Why you should have a marketing plan

Hi everybody, and welcome to my Wednesday wisdom series. Lovely to be back. I’m in my new office. I’m sitting on my new sofa, so it’s nice to have a bigger space. And we’ve also got, hopefully you can see, our Max (my cat) listening to my video, so he’s hunkered it down for the morning.

So anyway, apart from cats and my new office what did I want to talk to you about today? Today I really wanted to mention marketing plans again. It is something that I talk about a lot and it’s one of the key services that I offer, but a lot of people don’t have them.

And my question today to you is, why should you have a marketing plan?

Well, firstly, if you don’t have one, then sometimes it might feel that there’s a little bit of marketing overwhelm. What exactly should you be doing? Should you be doing social? Should you be doing PR or guest blogging or back linking? Or should you be updating your website?

There are so many different things to think about. If you take the time to sit down and think about a marketing plan and what it is that you’re trying to sell and who you’re trying to sell it to, and pick a couple of key channels that you want to get your message out there this can really help give you a bit more structure and clarity.

One of the other reasons a marketing plan is very helpful is because it gives you consistency. What tends to happen is you go up and down when it comes to business, you’ll be busy and then you might be quite quiet. And I was saying that the day you want this kind of consistent activity running throughout the whole time that you’re doing your business because you want to make sure that people are always hearing about you, they know who you are and that you’re always front of mind.

And if you suddenly kind of go quiet for a couple of months – people start to forget. So it helps give you that consistency.

And lastly, having a marketing plan helps you track what you’re doing. And what’s actually working. So if you’re kind of implementing activity in a sporadic way, then it’s all a little bit sporadic and it’s hard to track and monitor. But if you can say, right, I’m doing this this month and I want to see who looked at my blog, I’m going to have a look at how many visits I’ve got, how many shares I had. And you can actually take a look at all the activity that you’ve done and go back and visit it and see actually what’s working and what isn’t. If you just do things in a sporadic way and you forget what you have done, then everything’s kind of lost to you and you can’t get any insights from it.

So hopefully that’s helpful. And that’s given you a little bit more information as to why you should write a marketing plan. I’ve got lots of content on my website about marketing planning, if you need any help. And of course if you need someone to write them, I do them all the time and I’m here anyway. I hope you found that helpful and bye for now.