How To Prepare A Marketing Plan For Your Small Business In 2017

Marketing strategies change with every year. A decade or two back, few small business owners would have bothered with online marketing like they do now. Even till a couple of years back, small businesses did not really go beyond SEO for finding customers online. So as we step into the new year, here are some factors to consider while preparing your annual marketing plan.

Prepare A Goal

The first and foremost thing to do while preparing a marketing plan is to know what you want to achieve at the end of it. At a broad level, your goal may be measured in terms of revenues, profits or unit sales. More specifically, you may want to track down each of your marketing channel and prepare a target for next year. This gives you clarity on where you are with your various channels and what needs to be done to reach the target you have set for these channels.

Review Your Channels

The next step in the process is to review each of your marketing channels to see what’s working and what’s not. It’s also a good time to remove outdated strategies and add new ones. For instance, Instagram has quickly grown to become one of the most popular social media channels. If you did not have an Instagram strategy in 2016, now is the time to add it to your marketing plan.

Relook Your SEO Strategy

No marketing channel evolves as fast as SEO does. Just in the past year, Google has released multiple algorithm updates including Penguin 4.0 (for real-time results), Possum (for local pack prevalence) and a second update to account for mobile-friendly websites. Start with a complete SEO audit of your website, and then perform a benchmark analysis to see where your website is at the moment, and where it ought to be. Based on this analysis, prepare an SEO marketing blueprint for the new year. It goes without saying, but, Google is expected to roll out a bunch of new updates in the new year and so your marketing plan needs to be fluid in order to account for these possible strategy changes.

Rework Your Budget

The end of the year is a good time to look into your various agreements and marketing budgets to view your ROI from the various campaigns. Depending on how these various campaigns worked out, you may raise or lower your budget for these various strategies. Not only this, if you make use of third party providers to send email or SMS marketing messages, use your latest volume numbers to rework your agreement. Most providers reward high volume users with lower per-message cost. Use your latest volume figures to your advantage.

Establish Your KPIs

No marketing plan is complete without establishing the metrics that you must use to track the success of failure of your strategies. It is recommended to create two KPIs for each of your marketing strategies - the first KPI should track the growth of your business and the second KPI should track expenses. For example, for your SEO strategy, your first KPI should be measuring the search engine position for your various ‘money’ keywords while the second KPI could probably be the cost of producing content and building backlinks.