Marketing Planning for 2024
As we approach the last quarter of the year, it’s important to make sure you've got your marketing strategy mapped out for 2024 so you can start off the new year with a clear idea of your goals and how you’re going to reach them.
Running a small business can be overwhelming. You’re often juggling tasks and firefighting, so it can be difficult to take yourself away from working in the business rather than on it. However, it’s essential to the success of your business. Now is the ideal time to evaluate, reinvigorate, and assess what you want to achieve next year (and in the years ahead).
Getting some independent advice can be really useful too. A different perspective can help you to develop new ideas and opportunities to deliver on your goals. Want some extra help? Take a look at my small business marketing support services and get in touch for a chat.
Solving the puzzle
Developing a marketing strategy is much like finding all of the pieces of a puzzle. Here are a few questions you need to tackle before putting your marketing plan together.
Review and Audit
This is pretty obvious but often overlooked or based on ‘gut feel’. What stats do you have? Do you know where e.g. website traffic or sales leads have come from? Do you have repeat customers or is your business more one-off transactional? Do you know how much it costs to get the sales leads you receive and their quality? Take a deep dive into your data to understand the who, what, why and how people buy from you. If you find holes in your understanding, then this is a perfect area to build on in your strategy to improve for next year.
Also important is to take an objective look at your competitors, product/service offering, pricing, current marketing materials, customer profile and financials…the list could go on! A SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) is also really helpful.
A marketing audit is one of the most important parts of establishing a marketing strategy and will likely take the most time to investigate fully.
Business Plan
Do you have a business plan gathering dust from when you first started out? It’s incredibly beneficial to review and update your overall business plan to ensure it’s still right for your business and accurately reflects your vision, goals, costs and profitability. Your marketing strategy will be closely linked to your business plan.
Set Achievable Goals
Once you’ve gathered all of your data, reviewed your business plan and understood your current position, you can make informed goals. Is your goal to grow? Consolidate? Make more profit? Diversify? What is realistic and achievable for the year ahead as well as targets for the long term?
Develop Your Strategy
Using your business goals, create a set of marketing objectives that are specific and measurable. These are what targets you hope to achieve from your marketing activities. For example, if your business goal is to grow turnover by 5%, your marketing objective could be to increase sales enquiries by 10% (assuming a 50% conversion of enquiry to sale).
Prioritise
Prioritising is especially important for smaller businesses as it is often more effective to focus efforts on a small number of key areas rather than spread yourself too thinly. Your plan could detail a complete wish list of everything you feel is relevant, but be sure to set out the absolute priorities for your company’s success.
Plan Your Tactics
This is where the plan really comes together. You’ve defined your goals and objectives, so now brainstorm tactics to achieve them. What marketing methods will you employ to reach your target audience and how will you engage with them? Should you modify or revamp your website or improve google positioning? Be more consistent on social media or grow followers? Or, perhaps you want to launch a new product or concentrate on customer retention? Do customers respond to sales promotion or is excellent customer service the key defining factor when they choose you?
Break your plan down into manageable sections. I usually choose to add each tactic as a separate line and define key tasks for each month. Be sure to detail how you will measure and monitor your results and remember, the plan can be modified as your business needs change, and should be reviewed regularly.
Allocate Resources
Identify who will carry out your marketing tactics within the business. Will this be yourself, a staff member, or an external contractor? Make sure you’ve understood all the costs involved with the activities you want to do. These may be advertising or sponsorship costs for example, but also make a judgement on the cost to you and your business for undertaking tasks (and whether there is a better allocation of resources by outsourcing these to a third party, so you can concentrate on the areas that are most profitable to your business).
Review and Revise
It’s very unlikely that the first version of your marketing plan will be the one that you end up with at the end of 2024, and that’s ok. This process is all about reviewing your actions, evaluating their performance, and refining your approach to reach your objectives. Looking at this monthly is ideal, quarterly is more realistic for smaller businesses. To do this effectively, you need to have a written plan that can act as a blueprint for the marketing of your business.
Marketing Support
Want to get moving on your marketing strategy and don’t know where to start? Get in touch to discuss how I can help you navigate reviewing your activities and establishing a plan for 2024. Or, if you have the foundations already in place, speak to me about a regular review of your business to keep you on the right track.
