A marketing plan can be as simple as a list of to-do items on a legal pad. We’ve all made those and seen plenty more. Our early to-do lists typically contain items that sound something like Steve Martin bits: “First, get a million dollars.” Yeah, you know what we’re talking about. Those non-committal, broad-stroke, out-there goals over which you have absolutely no control. That’s what usually ends up on the yellow legal pad.
The most important consideration is your customer, who s/he is, what they want, which media they use. But for most small businesses, it helps to start off by figuring out just how much traffic you need as a baseline. Because most small business owners have a deep psychological need for a silver bullet, it can be useful to figure out a baseline amount of money and traffic that you need each month. Once you’ve got that out of the way, you can move on to a real customer-centric marketing plan, which we’ll discuss in a future post.
Start Planning from Your Goals
You know the old saying, “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” Or maybe you heard “If you had tubes, you’d be a radio.” Hm, yeah, maybe something like, “If wishes were clicks, you’d be a gazillionaire.” Start with goals like your basic overhead requirements, add in some profit, then pad it a bit more and start from there.
Do the Math
Assume you have $5000 a month in overhead, including your salary. First, what’s your average gross revenue from your projects? If you’re just starting out, you’ll have to guess. But if you’ve done a few jobs and you’re confident that you can get the same kind of money, on average, for your upcoming projects, then use that number. For the sake of the example, assume you have been getting about $1200 per project, on average.
Divide your overhead by the average gross revenue:
5000 / 1200 = 4.1666
Right off the bat, you can see that you’re going to need at least 4 projects just to cover your overhead. Again, for the sake of the example, let’s say you’d like to be pulling in more like $7500 gross. That gives you a little extra you can save, after taxes, and maybe a little extra spending money.
7500 / 1200 = 6.25
You’re going to have to pull in 6 or 7 projects. Or you’ll need to raise your prices, but that’s another post for another day.
Do More Math
In our example, you need to increase your sales by more than 30%. Unless you’re already turning away work, you will need to come up with specific plans for how to draw that many more prospects to your site. And that brings us to another bit of math. Do you already know how many proposals or presentations you have to make before you land a new client?
If you’re just starting out, you may not know that yet, but if you’ve been in business for a while, you should be able to figure it out. How many inquiries did you get that you followed up on and how many of those resulted in business? Let’s say you responded to 12 inquiries for every job you landed. For your 6.25 projects, you’ll need to respond to about 75 inquiries.
Just how many site visitors do you need to generate 50-75 inquiries?
Again, just guesstimating here, but if you’ve done a great job of creating compelling content and have done all you can to optimize your on-page and off-page elements, you might be able to get highly-qualified visitors to your site. So, let’s say that for every 30 visitors, one inquires about your services. So far, this is where we stand:
12 inquiries = 1 project
30 visitors = 1 inquiry
360 visitors = 12 inquiries
2250 visitors = 75 inquiries = 6.25 projects
You need to attract at least 2,250 visitors to your site to generate 75 inquiries, which should result in 6.25 projects.
Use a System
Now finally, we get to the plan. Your plan should include all of the inbound marketing tasks that you can honestly and reasonably claim that you will do over the next quarter, half-year, or year. You should expect to perform at least one small task every day. It doesn’t have to be the same task, but it should be a task that helps complete one of the elements in your plan.
Assume that you’ve decided you’re going to create the following content for your website:
- 12 video tutorials
- 3 reports
- 100 blog posts
- 3 webinars
The first thing to do is map it out in a table or on a calendar. Putting your ideas down on paper will help you grasp how much work is ahead of you. You may decide it’s not enough. Or, you may realize that you need to outsource some of the work. Try a simple table like the one below.
In this table, we list the content product we plan to produce, followed by our projected publish or presentation date. The third column indicates whether the content will be produced in-house or will be outsourced. The fourth column contains the names of people or organizations that will work on the content, and the fifth column contains how you plan to promote the content, whether it’s by social media, such as bookmarking, or Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn notifications, by email to your list, or by running PPC ads with a link back to your content.
| Content | Publish Date | In/Out | Resource | Promotion |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Video: Researching your market online | January 30, 2010 | In | Me | Social Media |
| Video: How to create a marketing calendar | February 15, 2010 | In | John | Social Media |
| Video: How to set up a landing page | March 15, 2010 | In | Me, Ellen | Social Media |
| Video: How to set up an AdWords account | April 18, 2010 | In | Bob | Social Media |
| Video: How to search for relevant keywords | May 16, 2010 | In | John, Ellen | Social Media |
| Video: How to A/B test PPC ads | June 15, 2010 | In | Me, Bob | Social Media |
| Video: How to set up an email service account | July 15, 2010 | In | Ellen | Social Media |
| Video: How to create an autoresponder series | August 15, 2010 | In | Ellen, Heidi | Social Media |
| Video: How to create a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation video | September 15, 2010 | In | Me | Social Media |
| Video: How to post presentation to SlideShare | October 15, 2010 | In | Bob | Social Media |
| Video: How to set up Facebook and Twitter accounts | November 15, 2010 | In | John, Bob | Social Media |
| Video: How to shorten URLs when posting to Twitter and Facebook | December 15, 2010 | In | Me | Social Media |
| Webinar: Planning a year of blog posts based on your marketing plan | April 25, 2010 | In | John, Ellen | Social Media, PPC |
| Webinar: Creating a partner assessment tool | July 30, 2010 | In | Bob, Heidi | Social Media, PPC |
| Webinar: Positioning your product | November 12, 2010 | In | Me | Social Media, PPC |
| Report: 12 ways to promote your local service business | June 20, 2010 | Out | eLance, oDesk | PPC, Email, Social Media |
| Report: Why nobody wants your Open Source application and how to turn that around | August 20, 2010 | Out | eLance, oDesk | PPC, Email, Social Media |
| Report: 9 ways to find, evaluate, and engage partners who can help your business | December 12, 2010 | Out | eLance, oDesk | PPC, Email, Social Media |
| Blog Posts: TBD | 3 per week | In/Out | Me, eLance | Social Media |
Next, you’ll want to create a detailed project plan of the tasks required for each of your content products. That’s too much detail to go into here, but we’ll deal with it in an eBook or a report soon. With the information in this post, you should be able to get started putting together a real marketing plan for the year, not just a wish list.
