Does your business have strong a marketing plan?

In a recent discussion on the business forum, No more business plans please!, the well known author, Vincent Marino raised the issue that very few people actually use a business plan and only create it to obtain funding from a financial institution. As a great supporter of a proper business plan, it made me think about businesses and their marketing plans.

In my career I have seen several businesses that didn't have a marketing plan, or some that had a 5-year marketing plan. I even know of large corporate companies that have 10-year marketing plans!

Now having a marketing plan for more than 1 year simply is ridiculous. Before the nineties it might have made sense having marketing plans that was planned ahead so far, but times has changed. We are now in a era where marketing has to have a day by day plan, week by week plan and a month by month plan. The rate at which marketing is evolving is far to fast for a 5-year or 10-year marketing plan.

Years ago there was only a handful newspapers, radio stations, magazines and TV channels. There were very few businesses that distributed pamphlets, at street corners, postal boxes and residential homes. Infact marketing was easy and affordable, because consumers had much less choice than they have today. Spending money on a radio ad made a lot more sense than it does today, simply because the reach was far more than it is today. Conventional marketing or as I like to call it, interrupt marketing made sense and the ROI was much higher than it is using the same techniques today.

The face of marketing is changing so rapidly that business has to adjust and very fast. For example, it is no secret that the Apple TV has the ability to kill the 30 second ad breaks on TV. Although I personally think that this TV will not be so successful as to kill the 30 second ad, it certainly shows that there is a frightening future for the advertising industry.

Most advertising ad agencies can use money to make money by simply buying interrupt marketing utilizing a Loerie award production. Without jokes, if you give them a small budget, they are completely lost and have no idea how to do your marketing. However, does a small business need a large budget to do marketing? The answer is very simple. No!

That is what a marketing plan is used for. The main objective with a marketing plan is to ensure that you as the business owner utilize the funds available on the correct marketing tools. Any newspaper will tell you that you need to repeat your advertising frequently for it to be successful. Repetition is part of any marketing campaign. Placing one ad in a newspaper will definitely not work most of the time.

A marketing plan is essential for you to be able to know who your prospective market is and to ensure that you utilize as many marketing resources as possible to target them. I once listened to a well known speaker telling us that he had close to 100 websites with which he is making large amounts of money. The problem is that he made use of what I like to call shotgun marketing. Shotgun marketing is when you fire one shot of lots of the same projectiles and hopefully you hit something. It is completely focusing on one marketing method to hit as many people as possible. The problem with teaching this to people is that these customers tend to have very low retention and often makes one purchase and then they forget about you.

Marketing is about acquiring customers as well as retaining them. ROI only becomes really applicable if you can keep a customer for long periods of time. We all know that it costs a lot more to get a customer back, than to keep him happy. Your business's marketing plan will have to cover these aspects, and you will need to ensure that you stick to the plan.

My wife recently bought an advertising package from a well-known local Internet directory. They cost her a large amount of money each month and she simply can't afford to pay this money without getting sales in return. The irony is, that she is not getting any traffic from them, nor is she getting any sales from them. The salesman that sold her the package, sold it to her for one reason, she didn't have a marketing plan and thought that the package sounded like a sure way to reach her target market. If she made sales of it, she would definitely be able to afford it.

So what is the lesson to be learned from all this? A marketing plan will prevent you from wasting money on the wrong marketing avenue for your budget. It will prevent you from falling to the sales talk of an excellent salesman and think clearly about what your budget truly allows you.