controls Should Be Built In

Controls are needed to assess where performance currently resides in relation to where the marketing plan said it SHOULD be at a given time.  Remember, you do not control dollars or schedules or standards; you control the people who are responsible for a plan underway.  The controls should be easy to use, economical, flexible and objective and include corrective actions and alternate activities if the planned ones reach an impasse.

Control generally involves three parts...
Defining the Standards
Measuring the Performance against the standards, and
Correcting any Deviations.

Standards are defined in dollar volume, units of sales, transactions handled, number of sales, and increase in leads, etc....almost anything that can be quantified.  Participants should be compelled to turn in timely reports on their assigned activities and make note of deviations from set standards.  Take action when needed and do not sweat small deviations unless they portend a trend.  Sometimes major deviations simply mean that you set the bar too high to begin with.  If this is truly so, alter the plan.

Step Ten – Update the Plan to Meet Changing Circumstances

Nothing stays the same in any marketplace.  A new method of videotaping products for sale and posting them in minutes on the Internet could virtually overnight replace the current still pictures of your widgets residing on the pages of certain product catalogs. 

If that happened, how would you stay current?  Say you are a realty firm and a commercial property investor group wanted you to handle 50 multi-family-dwelling properties (apartment buildings) and you are 70% geared for residential sales, what would you do?  Certainly, the condition would require some quick alteration of your marketing plan and personnel. Maybe what’s needed is even partnering with a friendly competitor who is more steeped in commercial sales.

In summary, it seems that the hardest part of creating a marketing plan is being honest about what your actual resources are and writing down the truth about where your sales people, office, company, etc. stands right NOW.

If you and your peers can be honest with that part, then you have a good chance of seeing—often for the first time—those future activities that can capitalize on your assets and minimize your weaknesses. A marketing plan is merely the expression of that.

You do not need to do all the things discussed here.  Many small firms and retailers do fine with a single page marketing plan...but the lack of any plan whatsoever is usually chaos and gross lack of direction, so you might consider taking a crack at a marketing plan right now. 

A marketing plan is the equivalent of a GPS device that gets you the fastest to where you’re going with the least number of wrong turns.

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Bill Koelzer, CBC, APR is a marketing consultant to big and small firms nationwide. He is co-author, with Saddleback Community College Professor Barbara Cox, Ph.D., of the Prentice-Hall books, "Internet Marketing in Real Estate", "Internet Marketing" and Internet Marketing in Hospitality. He is also a senior editor of the 1000-page book, "Marketing Problem Solver"  Bill@Koelzer.com.