Marketing Plan Worksheet

Before you can even start writing it.

1. You need to be clear on:
   • What it is that you’re selling?
   • What are the main features and benefits of your primary products and services? 
   • What separates those from what the competitors are offering? 
   • What are your differentiators? 
2. The biggest picture:
   • What’s going on in your industry?
   • What type of industry are you in?
   • What’s the state of the industry?
   • Is it new growing shrinking? 
   • What are the trends, both positive and negative that could impact the success of your business?
3. Look and see:
   • How much competition you’ll have?
   • How do you stack up against them and these can be both direct competitors and indirect competitors?
   • Other choices that your potential customers or clients have.
4. Choose a broad market position that you’ll be in, in terms of price and so in relation to:
   • What you’re charging?
   • What will you be offering?
   • What level of quality will you be offering?

Create multiple market positions. Any of those positions, you’ll want it, would be fine and you want. Choose where you want.

Choosing a target market. 

• Target market is the people or businesses who are the most likely to buy from you and so those can either be consumers or you may be selling business to business and for either of those groups, you want to apply some demographic criteria and some psychographic criteria.
  • To narrow down, filter who is the most likely to buy from you. Pick the top three to five types of marketing that you’ll use and this is out of dozens of types of marketing that are available for small businesses but ideally, you’ll be able to narrow it down to the three to five that would work best for you and those can be both offline types of marketing and online types of marketing.
  • Set specific goals not only for the types of marketing you’re going to be doing but how much will you spend both in time and money.
  • Make some forecasting for how much new business that would bring in and how many re-orders you would get from these marketing efforts.
  • Test everything you do in small increments to see if it’s working and track what types of results you’re getting from that both in terms of what actions people are taking.
    • Are they calling? 
    • Are they emailing? 
    • Are they signing up for a free consultation? 
    • Are they asking for bids?
• Then also 
  • How many new customers will you get? 
  • How much new business will you get out of that?

The importance of testing and tracking is so that you could continually modify your marketing plan as you move on so that you get better and better at it.