The easiest way to create a business marketing plan is to use a marketing plan outline. The outline we provide here can be applied to virtually any home based business.
Creating your marketing plan will require you to go through the following seven steps:
- Identify your purpose
- Specify how you’ll achieve your purpose
- Specify your target market
- Identify your position
- Decide what marketing tools you’ll use
- Define your identity
- Determine your marketing budget
What you end up with after going through these seven steps will be the seven components of your business marketing plan.
Your business marketing plan might be as long as 10 or more pages, or as short as a single page. That all depends on your individual situation. However, for most new home based businesses, shorter is probably better. You can, and most likely will, tweak the plan as you progress.
Lets discuss each item in some detail. In doing so, we’ll use a fictitious on-site auto detailing business called “Your Place Auto Detailing” as an example.
Identify Your Purpose
Identifying your purpose refers to the purpose of your marketing. What result do you want your business marketing plan to achieve? Our auto detailing business might identify the purpose of its marketing something like this:
“The purpose of Your Place Auto Detailing marketing is to create and maintain a base of loyal customers that results in 500 sales in the first year.”
Let’s look at this a little closer. Does 500 sales mean 500 new customers? Not necessarily. In fact, Your Place Auto Detailing is looking to create a base of loyal customers. So I think it’s safe to assume that they’re looking for a lot of repeat business - something that’s very possible in this kind of business. They’re creating a marketing plan that will get that result.
The point here is to be specific about what you want your business marketing plan to accomplish, and to keep that specified purpose very much in mind as you create your plan.
Specify How You’ll Achieve Your Purpose
How you’ll achieve your purpose focuses on the benefits you’ll deliver.
When you think of benefits, don’t confuse them with features. Features aren’t benefits. Features deliver benefits. For example: GPS on a car is a feature. The benefit delivered by GPS is ease of navigation.
Your Place Auto Detailing might specify how they’ll achieve their purpose as follows:
"We will accomplish our purpose by positioning ourselves as a provider of highest quality, value added services at competitive prices. We will provide our customers with a clean car, not just car cleaning."
Do you recognize the benefit here?
Specify Your Target Market
This is pretty self explanatory. Your target market consists of the people or groups of people you wish to capture as customers. And it’s perfectly alright for a home based business to have more than one target market.
For Your Place Auto Detailing, a target market would probably consist of individuals who are somewhat affluent since they would be much more likely to have the discretionary income to spend on detailing services.
Another target market might be busy middle-income individuals who might not ordinarily purchase detailing services, but would take advantage of such services at more competitive prices.
Can you see how this second group might be a good target market for Your Place Auto Detailing given the benefit they offer of high quality, value added service at competitive prices?
Identify Your Position
Your position in the marketplace is important because people recall information about businesses based on one or two attributes of the business that they use as “tabs” to quickly recall the information when they need it later on.
If someone decides they need auto detailing, they’ll unconsciously search their brain for information about detailing services they’ve learned about over time. What they’ll likely retrieve about Your Place Auto Detailing is the convenience of having the work done at their home or place of business rather than having to drive to a shop someplace and waste time reading old magazines in a waiting room while their car is being serviced.
Your position is what sets you apart from others in your field.
Decide What Marketing Tools You’ll Use
The marketing tools section of your business marketing plan will be the longest. This is where you’ll list all of the marketing tools, tactics, and strategies you’ll use to promote your business.
Be very careful here. There are so many cool things you could do to promote your business, it’s really easy to get carried away.
Start by making a list of all the possible ways you could promote your business. Don’t evaluate the ideas yet, just write them down as they come to you. You may want to carry a notebook with you so you can write ideas down that come to you as you go about your day. And they will come to you.
Once you’ve got a good list of ideas, review each item and determine if it’s an appropriate and cost effective way to reach your target market. This will probably require some research on your part to find out about costs, etc. But it’s time well spent.
If an item it is appropriate and cost effective, include it in your business marketing plan. If not, tuck it away someplace because it may be appropriate and cost effective someday.
One last point about Marketing tools. There are a lot of marketing tools that cost nothing to do. Nothing in dollars that is. But they all require some time and effort. Don’t use a marketing tool just because it’s free. Free is great, and I encourage you to use all the free tools you can. But just because something is free doesn’t mean it’s appropriate.
Here’s an example: Given their target market, would it make sense for Your Place Auto Detailing to place a free ad on a community bulletin board located at the unemployment office? Of course not. The reason should be obvious.
Define Your Identity
Your company identity consists of the intrinsic characteristics of your company. More than the product of service you offer, it’s the very personality of your business. It’s not something you can buy or force. It’s something that’s developed and fostered over time in everything you do and every employee you hire.
Ponder this question carefully: What do you want your company’s personality to be?
Write it down. Commit to it. Then create and foster it.
Determine Your Marketing Budget
The last step is to determine your marketing budget. This is simply a percentage of your total sales. By tying your marketing budget to total sales, you’re automatically allowing for growth. It’s as simple as that.
In Conclusion
Remember, for your home based business to be successful, you must create a cohesive and effective business marketing plan. Hopefully, this marketing plan outline will be helpful to you in developing a solid marketing plan for your home based business. Once you’ve created your marketing plan, it should be incorporated into your overall business plan.
If you haven’t begun creating your business plan, Creating Your Business Plan can help.
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