Small Businesses Marketing Plan - Points to Consider

If you are going to make your business a success you need to know exactly where your business is headed. Most people starting out with a small business tend to forget the basics, and attempt to jump straight into the deep end. Taking the time out to take care of things like business plans and marketing plans is one of the most important parts of starting a business. However, there are a few key points to consider when writing a marketing plan that will form the basis of your future plan of attack to get your company noticed, whether it is online or offline.

Know What your Business Does
What is the core need for your business? In other words, why are people going to come to you for help? Be clear of your offering and what it will do for people?

Identify Who your Clients Are
This point may sound similar to the one above, however, knowing who your target clients are is of utmost importance to the longevity of your business. There are always numerous potential clients in every market, and each client comes from a different part of the market. While you can offer services and products to clients from many parts of the market, there is always one part of the market that every business needs to target for optimum ROI.

Define your competition
Once you know your target market it will be easier for you to judge who your competition in that market is. This offers the best opportunity for you to define how you will market, not around your competition, but above them. Once you know who they are you can research their marketing strategy and plan yours to better theirs. Most business owners tend to overlook this point, but knowing this will also offer you insight into their core advantage and how you can take clients away from them by offering better prices and better products or services.


Know your Brand Positioning
This is a single sentence, but you want to take a lot of time to think about what you are going to put down on paper. Your brand positioning statement symbolizes what your brand is going to mean to clients. This is your strongest competition advantage, and when you come across a competitor with an advantage over your business, your brand position sentence will hold to key to the best way forward. Your brand positioning sentence will be made up of a declaration that states how you will meet your customers' needs and how you will beat away your competitors. Think about it as a mission statement compressed into a single sentence.

While these are the key points to writing a successful marketing plan, you will want to keep one more thing in mind, and that is that clients do not come to you to buy products, they come to your business to buy the benefits and the solutions you offer because they believe that it is going make a huge difference in their lives or their businesses.