Today’s post is going to be the first of a series of posts providing tips for creating a marketing machine for your small business.

What triggered this? I recently began reading Duct Tape Marketing by John Jantsch again and it hit me that I needed to do a series of posts to help people that just trying to figure out a place to start.

This is a question that I get asked far to frequently at Infusionsoft. How are you supposed to take advantage of Marketing Automation if you don’t know where to start?  To answer that question you need a Marketing Plan, this is something that is part of a good Business Plan. A Marketing Plan will help you determine some very important pieces of information. There are a few things you will want to do to make this an effective tool in your marketing arsenal.

A Marketing Plan is something that will help you tremendously when it comes to figuring out what your goals are with your marketing efforts. Anywhere from budgets to ideas you will need to start some where so why come up with a game plan first. A fellow blogger Smallbizbee has an interesting article to get started as well.

1. Identify your “Target Market”. You need to know who your prospects are, who your customers are, and who spends money on your products and services.
2. Establish a budget based on cash on hand. You need to set a budget and follow it when it comes to marketing. This way you can identify exactly how much is costs to acquire new customers. Without a budget you will soon have blown through a stack of cash with little reward. By using a budget in your marketing you will also be able to identify what methods are most cost effective. Ultimately your budget should grow as time goes on based on your business’ goals.
3. Identify short and long term goals that you can accomplish with your marketing. Goals are a major part of marketing, it is what enables your business to grow. By setting short goals you will be able to build up momentum so you can reach those long term goals.
4. Develop Marketing Strategies based on your target market. This way you can tailor your marketing towards your prospects that eventually turn into ideal customers.  Some of these strategies are Lead Generation, Lead Conversion, Public Relations, and developing a continual relationship with your customers and clients.
5. Based on your strategies you can now get and idea of the average cost per customer. Your marketing strategies should fall in line with your budget, so if you were to do an ad in a newspaper or do some Pay Per Click you can now justify how much you are going to spend.
6. Select a plan of attack because you have to start somewhere. By now you will have a number of ideas and marketing strategies to get started. This can be extremely overwhelming if you only looking at the end of the road. Get something in place so you start making some money, don’t wait till it is absolutely perfect because it won’t be until you start using it.
7. Track measure all of your marketing efforts. You need to be able to determine the actual numbers you are working with. You have a budget, you have strategies, and you have somewhere to get started so now you start pulling reports that will show you how effective different aspects of your marketing are.

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