When we start a discussion with clients, one of the first parts of our consultation is to go over their current marketing and their current business goals and see how the two line up. Often, much of our consultation with clients is exploring the goals marketing can provide (traffic, online presence, form submissions, etc.) and comparing it to their current marketing. When this comes up short (and it almost always does), it usually falls into one of the three following categories. From there, we look why you might need a marketing plan.
Starting from Square One: No Significant Marketing
For startups or smaller businesses who have never fully explored marketing, we have both the easiest and hardest marketing job. On the one hand, their online presence is limited, which allows us to work with a blank slate and build up instead of focusing on rebuilding and managing the current brand. On the other, this means that they have the furthest to go in terms of meeting their business’s goals with marketing.
In general, for smaller businesses with no previous self-marketing of note, we recommend:
- Consultation: All good marketing starts with a long discussion of your business and marketing in general. For many of our clients, ongoing marketing and business consultation can make big differences in internal marketing and pave the way for a larger marketing plan.
- Website & SEO: Ideally, a client’s website is the hub on which their online marketing turns. For many, we’ll advise a new or rebuilt website, alongside building new and ongoing content to optimize their SEO.
- Starter Social Media: Many clients have claimed social media pages but have never used them or fail to use them regularly. Managed social media allows for regular posting, backlinks, and engagement with customers, building an online fanbase to bring repeat traffic to their business.
The Signs That Your Current Marketing is Failing
The second kind of clients are those who have attempted digital marketing with mixed results. For many, what is and isn’t working can sometimes be a mystery. Part of a marketing plan is taking a good hard look at current marketing data and finding the weak points. Likely culprits of failed or underperforming marketing are:
- Outdated Marketing Strategies
- Stalled Social Media
- Dated Website and Logo
- No SEO or New Content on Website
- Advertising Campaigns Without Oversight
- No Time for Self-Marketing
Learn more in our blog, Active Marketing: Why Set-It-and-Forget-It Marketing Doesn’t Work.
Looking to Take Your Marketing to the Next Level
Some businesses have thriving marketing, including a staff member whose full or part-time job it is to perform and coordinate marketing. In this situation, building a marketing plan is about refining, consolidating, and managing marketing for the client, offloading aspects so they that their internal staff can better manage their limited resources of money, time, and expertise.
Marketing Plan to Augment Current Marketing
Our goal is to build a marketing plan around what is working for your business, duplicating your current successes to other platforms, and help you explore and solve the current marketing blind spots in your plan. As a comprehensive marketing agency, we’ll help you explore what’s missing from your current marketing and the right options for your business’s size and industry.
For any business of any size, revisiting your marketing with a marketing plan will always make your marketing more likely to succeed and less likely to waste funds. By measuring twice and cutting once, you bring years of marketing experience to bear on your current marketing situation, helping you improve your internal marketing and explore outsourcing options. Want to learn more? Check out our Marketing Plans today and schedule a consultation with Vision to explore your options.
