These seven steps are meant to guide you through formulating a marketing plan that's realistic and attainable, one that you can use to actually grow your business. This plan needs to be personalized to YOUR business. You don't have to do the same thing as everyone else!

 

Transcription

Hello again, this is Monica Pitts and Katie Guinn. Welcome to Marketing With Purpose. Today, I am going to do my very, very best to answer the incredibly elusive question. How to create a marketing plan in like, less than an hour. 

0:19  

I mean, it sounds like a feat.

0:23  

I think that this could roll out into a whole semester worth of content course. We are going to have a course based on this whole blog post now, we might. Maybe someday, if ever get that LMS installed in our website.

0:41  

Nervous laughter. Learning management systems are hard. Yeah, you just let us know. Hey, you know what, seriously, if you listen to this podcast, and you're like, Man, this stuff is real, and I need to know more about it. You should make an online course about it. Let me know because I would Yeah.

1:00  

Contact us while we're saying Yeah. Okay, so I talked to business owners all the time, and especially small business owners get very intimidated by the thought of making a marketing plan. There are so many pieces, and it's very, very easy to get them all tangled up. It's hard to wrap your mind around all of the individual pieces and make sure you've done enough covered everything, not done too much. And don't even get me started.

1:34  

So from a big picture perspective, I want you to think of a marketing plan like a flowchart. Everything starts at the top and big, it's like why and who, and then it breaks into smaller supplemental parts with what and where, then when, how budget and outcomes. It's a flow chart, it flows down.

1:57  

I do actually have a worksheet that you can download

2:03  

to build these lovely flowchart parts. Now here's the challenge, though, is like I'm calling it a flowchart. But an actual robust marketing plan, like in our office consists of a series of documents, processes and calendars and even a project management system to keep it all organized. So like a flowchart of flow charts, yeah, something crazy like that. But I do have a template that you can download and use for these beginning steps. And then you'll probably though need to go out into

2:40  

a different area to really document all the individual little pieces of your marketing plan.

2:47  

Because I mean, I wish it could be like this simple little flowchart, but these little boxes, like imagine so and it does, it flows down right? So you have why and who and then you have what and where.

3:00  

Well, you could have 21 what and wheres sure and then you could have a when underneath each one of those and multiple hows, a budget, and outcomes underneath every single one of these things. And eventually, you would have like these teeny tiny boxes one pixel by one pixel with one letter the barely shows part of it in there. Like it fits in L looks like the edge of a T, but nothing else. Two dots, I think it's I don't know, and it won't let it to dot letter be like a backwards E, I don't know. Or just an S like the back curve of the top part of the yes bottom. That's all you're gonna see. The Z would have two dots. Yes, we would have lost sleep ov