Three Reasons you should have a Marketing Plan

Too often you are too busy doing what you do that you do not get time to do what really needs doing.

As Marissa Mayer the CEO of Yahoo states, “The urgent can drown out the important.”

Marketing is a part of every business, and most business owners do some form of marketing instinctively.  Unfortunately, like almost everything we do, to truly excel, one must go beyond the normal, break out from the average – and become exceptional.

Exceptional marketing can have a phenomenal impact on your business sales and overall revenue.  Awesome marketing can also make any business more fun.  Marketing is about meeting the needs the client, and communicating that to the client.  And with happy clients comes a enjoyable business.

“The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing.” Tom Fishburne

A marketing plan is simply a document that describes how you meet the client needs, and how you will communicate that process to the client. It can be as short as a single page, or it can be a comprehensive 50 page report.  Whatever works best for your organization.

Here are three reasons you should have a marketing plan.

1. Clarity and Focus.

A marketing plan defines key marketing factors. Every business needs to make key marketing decisions relating to these key marketing factors. You need to determine who your target market is.  You also need to define your brand.  These two factors are critically important to your long-term success.  Bringing clarity and focus to these two key marketing factors will greatly enhance your business.  This makes it much easier to tell others what you do, and to gather the right clients for your business.

2. Save Money!

Every business spends money on marketing in some fashion. Advertising, signage, business cards, events, website.  And if you are the rare business that is spending minimal on these things – you are probably spending time on marketing. Explaining what you do, or maybe what you do not do. Dealing with customer service issues or longer sales cycles. Time is money.  By having an effective marketing plan you can use both your time and money wisely – saving more of it for even better marketing that increases sales and revenue even more – which brings us to the next reason.

3. Increased Sales and Revenue.

This is the whole point of marketing – and an effective marketing plan will increase both your sales and your revenue.  We should be clear that when planning your marketing – you should plan to increase both sales (overall amount sold in number of units) and revenue (money generated by sales).  Simply increasing sales, while usually positively impacts revenue, is not always the easiest or best objective for your marketing plan.  There are times when you can significantly increase revenue through very low cost marketing strategies.

“Our job is to connect to people, to interact with them in a way that leaves them better than we found them, more able to get where they’d like to go.” – Seth Godin