Only 50% of small business owners have a marketing plan for their business. Maybe that’s because they think that it has to be this long and complicated document. Well, it doesn’t. In this guide, you’re going to learn how to streamline your marketing efforts and increase your chances for marketing success by using a simple one-page marketing plan template.
What is a One Page Marketing Plan?
A one-page marketing plan is an executive summary of your marketing strategy, marketing objectives and marketing activities all on a single page.
It’s different from a traditional marketing plan in that it’s more like an executive summary of what you’ve learned from your market research, SWOT analysis and the decisions that you’ve made about how your marketing is going to go for a specific period of time.
Why a One Page Marketing Plan Should be Part of Your Marketing Strategy
Small businesses don’t need a comprehensive marketing plan. What they need is an actionable marketing plan that helps you:
- Focus your team on your goals: Share your 1-page marketing plan with your marketing department, your entire team and even your vendors so that everyone knows what your priorities are.
- Stay within your marketing budget: Once you’ve specified your specific marketing strategies and tactics, you’ll only be spending money on those items and you won’t waste money on tools or programs that aren’t relevant to the success of your marketing plan.
- Generate leads: Your digital marketing campaign will fit within your entire business plan and help you achieve your marketing goals faster.
- Track key performance indicators: In order to measure the success of your marketing plan, you’ll want to track key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs can be different for every business, but some common ones are website visits, social media followers, email subscribers, and conversion rates.
What to Include in Your Marketing Plan and How to Create One
Now that you understand the benefits of having a one-page marketing plan, let’s take a closer look at what should be included in your marketing plan.
The key to a successful marketing plan is making sure that you’re following the marketing process:
- Market Research and SWOT Analysis: This is the first step to any marketing activity. Your goal here is to make sure that there is a market and demand for what you’re selling.
- Target market: This is a description of your ideal customer. Sometimes businesses will start with a target audience and create a product or service to solve their problem and sometimes a business will start with a product or service and adjust it to meet a market need.
- Offer: This is a bundle of what you’re selling. It includes any products, services, price, packaging, and how it’s delivered. This is often called “The Four Ps” and includes the Product, Price, Promotion, and Place.
- Marketing Strategy: People will tell you that there are dozens of marketing strategies. But there are only three; content marketing (inbound marketing), direct marketing (direct response marketing), and advertising. Your marketing strategy defines how you intend to attract customers.
- Implementation: This includes the marketing tactics and channels that you’re going to use to generate leads. For example, email, video, SEO, webinars, or advertising.
With all of these marketing basics in hand, you can use your one-page marketing plan template to document your decisions on a single piece of paper.
Mission Statement
Putting your mission statement or marketing message theme at the top of your marketing plan is a great way to keep you and your team focused on the right marketing message throughout the year.
As you go through the marketing plan, always go back to the mission statement or marketing message that you laid out and make sure that the campaigns you’ve outlined are in line with the brand promise you’ve laid out.
Business Objectives and Marketing Objectives
Your business objectives are the goals that you want to achieve, while your marketing objectives are how you plan to use marketing activities to help you reach those goals.
For example, if your goal is to increase sales, then one of your marketing objectives might be increasing website traffic by 10%.
Logos and other Branding
Because this will be an internal plan, the logos aren’t just there to designate your brand, they are there to show the designated logo or logos that you’re going to be using as part of your digital marketing plan. For example, you might be using specialty logos for the holidays, or you might have different logos that you’ll be using for featured products that you’re launching or promoting.
You can also add a link to a shared folder that contains all of the approved branding or marketing assets that you’ll be using in your plan.
Company Name or Product Names
In addition to your logos and branding, be sure to include any product names, service names, or campaign names that are associated with your plan.
Target Market – Create Buyer Personas
Who is the ideal customer for your product or service? Describe the physical attributes of your target audience or target customer.
In this marketing plan, we are focusing on describing PEOPLE and not organizations because people make buying decisions. This is also known as a buyer persona.
