Let’s take a look at what exactly is marketing? To do so, we need to take a quick detour to define what it isn’t - marketing isn’t advertising. Many small business owners fall into the common trap of thinking “I need visibility in the market and I need more customers - my competitors are advertising, so I better too”, and then feel they’ve taken care of marketing their business. Although advertising can be an integral part of your marketing plan, it should not be your only activity - it can take a huge chunk out of your budget and can be a bit like firing a shotgun into a very very large paddock.

So what is it? Marketing is simply the process by which you create quality leads for your business. It’s all the activities that get the phone ringing, people to visit to your website and customers to your door. And it is definitely a process, not an event.

Marketing requires you to take a step back and work on your business rather than just in it. But it doesn’t need to be daunting, expensive or complicated. A lot of marketing theory has been built, tried and tested in the corporate world and is simply not relevant to small business owners. You don’t need multi-layered strategic marketing plans.

So what do you need to get started? I like to create “The One Page Marketing Plan” for my small business clients. It’s a simple strategy for allocating resources (time and money) to achieve your objectives (likely to be a fair profit for supplying a good product or service). This involves:

A Vision - what do you want to achieve with your business? This will be very different for someone who wants to build an asset to sell in 5 years, versus someone who wants to franchise their model, create a family business their children can step into or simply provide a wage instead of working in the corporate world. You need to define what it is you are looking to achieve with your business before you can move to the next step…..

Objectives - What you’ve heard is true, keep them SMART - specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and time framed. And don’t have too many of them!

Strategies - The activities that you will put into place to achieve your objectives. This is where the ideas are created, analysed, harvested and selected

Implementation - The timelines within which you put the strategies into place, usually in 2-3 phases

Evaluation - Where you look back and measure what worked, what didn’t, what to drop and what to repeat and improve.

So, as you can see, the process is not difficult to plan. The key now is to develop the strategies that fit your product or service, market and budget. I’ll look at some of the essentials that you need in your marketing toolkit in my next post, in the meantime you might like to take a look at my website where you’ll find a whole lot of small business marketing ideas.