guide to small business marketing banner

How to Create a Small Business Marketing Plan in 6 Easy Steps!

What do you need help with?

Select all that apply

What are your goals?

Select all that apply

Please let us know your company website URL

We’re putting your marketing plan & pricing options together. Who can we send them to?

How do you put together a small business marketing plan that works? Join us in our guide to small business marketing and see how you can put together a simple plan of action.

Have you been ‘volunteered’ to put together the marketing strategy for your small business? 

Blink twice if the answer is yes.

If this is the case, you may be tempted to Google ‘small business online marketing guide,’ print the first result that appears, and go off on an early lunch break.

Because, let’s be honest, no one likes writing reports.

However, what if we told you it was possible to write a simple business marketing plan that your boss will love and boost your sales into the bargain?

Introducing your guide to small business marketing!

In this article, we’ll show you how to put together a plan that takes you one giant leap towards determining the right marketing tactics to use.

Season 6 Netflix GIF by Gilmore Girls  - Find & Share on GIPHY

Grab a notebook, find that Sports Direct-sized mug, and pour yourself a coffee. You’ve got this.

1. Determine where you are now

Before you start buying ad space and wondering if you have the money to buy that awesome-looking social media scheduling software, you need to assess your current situation.

After all, you can’t work out where you want to go if you don’t know how to get there!

Consider the following:

  • What the industry is like. Are there any upcoming changes in the law or industry that may affect your business?
  • Who your competitors are. You don’t need to be the best; you just need to be better than your rivals. Who is the Johnny Lawrence to your Daniel La Russo, the Moriarty to your Sherlock Holmes, the Nicki Minaj to your Cardi B?
  • What your unique selling point is. What does your business do better than everyone else?
  • What you don’t do well. Is there anything you fall short on that you need marketing to help with?
  • What you’ve done in regard to marketing your business in the past. Write down everything you’ve done and what you got out of it. It doesn’t matter if the answer is ‘nothing’ as we’re going to improve on this

Scribble all this down. It will help give you insight as you put your plan together.

Writing notes down on paper

2. Define your target audience

Here’s the second of our small business marketing tips. 

Have you ever asked your boss who your target audience is, and they’ve gone: ‘our target audience is everyone!’

No, no, and no. Bad boss.

It’s essential to have a target audience in mind for your product or service, as this gives you a clear steer when it comes to your marketing efforts. Try and make everyone happy, and you’ll end up with a mushy, fuzzy marketing strategy that nobody wants to engage with.

‘When you try and appeal to everyone, you won’t appeal to anyone.’ Wise words. We wish we knew who said them so we can send them a fruit basket.

You need to know who your ideal customer is, and this is precisely what we will do in this step of our guide to small business marketing.

Think about your target customer and ask yourself the following questions. Bonus points if you’ve got customer data you can use here too.

  • What’s their name? This might sound silly, but giving your target customer a name helps make it easier to relate to them. ‘Shall we set up a TikTok profile for the business?’ ‘Nah, Gary won’t go for it’
  • How old are they?
  • Do they have any kids or pets?
  • Where do they live?
  • What industry do they work in?
  • What’s their job?
  • What hobbies do they have? Again this may sound superfluous to requirements, but it will help you know which digital marketing channels you need to employ to appeal to them
  • What social media channels do they use most?
  • What newspapers, magazines and news websites do they read?
  • How does your product or service make their lives easier?

The more information you have about your ideal customer, the easier it will be to target them with laser precision.

Woman shopping in supermarket

3. Understand your budget

We know, we know, talking about money is crass. However, it’s an essential part of our ultimate small business marketing guide. You need to know what your marketing budget is now, and what it will be in the future.

Here’s an interesting fact for you. Did you know the average marketing budget is the equivalent of nearly 10% of company revenue? So if yours falls below this, it might be time to ask the MD for a bump…

The good news is that there is still lots of marketing you can do if your budget is not where you want it to be. 

