Large firms have a team of strategists and big consulting giants behind their success. However, as a small business owner, you can only rely on yourself to come up with a solid marketing strategy to upgrade your business. As modern times bring more disruptions, your existing plan may be outdated and it’s time to bring out the marketing wrench for a few tweaks.
Tweaks to upgrade the marketing plan for your small business:
1. Audit Your Existing Plan
You can start making tweaks and apply fixes when you know what’s wrong with your existing plan. To identify what’s working and what’s not, audit your business marketing plan with measurable metrics. Gather insights from social media, use Google Analytics, collect customer feedback through comments and surveys, and generate reports from your email marketing campaigns to check the performance of your existing plan.
Look at:
- Sales figures
- Leads
- Website traffic
- Customer loyalty
- Audience engagement and retention
And other such relevant metrics to figure out what’s working, what needs to be tweaked immediately, and what needs further review.
2. Analyze the Competition
Your competitors are in the market for good reason. They may have better products, offer better service, or simply have a better marketing plan compared to you. Competitors who have a larger market share or get higher recognition in the industry may have better marketing strategies compared to you.
Learn from them to ditch ineffective components of your small business marketing planand adopt strategies that work. Your competition is targeting similar demographics and there’s a high chance that what works for them would work for you. For instance, if your competition is getting a lot of conversions from PPC campaigns on social media, it might work for you as well. Start small with a pilot project and expand it when you see measurable results.
3. Connect With Relevant Local Businesses
Connection with local businesses doesn’t translate to partnering with your competitors to price control the local market. Instead, connect with relevant local businesses where you can mutually benefit from each other’s audience. For instance, if you have a restaurant, consider partnering with local wineries and organic food sources.
You may create a campaign to promote local organic food and create a recipe exclusively with them to promote local growers. On the other hand, local producers can promote a list of top-tier restaurants that make the best use of their produce. Guess what? One of them is you. There’s no need to explain the cooperation between fine wine and great food.
4. Take a Holistic Approach
Measurable figures matter since they let us understand the effectiveness of our marketing plan for small businesses. However, it’s important to balance it out with a holistic approach instead of just focusing on raw numbers at the bottom of the sales funnel. Your marketing funnel functions as a cohesive unit that starts with awareness, imprints brand recognition in potential customers, and draws them down the pipeline into paying customers. As more people pass through the tunnel, it increases the odds of increasing sales and boosting your revenue.
5. Reconsider Your Budget
You have reconsidered your campaign plans and armed it with comprehensive market analysis for your business plan. You’ve scouted the competition, learned from them and applied those lessons to tweak your plans and the final budget. These tweaks may require some additional expenses. However, it’s important to calculate the Return on Investment (ROI) to find out if those extra funds are worth investing. Moreover, you don’t need to hold an Accounts Major to budget and figure out the ROI. Get help from free online calculators.
The business landscape is always changing and your marketing efforts need to keep up to consistently increase your revenue. Audit your existing plans, adapt to changing needs and craft a solid new marketing plan to stay in green and add on profits.
Amilia Brown is a seasoned business writer & strategist who simplifies complex business concepts and turn them into engaging narratives. As a trusted business writer, she delivers actionable insights with precision.
