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New Year, New Marketing Plan

Posted on in Small Business Tips, SME Marketing

So we’re a few weeks into the New Year. You’ve trawled through the backlog of emails and voicemails and caught up with all of the pressing tasks. Now your mind turns to the rest of 2016 – and how you’re going to grow your business…

You need a marketing plan

  • Do you have a marketing plan already? No.
  • Do you have a scarily blank piece of paper? Yes! Well that’s a start.

First, start noting down what your business objectives are for the year. If you already have a business plan, use this as your basis. If not, don’t worry; think about what you want to get out of your business this year and what direction you want to take it.

Take a look at these five questions first:

  1. What do you want to achieve in 2016? Grow your audience? Increase sales to your existing customers? Tackle a new target market. Introduce your company and product to a niche audience?
  2. Next, list your key products and services.
  3. Are you launching a new product or service in 2016? Write it down! When and how will you launch it, what are the timescales?
  4. Now think about who your target audience is, in line with the key products and services that you’ve listed above. Describe the sort of people you are planning to sell to – this will help you to identify and find them.
  5. Where are you planning to sell? Are your sales done online, in a retail setting, face-to-face or a combination of all of these channels?

Once you have these down on paper (or on your computer/tablet whichever works best for you) you can start to work out how your marketing needs to proceed, and draw up a plan of what you will do, when and where.

Make sure you include key times of the year, such as trade shows, seasonal peaks and troughs, or when your business customers plan their year ahead. This will give you a good backbone for your marketing plans, and then you can fill in the gaps in between.

You might also want to include some targets so that you can measure how effective your marketing campaigns are as the year progresses, whether that is a percentage increase in enquiries, footfall or actual sales.

Still feeling stuck? Get in touch with APM and for a set fee we will meet with you to outline your plan for 2016 with key recommendations.