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If you need a marketing plan template example, my 12-Month Small Business Marketing Plans can help.

I came up with my 12-Month Marketing Plans for small businesses, as a way to inspire you with my easy, proven and sometimes out-of-the-box tactics, so you can effectively market and promote your business – especially if you have little marketing experience and a limited budget.

Marketing Tactics That Really Work

Now, I have been in marketing a looong time. I can tell you first hand that the three most effective forms of marketing, in terms of actually generating sales, are:

SEO
Advertising
Email Marketing

Again, I am talking about generating sales, and agreed, this could vary depending on the type of business.

If you are just looking to create brand awareness, then Social Media definitely plays a bigger role. But, as I have proven in past blog posts, both social media and “influencer” marketing does not always result in sales (see my post: Proof that Social Media Mentions Don’t Always Results in Big Sales).

I am also a big believer in free Publicity, but again, that can go either way. It might not always result in a ton of sales, but it has longevity in providing you with creditability.

Add to that Sales Promotions, Alliance Marketing and Content Marketing and you have a well-rounded tactical plan:

Social Media
Publicity
Sales Promotions
Alliance Marketing
Content Marketing

Some of the Tactics in my Marketing Plans

I have 12-Month Marketing Plans for all types of businesses (with more coming), so here are some sample tactics to try:

If you sell baby products, pin a collage of your favorite baby items (include ones you sell) to Pinterest and entitle the pin, “Having a Baby” as this search phrase gets 5 million searches a month on Pinterest. You also need to use the hashtag #HavingaBaby in the pin description.
If you sell skincare, bath or beauty products, ask local AirBnB owners if you could be their official supplier or even just leave free samples for their renters to try.
If you sell vintage items, consider also selling your items on the vintage selling app, Evintage.
If you sell eco-friendly products, sponsor a reader poll with the blog Earth911 based on a question you provide. You get the exposure as well as the data gathered from the poll.

Try This Idea!

So, let me give you an tactic that can result in free publicity for you. Let’s say that you sell swimwear. Why not have a few product photos taken at a local hotel’s outdoor pool. You give a shoutout to the hotel and they will likely repost the photos on their social media sites as well, giving you exposure to their followers.

You can do this with almost any type of product. If you sell dog collars, for example, post a photo of your dog wearing one of your collars while sitting with you at a popular local outdoor bistro, and give a shoutout to the restaurant. Use location photos to your advantage!

I hope you’ll try my 12-Month Marketing Plans, and if there is a business you would like to see a plan for, please let me know!

Download One of My Plans

Get More Success Tips

If your business is struggling to make sales, then you really need to implement a Marketing plan, and a Marketing Strategy Plan Template will help you do this. Therefore, I recommend my best-selling Marketing Plan Template printable download.

I spent weeks developing and creating this comprehensive marketing plan template for you to fill in. It will definitely help you develop and execute your marketing mix, even if you know nothing about marketing.

What is Marketing?

And better yet, how to write a marketing plan? In a nutshell, marketing is all the various ways you can promote your business… and that takes a mix of tactics in the form of a marketing plan.

Why Do You Need a Marketing Plan?

A marketing plan is like a road map. You follow it to get where you want to be. Without a road map, you will be all over the place, and likely going in the wrong direction, which is waste of time and money.

What are the Steps Involved in Creating a Marketing Plan

The main marketing plan steps, especially for a marketing plan for a business plan, are to start with:

Goals
Budget
Marketing Mix
Implementation
Tracking

Start with Your Marketing Mix

A marketing mix typically consists of the following marketing components:

Advertising
Publicity
SEO
Social Media
Content Marketing (blogging or articles for third parties)
Co-Marketing
Sales Promotions
Email Marketing
Events

Now, you do not have to do all of these things, but if your current marketing is not working, you might want to think about shaking things up, and trying some new tactics.

Why Your Plan Needs a Diverse Marketing Mix

If you are focusing on just one of the tactics above, does it not make sense that if you added another tactic, you might double your traffic and sales?

This is why a wide and diverse marketing mix is always an optimal strategy. There is a real danger in using just one tactic to drive traffic and sales, because if something unexpected happens to that tactic, the bottom can fall out of your business overnight.

For example, I consult for a lot of e-commerce businesses, especially Etsy shops. Unforeseen and sudden changes to Etsy’s search algorithm and an increase in Etsy ad bid rates caused problems for a lot of shops who were dependent on just one or both of these tactics, bringing their sales to a halt. So don’t make yourself vulnerable and make sure that you have several streams bringing traffic to your site.

