Writing a Marketing Plan for Your Small Business: The 3 questions you must answer

Whether you are just starting up your own business or have been working for yourself for several years, a clear marketing plan is essential to not only show you what you should be doing to attract clients to your business, but also to keep you on track.

And despite common misconceptions, a marketing plan is really quite a simple document to produce.

There are far too many complicated templates that can be downloaded off the internet or got from a business book.  And when you feel you may to produce a 20 page document it can be the fastest way to put off the whole planning process.

There are only 3 questions that you need to answer in your marketing plan and they are:

1.  Where are you now?

2.  where are you going?

3.  How are you going to get there?

And they need to be in this order.

Lots of small business owners jump in to the “how are you going get there” question and get bogged down with marketing strategies and tools that, frankly, may not help you bit.

Start with the easiest question of all “where are you now?”. Not only will this help build your confidence up (after all, you should know the answer to this question without much thinking!), it will give you a baseline from where to start building.

The second question “where are you going?” is designed to focus you on targets and goals.  Where do you want to be this time next year?  How many clients do you want to managing?  How many hours do you want to be working? How much money do you want to be creating?

Your destination needs to specific.  It needs to be something that you can measure.  It’s got to have a timescales.  And it’s got to be realistic and something that you know is achievable. (Yup, you’ve guessed it – it has to a SMART goal!).

Once you have your SMART desination, you will find it far easier to answer the third and final question “How are you going to get there?”.

So forget about mission statements and synopsises.  Get to the basics and focus on what’s going to work for you on a day-to-day basis.

Other articles you may be interested in:

1. The 5 Marketing Rules for Small Business Owners in 2009
2. Marketing Drip-Feed is Essential for Small Business Success
3. Getting blogging: tips to get your blog writing started