For a Small Business, What is Most Important in a Marketing Plan?

There are key differences between developing a marketing plan for a small business compared to a large organization. This page outlines some of the important points for those running small and home businesses.

How Do I Decide on Which Promotional Activities?

When creating a marketing plan, it is very important to be selective about which promotional activities you choose to market your business.

Most small and home-based businesses do not have the time and resources to be a whole marketing department themselves. By this, I mean there is not enough time (or money) to do all the different marketing and promotional activities effectively.

For a small business, effective use of our time is essential, and there is usually not enough of it to do all the marketing activities that you would see in a large organisation – which could range from website design and search engine optimisation to cold-calling, advertising across all media, branding and public relations.

The danger is if we tried this we would spread ourselves too thinly to be as effective as we would want. Far better to focus on a smaller range of promotional tools that you know get good results and bring business in.

“I Tried Marketing and It Didn’t Work!”

Many small business people have had the experience of trying out some form of marketing that didn’t get them the results they wanted, or indeed, didn’t get them any results at all, myself included!

Many of us have tried an advert or used a mailing list and been disappointed at the waste of time and money.

Please don’t let that put you off marketing. There are many other low-cost forms of marketing which are effective. The secret is to establish which of them will work consistently for you and your business, and then build a number of these which work well together into your marketing plan.

Particularly in the early stages of building your business, it is important not to put all your marketing eggs in one basket and believe that one advert, editorial or mailing list is going to be the marketing solution. Far better to choose a selection of low-cost activities and see which work the best for you.

What Next?

To help you with a small business marketing plan, there is a Free Marketing Plan Template on this site.  Go to the box on the top right hand side to fill in your details and get the download.