It has been proven, that the top 3 ways to drive traffic and sales are:

SEO
email marketing
advertising

Social media can drive a lot of traffic, but as I have said many times on my blog, it does not always convert as highly into sales. In fact, you might want to read my post, Proof that Social Media Doesn’t Always Convert Into Sales.

Your Specific Marketing Strategy

Now, you also have to think about your overall marketing strategy. For example, if you are a brand new product or business, maybe your goal is to just create brand awareness. In that case, the best tactics would be Publicity and Social Media, especially since both are free, which helps when just starting out.

There are also tactics within tactics. For example, maybe you want to implement tactics of organic SEO traffic as well as organic social media traffic. If these tactics are working for you, then you can increase your ad budget and add paid SEO traffic and paid social media traffic.

Set Realistic Marketing Goals

Your Marketing Strategy Plan Template needs to first set realistic marketing goals and objectives. For example, if part of your social media marketing strategy plan is to increase social media followers in one month from 100 to 10,000, that would be quite a challenge. It is possible, but you would need something really clever to go viral. Increasing followers by 10 to 15% month over month is a little more realistic.

Have a Healthy Marketing Budget

If your sales have plateaued, it is likely because you are not spending enough (or possibly anything) on marketing your business. Remember, your competition is spending money – running ads, doing sales promotions – and they are going to take away your market share very quickly.

A reasonable scale is spending 8 to 15% of your desired annual sales on marketing. I had a client recently who was spending $2,000 a month on advertising and it was bringing them in $15,000 a month in sales. Since advertising cost to revenue tends to stay proportional, I recommended that they double their ad budget to $4,000 and see if this now brings them $40,000 in revenue.

Advertising is particularly important in the beginning, when you are trying to establish market share. Once you acquire a significant customer base that you can get repeat business from, then you can cut back on advertising if need be.

Do More of What’s Working, Fix What Isn’t

You have to spend time reviewing your marketing successes and failures.

For example, if running a sale resulted in 200 new customers that you can now get repeat business from, even though it meant you charged less money for your products/services, was it not worth it to grow your customer base?

Another example. If your ad costs were consistently more than 25% of the revenue they brought in (which is not a great return), do you just drop the ads, or do you make changes to the ad campaign? Maybe your headline or ad creative wasn’t captivating enough. Maybe the ads are targeting the wrong demographic or customer location. Maybe your online ads just need to eliminate negative keywords – there are so many factors that can impact online advertising success. So before you drop your ads, see what you can fix.

You might want to read my Quick Advertising Tip to see if this is your issue.

Conduct a Monthly Marketing Audit

Once a month, it is a good idea to audit your marketing. I’ve spoken before about doing a monthly marketing audit before on my blog, but it involves setting goals for each of your strategies such as advertising, social media, publicity, and then reviewing them to see the results.

If the results are successful, you keep doing the tactic, maybe even expand it to other products or services. However, if the results are not successful, do you drop the tactic altogether, or you do modify it.

For example, your Instagram giveaway was unsuccessful in expanding your email list. Do you try it again with a new creative that gets more attention? Do you improve the offer? Do you make it easier to enter? Do you boost the post? Again, it all depends on what you set as your marketing goals and objectives for the month, and whether or not they were achieved.

Use Success Trackers

Finally, your marketing plan needs success trackers. Much like the audit above, these are monthly pages where you can see how your marketing is working for you. It lets you track the growth of your email list from month to month, your blog followers, your social media followers, and obviously your sales and customers.

My Printable Marketing Plan Digital Download

Now, get your business ready with my 96-page Marketing Plan Template. It is a printable and fillable PDF. If you wish, you can use the marketing planner on your iPad with various drawing tools, or you can simply double click anywhere on the planner page and a text box will appear for you to enter your content.

One recent customer email stated:

“I can’t tell you how happy I am with this marketing plan. It is sooo thorough and well organized. A few months ago I paid a ton of money for a ‘personalized marketing strategy’ and it didn’t include a fraction of what is included here. I was so disappointed and sad to have wasted so much money.”

My planner pages will help you analyze, strategize, plan and track your marketing success, and I cover all of the tactics mentioned above in detail.

Need a Marketing Plan Already Filled in for You?

I offer these types of plans as well, for a variety of different types of small businesses, and more coming. Each 12-Month Plan has action items for each month, Check a few quick ideas from these plans below and click the link to go to the listing and see a sample page.