For example, search engine optimisation (SEO) and its little sister, local SEO, are cost-effective ways to bring organic traffic to your website. We’ll talk about this in more detail later.

4. Know where you want to be

The first step of this guide to small business marketing looked at where your small business currently was. Now, you need to look at your future goals and what you want to achieve with your marketing plan.

All the goals you create need to be SMART. This means they are:

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Achievable
  • Realistic
  • Timely

So ‘I want to increase sales’ is a lousy goal as it doesn’t have an endgame in mind. 

Enormous yellow sale sign on window

However, ‘I want to achieve a 15% increase in sales on our website by the end of Q3’ is a good goal. This is because you’ve put a specific (and attainable) number in there, a channel you want to focus on, and a time you want to achieve it by.

It’s better to have three or four well-thought-out goals than lots of wishy-washy ones.

5. Identify the right marketing tactics

So now you know the goals you want to achieve, you need to consider the marketing channels you’ll utilise to accomplish them.

The thing we love most about digital marketing is that there are so many options available. 

You can use SEO to rank in the search engines, pay-per-click advertising to get your customers’ attention, and digital PR to get publicity from other websites. It’s a veritable buffet of options for small businesses.

While it may be tempting to use every single marketing channel you have at your disposal to get the right customers, it’s often better to focus on a handful. 

Let’s go back to the goal: ‘I want to achieve a 15% increase in sales on our website by the end of Q3’. You may decide that the best way to get results is through:

  • Optimising your existing website for SEO
  • Starting a blog that you can optimise for relevant keywords
  • An email marketing campaign to nurture customers that aren’t ready to buy
  • Retargeting ads to encourage previous shoppers to come back to your website 

This plan of action will provide a good return on investment, and is relatively low-cost.

6. Put together your action plan

Final part of this guide to small business marketing plans!

It’s time to put everything you’ve learned together. You need to take the goals and marketing tactics and break them down into small chunks, alongside when they will be done and who will do them.

Let’s imagine you need to clean your house. If you write down ‘clean the whole house,’ it’s too big a chore and you’re not going to do it (let’s be honest). 

Person cleaning the house

However, splitting the large task into more manageable bits like ‘clean the oven,’ ‘defrost the fridge,’ and ‘wash the bedding’ is much easier. The same logic applies to your marketing plan.

Let’s take your goal of starting a blog. You could look at it in the following way:

NumberTaskWho will do itDeadline
1Set up blog subdomainFred7 November
2Carry out keyword researchMartha7 November
3Write first blogBilly18 November
4Create imagery for blogJaney18 November
5Post blog on websiteBilly22 November

That way, everyone knows what they need to do, and when it needs to be done by. They’re happy, you’re happy, your boss is happy, your customers are happy. 

Result.

So go forth, get writing, and create the best damn marketing plan your manager has ever seen in their lives!

Neil Patrick Harris Dr Horrible GIF - Find & Share on GIPHY

We hope you’ve found this guide to small business marketing useful! 

If you’ve read this article all the way through and still aren’t inspired to draft that killer marketing plan, we can do the hard work for you. 

(We probably should have started with that, shouldn’t we?)

Take our free marketing plan that’s bespoke to your business and tell your manager you wrote it yourself – we won’t say a word. Our experts will look at your website, assess your competitors and suggest which digital marketing services you should invest in. 

It’s the pain-free way to create a marketing strategy for your small business.

Subscribe to Our Marketing Blog For SMEs

Receive weekly updates from our team of digital marketing experts. We reveal the exact strategies and tactics we use to successfully grow our clients businesses and provide inbound marketing tips and advice so valuable your face just might melt from the heat! (Its worth the risk!).

Share Now

Start Increasing Your Organic Traffic Today!

Unlock the Secrets to Small Business SEO Success!

Unleash the Power of 5 High-Impact SEO Techniques to Dominate Your Niche and Boost Your Profits! 💰💪