Creating a marketing plan – 10 things to consider

I've just come from a Zoom meeting with a friend of mine, somebody I've known for a couple of years. He's opening a new business and he wants me to help him create a marketing plan for the business, so it was an interesting chat. I'm excited for him about his business; it looks pretty good, but, before creating a marketing plan, I think there's lots of things that businesses need to ask themselves. 

These are 10 questions I always ask before developing a marketing plan for a business in order for the success to come to the business.

1 Who is your target market?

Pretty obvious question - who are we trying to target here? The mistake people make with this is that sometimes they say, "Well, this product is for everybody. This service is for everybody." That may be so, but you have still got to have a target. It's not the total market that I'm asking about, but it's what the target market is. It's too expensive in this day and age to go for the total market - to market to the total market - so who is the target market? Let's keep that quite narrow. We'll still connect with the people along the way, but who is that target market?

2. What's the core solution that you're offering that target market?

Get really specific with this. What is your core solution? All businesses need to solve a problem for their customers. What is the problem that you can solve?

3. Where do your current customers, if you're an existing business, currently hangout?

And when I say hangout, I'm talking about in both the real world and the digital world. In the real world, what newspapers are they reading? What are they consuming in the real world? Where are they buying food from? Where are they going out for dinner? Where are they going to watch movies? What are they doing in the real world? Where do they hangout and in the digital world, what websites are they visiting? What social media platforms are they on? What podcasts are they listening to? These are all very, very relevant pieces of information that we can use in the marketing plan.

4. Where do the potential customers hangout?

Many businesses know what their customers do. They know the behaviour of their customers but you might want to change your customer base or you might want to expand your customer base, so where do the potential customers hangout? If you're trying to change your customer profile, are they on different websites or reading different newspapers or going to different places than your current customer base? So, where do your potential customers hangout?

5. What does your brand currently say to your customers and potential customers?

Brand communicates to people before they even engage with your business, before they even buy from you, before they become customers. So, what is your brand currently? What's it currently saying?

6. Who are your competitors?

Who else has taken your customers and money in this market place? I think it's very important to know who your competitors are, but I don't like companies that particularly get obsessed with their competitors. There's a balance, but you do need to know who they are. I'll probably talk more about that in another vlog or I might write a blog about it, but don't get obsessed about them.

7. What is your uniqueness?

What is your USP? What makes you different from your competitors or other people in the marketplace? Really focusing, really think about what makes you different.

8. What is the cost of acquiring a new customer?

It's a presumption that you are already spending on marketing. What is the cost? What is it costing you to get a new customer? This is vital because if your marketing costs to acquire a customer is greater than the lifetime value of that customer, then your business isn't going to survive that long and you're going to meet a deficit. So, work out, find an equation to work out the cost of acquiring a new customer. Again, we could go into depth about that another time.

9. How many customers?

How many new customers do we really want? I've worked with bars, hairdressers and businesses who say, "We want lots and lots of customers. We want hundreds of more customers," when actually they can't facilitate or serve them. So, work out how many customers you actually want. Get specific again with that. You might want to talk about timing. You might say, “Well, actually, in a bar, we don't want any more customers from 9 until 11 at night, but we could do with some between 6pm and 9pm”.

10. How are you currently measuring your marketing spend?

It's very, very important that as a total budget - say you put in ￡1K into a marketing project - how are you actually monitoring that? How are you judging the results and the return of investment on that? It's very, very important that you have a reporting system back, so you can refine the marketing over time, improve it and see that return on investment increase.

I hope you've learnt a couple of things from these 10 points and a couple of questions that you weren't currently asking yourself.