Imagine you had a video camera following your ideal customer around. What would the camera capture? Also, consider adding their frustrations and what’s important to them when they are thinking about buying your product or service.
Example:
Upscale households with incomes between $65,000 and $500,000 with an emphasis on female decision-makers between the ages of 30 and 55.
Positioning Statement – How Will You Set Yourself Apart from Other Alternatives
This is another way of saying what do you want to be known for.
A great positioning statement comes from answers to three questions –
- Who are you BEING as a business? Are you adventurous, attentive, bold, brainy or cheerful?
- What is the purpose of your business? Do you offer 30-minute delivery or 10 times return on your investment? Do you offer a product or service everyone should have access to? Is your product American made? etc.
- What can I count on you for? This might be something that people are always telling you that you or your company consistently delivers.Example:
(YOUR COMPANY NAME) is known for (WHO YOU’RE BEING) committed to (YOUR COMMITMENT). Customers can count on us to consistently (WHAT I COUNT ON YOU FOR).
Offering to Customers
Think of your product or service offering as a present that you give to your customer. It’s more than just the product or service.
It’s the “who, what, when, where, how and how much” of your product or service.
Example:
“Family Night Tuesdays” is an offering a movie theater or restaurant might have. On Family Night Tuesdays you can watch a matinee movie and get a free large popcorn all for $5 a person.
Price Strategy
This isn’t so much about exactly what your price is. It’s how you want to price your product or service.
Will you be priced at a premium such as a luxury item or do you want to be known for having a low-value price? If you have a service, will you price it by the hour or will you use a flat fee?
Example:
Our landscaping offers will be priced 20% above the competition. Our products and services will be premium brands and we guarantee that the work will be done on budget and on time. No surprises.
Distribution
How are you going to get your product or service within arm’s reach of your customer? You can use direct salespeople, distributors or the internet.
Example:
We will sell our product in retail stores as well as online via our company website.
Sales Strategy
How will you sell your product to your customers? How will you educate your customers about your product? How much will you grow the business?
Example:
We will grow sales by 20% per year by introducing new products and services to existing customers.
Service Strategy
How will you service your customers? How will they reach you, and how will you answer their questions? You can also describe a service policy here.
Example:
We will service all clients using an online customer service portal “Get satisfaction”. Customers are free to test products for 30 days free of charge.
Promotion Strategy
How will you get the word out about your product? What marketing channels will you use?
Example:
We will promote our products through blogging and article marketing, social media and joint venture partnerships with experts who have complementary products.
Marketing Research
In this section, you want to present your research as a talking point. What’s the burning issue that your offer is solving?
Example:
50% of small businesses don’t have a website. 30 % of these small businesses are overwhelmed by the technology involved in creating a website.
Measuring Success
How are you going to track your success? If email marketing is a tactic that you’re using, you might decide to measure open rates, click-through rates and conversion rates. If you’re using SEO, you might track website traffic from Google, or social media and then look at conversion rates.
Example:
We will build our Facebook group to 10,000 members. Our average email open rate goal is 30% with a click-through rate of 5% and a conversion rate of 2%.
Any Other Component of Your Marketing Plan
This is the section where you can put in any other ideas that you are thinking about. Perhaps you’ve thought about using webinars to sell your product or online videos for training. This is the place to put those miscellaneous ideas or potential marketing campaigns.
Here are a few more ideas of what you can put in this section:
- A marketing calendar of marketing campaign plans
- Any direct response marketing ideas such as email campaigns, promotional webinars, etc.
- Forecast of your marketing expenses
One Page Marketing Plan Template
This might sound like a lot, but it’s a lot easier than you think. Here’s a free template that you can use to lay out your winning marketing campaigns and ideas.
You can use this digital marketing plan template right out of the box as a way to identify gaps in your knowledge or skill gaps in your marketing team.
Use this form to get started. Then once you get the hang of it, feel free to create your own personalized marketing plan.
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