Whenever we meet with a prospective client, one of the first things we explain is our belief in the importance of having a solid Strategic Marketing Plan. For all business owners, large or small, writing a yearly Marketing Plan that identifies what you’re hoping to accomplish, and how you will go about doing so, is the foundation for all that you do that year. With the Internet, it’s easier than ever to reach your customers & prospects, connect with them, build relationships, and drive sales, that many business owners jump right in without first creating a Strategic Marketing Plan. This post will provide you with the top 3 reasons why it’s imperative that you create a Strategic Marketing Plan for your small business.
Before we get into why it’s important to have a Marketing Plan for your business, let’s first define what we think a solid Strategic Marketing Plan looks like. Let’s start at the top…When we create a Strategic Marketing Plan for a customer, we start out by learning their business. We then go through exercises aimed at finding out what our customer’s organizational goals are, and who their target audience is. Once we have a strong understanding of our customers’ business, their goals, and their audience, we start building out the Strategic Marketing Plan.
If you’re creating a plan yourself, be sure to list out your organizational goals for the current year, determine who your target audience is, and where those folks spend their time online. If your target audience uses foursquare, then you should have an online presence on foursquare. If your target audience doesn’t use Facebook, then don’t spend your time using Facebook as a marketing tool.
Creating your Strategic Imperatives is the next step in the process. Strategic Imperatives are simply how you will go about achieving your goals. A few examples might be, “Use online tools to reach more people, build relationships, and ultimately drive sales”, or “Create a blog to provide free articles about XYZ industry, my products, and our business philosophies”.
Once you know what your goals are, how you will achieve those goals, and who you’re looking to target, now it’s time to create your marketing tactics. Tactics are the actual campaigns that you will run to reach and engage your target audience. A few example tactics might be, “Create a YouTube Video Series to educate consumers on my services”, or “Use Twitter to promote my blog articles”. After the marketing tactics are created, your plan is complete.
Now that you know how to create a Strategic Marketing Plan, below are 3 reasons why it’s critical to your success. A Strategic Marketing Plan provides business owners with:
- A map for achieving yearly goals
- The ability to track success through individual tactic performance measures – Performance measures should be setup for every Marketing Tactic
- An understanding of the time, and budget, needed to execute on the Strategic Marketing Plan
Have you taken the time to create a Strategic Marketing Plan for your business? Has it helped your business?
A few reasons why traditional newspaper ads just don’t make “CENTS” for small businesses:
As we discussed in the last post, you want to be sure to video record the fashion show. This is the ultimate content piece for post-event promotion. This truly let’s those who were unable to attend the live show, see what they missed. It’s the centerpiece of post-event content. This video will be the video that local media outlets use when they write stories on how great the Fashion Show was. Be sure to capture the event from multiple angles if you can. Run secondary cameras to capture B-Roll footage. This way when it comes time to put the final video together, there is plenty of core footage and even more filler footage for use in the video. 
The Swarm Badge on Foursquare is unlocked when a Foursquare flash mob is created at any location. A Foursquare flash mob consists of at least 50 people being in the same place at the same time. Now, of course, you can influence this so that a Foursquare flash mob occurs at your small business, just like this 
The biggest key to the college student working on a side project, or business owner looking to grow her business, to becoming a star is their ability to use video to communicate their message, just as Hollywood stars use video to communicate their acting talent. Video, more than other content forms, captures personality and creates a deeper connection with the audience. Due to decreasing video production and distribution costs, everyone can become an online video celebrity. Do you have a crazy lead Chef at your restaurant that you’ve always said, this guy could have his own show? Well, give him his own show. Create a YouTube Channel and turn your lead Chef into the next Emeril Lagasse. Are you a quirky fashion designer with passionate ideas about the future of fashion in America? Create your own Future of Fashion Channel on YouTube and start blasting out videos about fashion. Do you walk dogs for a living? Start recording your “Doggy Adventures” and publish those videos to your YouTube Channel. Start educating dog owners about the benefits of exercise for dogs. 
During your 
Knowing that you’re all setup to accomplish your goals of having a full crowd of loyal customers, local residents, and local media attend the Fashion Show, as well as, a plan in place for selling $2,000 worth of clothes to those folks during the Fashion Show, you can now move your efforts to setting up your store for the Fashion Show. A few things to consider when staging your clothing store for a Fashion Show:
Once you’ve created a Google Places Profile for your small business, you can then begin using your profile as a way to drive traffic to your blog. First, navigate to your Google Places listing, click “Owner-verified listing” to get to your profile. Once you’re on your Google Places profile, on the right-hand side, there is a text box for you to “post to your place page”. The post to your place page area is the area that you can use to promote a new blog post.
When promoting your blog on Google Places, simply copy/paste the article title into the text box and then copy/paste the article link into the text box. One nice thing about Posting content to your Google Places Page is that Google Places allows you to input 160 characters — 20 more than Twitter. The extra 20 characters allows you to add the article link in full. By not using a URL shortener, you are adding to your inbound links, which is the single biggest factor in ranking you higher in search.
Being able to pull off an event like hosting your own local boutique fashion show is a big feat for all business owners, both large and small. With that said, a few years ago, it was almost impossible to host your own successful Fashion Show as a small business. The main reason being costs. Tools for pulling off a fashion show have been around for a while, but those tools were just so much more expensive than tools today. Free online social tools like Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Google Local, and many others can help clothing boutique owners create a ton of buzz around their local Fashion Show. You can host a contest to give away free tickets to the community. You can offer discounts to live attendees on anything they purchase that night. Really, the opportunities are limitless if you get creative. 
As a business owner, you are probably starting to see the power of FourSquare for business. The more people you get to “check-in” at your local business, the better. Basically those customers who check-in at your local business on FourSquare, just helped you market your business. The cost to you, $0.
The key takeaway from this post should be that you need to start using Yelp to promote your small business because not only will Yelp users see your Yelp business listing (and hopefully positive customer reviews/ratings), but so too will local EveryBlock subscribers. Basically, for no money at all, you can attract new prospects to your business from two different online tools, Yelp & EveryBlock.
