Building Your Marketing Plan – Where Do You Start?

A strong marketing strategy is one of the most difficult things for new businesses to implement correctly. Many new business owners know how important marketing is but are unsure of how to make their plan successful. My good friend Allan Dib wrote a book titled The 1-Page Marketing Plan to teach business owners how to quickly market their businesses.

Allan explains that one of the biggest mistakes new business owners make is trying to ensure that their marketing plan is perfect from day one. It’s impossible for your marketing to truly be perfect since it’s iterative and needs constant optimization. Instead of trying to make your marketing perfect, just try to get it done. Feedback will tell you what worked and what didn’t, and you can adjust your strategy based on that.

Before you can even start planning your marketing strategy, there are a few things you need to figure out first. Before anything else, you need to figure out who your audience is. This will allow you to find a certain niche that will help you build a solid marketing plan. If you try to target everyone as your audience, and you'll end up targeting nobody. Furthermore, Allan explains that once you have found your target audience, you need to create a message that resonates with them. Test your ideas on your current customer base, and if you find one that fits, implement the wording into your marketing campaign. Don’t try to sell in your advertisements; instead, have them fill out a form or give your business a call.

Once you’ve found your target audience and crafted your message, you’ll need to find the perfect place to broadcast. Through your research in finding your target audience, you should have a general idea of where to publish any marketing. Don‘t be afraid to use multiple platforms to reach a wider audience.

Allan is a best-selling author and an extremely successful marketer. He’s helped over 500,000 businesses achieve rapid growth and (in my opinion) is one of the best minds in the business. If you’re needing more marketing advice from one of the masters of the craft, check out his book, The 1-Page Marketing Plan.

Mike Michalowicz is a very successful author, entrepreneur and lecturer. He has written several
successful books, including his latest, Get Different. He is currently the host of the “Business
Rescue” segment on MSNBC’s Your Business, and he previously worked as a small-business
columnist for The Wall Street Journal.