Restaurant Marketing Plan

Publicity: Email a story pitch to Eater to be included in their cities features, such as “Popular Eateries to Check out in {Your City} ”.
Advertising: Add your restaurant to Zomato.
Social Media: Post a photo of a busy night at the restaurant for #ManicMonday.
Email Marketing: Email your customers your winter theme menu as well as any early bird Valentine’s day offers or Superbowl party specials.
Content Marketing: Write a short article on “The Best Places to Visit When in {Your City}” and include your restaurant and submit it to Buzzfeed.
Sales & Promotions: Comment daily on the latest blog posts of popular local news media and magazines as a great way to get seen by their readers. Most blogs allow you to leave a comment that includes your restaurant name and a link to your website, which also helps your site’s Google SEO ranking.
See a full sample page here.

Online Jewelry Store Marketing Plan

Publicity: If you sell rings, email a story pitch idea to fashion and lifestyle media contacts on my blog recommending one of your rings for National Ring day (February 3rd).
Advertising: Advertise in your city’s local fashion guide, sometimes it is a free vendor listing as well as paid advertising opportunities.
Social Media: Post a video / reel commenting on favorite fashion trends from New York Fashion Week #NYFW this month, everyday for all 9 days of the show.
Email Marketing: Change up your email opt-in incentive to include a free printable such as, “10 Classic Jewelry Pieces to Own”.
Sales & Promotions: Consider selling your jewelry on Zulily.
Content Marketing: Approach your local newspaper’s lifestyle writer and offer to submit a guest article featuring your observations of the hottest trends in jewelry for spring (related to what you sell).
See a full sample page here.

Retail Marketing Plan

Publicity: Maybe you have a special promotion coming up in honor of a special event like the Super Bowl or the Olympics, so pitch a story idea to your local media, such as, “Local Stores Offering Super Bowl Specials This Weekend”.
Advertising: Consider less expensive forms of TV ads, such as having your ad appear on the local weather channel (try sponsoring a segment), the local real estate channel or on the program listings channel. All of these are affordable options and really just involve a print ad appearing on screen.
Social Media: Post a GoPro fly-through reel of your retail store, particularly at a busy time so it looks like you always have lots of customers. You could also do drone videos of the outside of the store. The key here is to be creative so that the video goes viral.
Email Marketing: Email your customers all of the new items in your shop this month, as well as any Valentine’s sales or special offers, as well as any big events happening in your town in February.
Sales & Promotions: Try something different for your store’s signage including chalkboard easel sidewalk signs, signs with 3D lettering, blinking signs, flag signs that protrude out of the building or a signs in the shape of an arrow pointing in the direction of your store, just so it stands out better.
Content Marketing: The search phrase “Stores Near Me” gets 1,000,000 searches each month on Google. So create a page on your blog or website using this phrase as the title tag but also what you sell, i.e. “Stores Near Me Clothing”, and Google will automatically sense what city the searcher is in, driving local searches to your page.
See a full sample page here.

Real Estate Marketing Plan

Publicity: Send out a story pitch idea to your local media for Earth Day editorial next month (April 22nd) on the topic of eco-friendly home design.
Advertising:Add some of your listings to Homes.com.
Social Media: Post a photo of a dog in front of one of your listings every Wednesday for #WoofWednesday.
Email Marketing: Email your latest blog posts and listing of the week to followers.
Sales & Promotions: A great way to get to know people in the neighborhood is to offer to pick up hazardous household waste once a month (batteries, paint, etc.) or hand out batteries (with your business name on them) every Spring to remind people to change the ones in their smoke detectors.
Content Marketing: Write a short article on your “The Difference Between Condos and Apartments” with a byline and link to your website and submit to HUBPAGES.
See a full sample page here.

Fashion Brand Marketing Plan

Publicity: Email a story idea pitch to InStyle recommending one of your products for their Deals & Steals section (should be under $100).
Advertising: Run a one-week Pinterest ad that features a video of your products or a graphic for your shop as a whole with a call to action such as “Shop Spring Fashions Now”.
Social Media: Post a video / reel that starts with the model in her tank top and underwear and one item of clothing and accessories is added with each transition until she is wearing a complete outfit.
Email Marketing: Change up your email opt-in incentive to include a free printable such as “Your Summer Fashion Checklist”.
Sales & Promotions: Consider opening a boutique on The Asos Marketplace.
Content Marketing: Submit a story about “How to Save Money on Your Summer Wardrobe” or another type of cost saving article to money and budget type blogs, such as Wisebread, to go beyond just the fashion blogs.
See a full sample page here.