Good and efficient marketing can make or break a business venture. Whether it is through branding, marketing campaigns, or social media, a successful marketing initiative will benefit a company's bottom line significantly. 

When it comes to startup businesses and small business owners seeking to expand their market share, smart planning can give you the edge you need over your competitors.

A decent product with good marketing will have a better chance of success than an excellent product with poor marketing. 

This article will cover the importance of planning and strategy prior to launching a new campaign for your small business.

For your marketing to be successful, it is vital that you do a few things properly right from the beginning of your business venture. Let's us see some of those here,

Be clear on the type of Business you want to start

It is crucial to the success of the venture that the type of business you want to start matches your strength, passion, and experience. 

There are several ways you can try to start a business. It can be an e-commerce online store, a digital marketing agency, a consultancy firm, an affiliate marketing blog, a software start-up, etc. 

The opportunities are wide and endless. However, it is crucial to choose the right one for you that you would enjoy putting consistent work into. 

If you are good at writing, a blog makes perfect sense, if you have expertise in a very targeted niche a consultancy is a fantastic option, if you have many local businesses to serve in your locality a digital marketing agency might be a perfect choice. 

Do a self-study of yourself and pick the right business model that you can commit to.

Validate your Business Idea

An honest and proper validation of the business idea is something many entrepreneurs fail to do and pay the price for it later. 

Many new start-ups and small businesses also fail to identify the right problem they are trying to solve. 

Before starting a new venture, it is important that you understand your target audience. Understand who you want your product or service to appeal to and be designed for.

If it is a software product, do a pre-launch of the beta version and gauge market interest, and tweak the pricing to get it right. If you are launching an online course, collect feedback from your existing audience and make sure they will be willing to pay the price you demand that the quality of content you provide deserves.

In the case of a services or a consultancy firm, you can use the following points to validate the idea and improve it further by asking your initial clients or students, 

• What did they like or dislike about your services?
• What did they think about the approach you used to solve their problem?
• Did they have any suggestions for improving the quality of your service?
• Were they satisfied with the outcome of your service? If not, what is missing? Is there something that can be done to provide them with that solution?

If you are planning an e-commerce store, run a pre-launch at a heavily discounted price and get the below feedback as detailed as possible,

• How did they react to the quality of the product?
• Did they like it or not? Why? Would they recommend it to their friends and family?
• Did they find any flaws in the product before purchasing it? If so, what are they and how can they be fixed?
• Did they have any suggestions regarding the packaging and the delivery of the product?
• How are your customers using that particular product and how does it affect their lives in general? This is a simple way of getting customer feedback. It does not require any detailed research or huge efforts. 

Also, as a general thumb rule, run the below checklist while validating your business idea,

• There is enough demand in the market for the product or service at the price point you are planning,
• Competitors Analysis - There is enough room to grow the business even if the competition becomes bigger and fierce,
• Availability of sufficient marketing budget to reach the target audience either by advertising or content marketing,
• Availability of sufficient funds in case the revenue and profit targets are not met in the first one or two years of the business. 
• Ability to hire the right people when needed and the availability of a competent workforce in the market at the right price.

In addition to all of this, if you would like to further validate your big idea, we have created a free pdf questionnaire that you can use in your business!

Plan and write down a detailed path for 0 to 100K, 1M in Revenue. 

Generating revenue and profits are an integral part of starting a business venture. However, writing a detailed plan with the target revenue numbers is so vital as it makes it easier to determine how many milestones that you need to hit in specific periods in order to achieve the overall target. 

Having a detailed plan helps to execute the strategy and make sure you are on the right track. It also helps in self-motivation and keeping your morale up.

The early success of your business can easily boost your morale, which is crucial in tough times, but you need to see past that. A failed business venture can make you lose motivation and lose sight of the bigger picture. 

A detailed business plan will help you stay focused and stay motivated even through tough times.

The business plan should comprehensively cover the below five aspects of your business to achieve this revenue target,

• Your product or service,
• Market research and Competitor analysis,
• The audience that are potential customers of your product or service,
• The sales process that will be implemented to achieve the target revenue,
• After-sales customer service and how to implement it effectively.

So, once you have decided on the business type based on the market research, your product, and validated it, the next vital step is to come up with the marketing idea to promote it among your target audience. This is so crucial that it could make or break your venture.

