Module 1: An Introduction to the Basics

In order for you to know where your business needs to go, you need a roadmap. That’s why you create a business plan. The same goes for every aspect of your business, including marketing. In fact, having a clear and thorough marketing plan is essential if you want to maximize your marketing efforts and make the most of your precious resources. Your business’s marketing plan is part of your overall business plan.

But while the business plan covers every aspect of your business, your marketing plan deals with only marketing. Your marketing plan includes everything from analyses of your market, your business, and your products, to marketing goals and the strategies that will help you reach those goals. The key elements of a marketing plan are:

• Market Analysis – This is a detailed analysis of your market, your customers, your competitors, and other factors.
• Marketing Goals – A definition of your marketing goals and how they tie into your overall business goals.
• Marketing Mix – Your marketing strategy and the tactics you will use to realize your goals in terms of the 4 P’s: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion.
• Marketing Budget – A budget for your marketing expenses and revenues.

• Learn the benefits of creating a marketing plan for your business
• Conduct the initial market research that will be included in your marketing plan
• Create a company overview that briefly describes what your business is about
• Conduct an analysis of your company’s current position in the market
• Define your key marketing goals and make sure they are in line with your business goals
• Decide how you will track whether you are meeting your goals
• Gain an understanding of the 4 P’s of a marketing mix
• Identify your own marketing mix and what resources you need in order to implement it
• Draft a prospective marketing budget
• Identify your marketing initiatives and calendar for the next year
• Determine the key tasks you’ll need to do to implement your plan
• Identify any next steps needed to complete your marketing plan

By the end of the course, you’ll have everything you need to complete your marketing plan and start putting it into action.

In the next module, we will be diving into identifying your goals and why having a solid plan in place is so important.

Before digging into what you want to accomplish with your plan though, we recommend taking some time to reflect on what not having a plan looks like. 

Take a moment to think about some projects that you’ve worked on where the goals were ambiguous and there was no clear plan in place. Poorly planned projects requiring a lot of collaboration and communication provide great examples.

Choose the project that stands out the most, and simply go back to what your experience was like from start to finish.

• What was it like at the start? Generating a lot of excitement over what is possible and what the results might be is common.
• How did things develop over time? Getting lost or distracted without a plan is a problem, but you might have examples where a loose structure gave room for more innovation and creativity too.
• Where did you end up in the end? How close did you end up to where you had hoped? How did your team feel about themselves and each other?

When you are ready to really dig into this stuff, remember that there’s a real mix of marketing advice out there. Some of it’s awesome, some of it’s half-baked, lots of it is outdated, and a whole lot of it is designed to help sell products, not professionals services.

We’ve filtered through the best of what is available to provide you with actionable advice in our Deep Dive recommendations that are from the most trusted resources and are designed specifically to promote professional practices like yours.

John Jantsch knows the trouble that small businesses get into when they focus on marketing tactics instead of strategy. That’s why his classic Duct Tape Marketing system places marketing strategy first.

He has a great blog post on this topic that we recommend for a deeper dive on this topic that is linked to below. The spot-on title is adapted from a line from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War:

Marketing without Strategy is the Noise Before Defeat