When you run a small business, marketing can seem like a bit of a dark art. You know you have to do it, but you’re not quite sure where to start or what exactly to do. Well, the problem is marketing is the engine room of your business whether you like it or not. If you re in business, you’re in marketing, and more to the point, everybody in your business needs to understand they’re in marketing too.
Marketing is what builds awareness of your products or service and drives the pipeline of your business that turns leads into sales. The most common mistake I see with small business marketing is going at it without a real plan or a goal you would like to achieve. This results in a load of activity that ultimately fails and the business owner in question feeling like all marketing doesn’t work. Which is an interesting mindset in itself. Whether you are struggling with a limited budget, time constraints, a smaller than usual team or lack of direction, a marketing plan can help you to build an appropriate, sustainable strategy to help you grow.
Firstly, know your audience. A big mistake is thinking that anyone is a buyer. Sure, big companies have the ability and money to be able to appeal to wider audiences, but that’s not us, yet. So think about who your ideal customer is, where they go, what their life is like, what their hobbies are. You’re doing this for a number of reasons, primarily to understand where you need to market your product or service and how to reach your clients, but also to understand their pain points and how your product or service addresses that. By the end of this exercise you should be able to answer two very important questions: What keeps my ideal client awake at night? And where does my ideal client hang out, both online and offline?
Next you need to identify and emphasize your value proposition. What sets you apart from your competition? Why should people choose you over anyone else? Think about what you and your business do better than anyone else in the industry, conveying this makes a compelling reason to buy from you. Oh, by the way, the answer to this question has nothing to do with customer service.
In order to write a strategy, you need a framework and a great one to use is SOSTAC:
Situation: Where are you right now? What is working or not working? What have you tried before? What could you tweak? This is also where you do all your market research. Think about where you are positioned in the market and maybe also do a competitor analysis. What are the opportunities for both short and long term gain?
Objectives: What do you actually want to achieve? This is where you define the vision and align the marketing activity to the goals of the business. You might want to set KPI’s here. Key Performance Indicators are vital to ensure you can monitor, test and measure your marketing. When things go wrong, your numbers don’t lie.
Strategy: Now we get to segmenting and targeting. What are you going to use in your marketing mix and how are you going to make sure everything is aligned? What does your engagement and content strategy look like? This should be all encompassing answers the question of how you will achieve your objectives.
Action: Now what are the individual tactics and actions each person needs to do in order to achieve the strategic aims? In other words, who does what and when?
Control: This is all about monitoring performance. How will you check that everything you are doing is moving the needle in terms of sales and performance?
Once you move through all of the sections of SOSTAC, you have yourself a basic one-page marketing plan. This will allow you to get started in a process driven way. Your marketing plan should be a living document, and drive your business through the numbers. As I said above the numbers never lie. Double down on what is working, and cut or tweak what isn’t working.
Have you ever used SOSTAC before, what were the results? I would love to hear how your marketing plan is going, and if you need any help, don’t hesitate to drop me a message.