The below factors will play a huge part in determining your marketing plan,

The size and type of your target audience

Based on your business type, your target audience will vastly differ. The audience for B2B business is completely different to a B2C business like e-commerce. 

In the case of B2B, the sales process might take longer compared to B2C as the average lifetime value of each customer is much higher. It is important to be patient and build your brand and trust in the customer's mind and turn the awareness stage of the funnel to the purchase stage. 

If it is a B2C product or service, it can involve a lot of impulsive buying. Therefore, it is crucial that you do a thorough market research on the demographics, geographical location and also the buying behavior of your target audience. 

Your marketing plan will be a lot more effective if you understand how each segment behaves.

How a detailed marketing plan can help your business

Once you start your business, you will have to face lots of challenges which will be difficult to manage. Once you are in the midst of the struggle, without a clear marketing plan, it becomes hard to make the right decisions and make any adjustments. 

A well-written marketing plan will help you in determining how much resources should be spent on its development and what are the key areas that need to be attended to in order to make it successful.

The main reason why a proper marketing plan is important is because it helps to keep an eye on expenses and tracks progress of different tasks.

You must know where you are now, where you are going to and how you’ll get there. Think about the following points before writing your marketing plan. It’ll help to make more sense of your business and how it works:

• Where are you now?
• What do you need to reach that next level?
• Where does it take you? What’s the path from here to there?
• How will that affect what you do now and in the future?
• Why should an investor invest in your company or hire a worker and vice versa?. A clear view on this question will help at every stage of the planning process.

Tools you can use to Define and Execute your Marketing Plan

For your marketing plan to be effective in the longer run, it is imperative that you use the right tools for it. The initial marketing plan is not going to be perfect and you will have to adapt and tweak it over time. Hence, putting in the time and effort initially to decide on the right tools would definitely give you some leverage in your business later on.

You can ask your co-founders or team members to get together and discuss what each of you is capable of doing. Once you have put everyone's expertise into account, you can decide on the marketing strategy and the mediums & tools to be used.

You will have to keep checking on the marketing plan once it is implemented as well. You need to make sure that it is achieving its defined goals and keep optimizing it for maximum effectiveness.

Let's have a look at some of the tools that can be of help,

• MarketPlan

Regardless of the type of business you want to start, MarketPlan can help accomplish a variety of aspects in successfully detailing your marketing plan and implementing it. 

Below are just some of the things you can do with MarketPlan,

• Plan and map out your complete marketing and sales funnel with details on every traffic source, outreach & social media channels, 
• Collaborate with your team members in the mapping process via internal team chat,
• Forecasting the performance of your sales funnel with expected numbers,
• Track your marketing funnel with real-time data and numbers once it is live,
• Comparison of forecasted and real-time data to measure the effectiveness of your marketing & sales funnel to optimize it. 
• Plan all your blog posts, chatbot sequences, and email sequences right within MarketPlan.
• Manage all your projects with a built-in Kanban.
• Collaborate on image designs and videos.

The above features would cover all of your activities in your marketing plan and help you implement the plan in the most efficient manner. 

• Google’s Free Tools

There are so many free tools that Google provides you that helps you in each aspect of implementing your marketing plan. Let's have a look at some of it,

• Google Analytics - The all-in-one analytics tool that helps you track all the key KPIs like, your traffic, the revenue generated by each of your sites and so on. You also get to see the visitor demographics such as the age group etc.
• Google Search Console - A tool that helps you in knowing how your site has been ranked and discovered on Google.
• Google Adwords - The native advertising platform of Google that you can use to advertise your product or service on the world’s biggest search engine,
• Google Trends - Helps you analyze the latest trends in your niche based on the searches made in Google. 

• Social Media Channels

There are a ton of social media channels to plan your marketing for every type of business. If you are planning a B2B business, LinkedIn can be the best channel while Instagram & Pinterest works the best for e-commerce businesses. 

Facebook and Twitter could work for both the business types with their wider range of audience and in turn their robust advertising as well. 

Conclusion

To wrap up, as discussed, a well-defined marketing map could be a huge asset when you launch your business idea. 

Are you ready with your next big business and marketing idea? Sign up for an account with MarketPlan today and start planning.

It is completely free, so you can see how well it works for your business.