The Authority Guide to Writing and Implementing a Marketing Plan

A step-by-step manual to make you a smarter marketer and maximise your business profits

Ambrose Blowfield, Jo Blowfield

• Publisher: The Authority Guides
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781909116917
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

Have a sales plan? Now you need a marketing plan. Written especially for small businesses, this Authority Guide shows you how to write and execute your marketing plans efficiently and accurately. Ambrose and Jo Blowfield will help you create a plan using proven, affordable marketing tactics for both digital and traditional strategies. You'll have a year long marketing plan that is structured, well thought out and targeted to your ideal clients, allowing you proactively to promote your business.

1. The changing world of business

As you will have realised, the nature of business has changed, as has the nature of marketing. To understand marketing a couple of decades ago you probably had to attend multiple years of higher learning followed by several years working in a full-time marketing role, or an advertising agency, or working in a truly marketing-driven business. These days you can, and should, acquire marketing know-how on a weekly basis and in smaller bite-sized pieces. By applying and measuring those techniques you can learn quickly while growing your business.

Even measuring your marketing, once the competitive advantage of large organisations, is now easier for SMEs than it has ever been. With a little planning and effort you can easily measure over 80 per cent of your marketing activities and results, allowing you to make changes more easily and implement new actions quickly.

When the marketing world was dominated by advertising, a standard commitment for any business was for a 6- or, more likely, 12-month contract. This meant that if you made the wrong decision at the start of a year, there was little you could do except write the money off or, worse still, ‘hope’ for a better outcome. We believe that there are times in your life for hope, but the marketing of your business is not one of those times!

For those of you about to launch a new business or new division, or even those in that start-up phase, you can research the market and learn about your chosen industry more easily and quickly than ever before – using websites, industry forums and social media. Never before in human economic history has there been a better time to launch a new business, a new product or service, or a new division.

As stated, many businesses do not survive their first five years, while many more stagnate long term. Too many businesses, despite having seen first hand the benefits of planning parts of their business or personal lives, get to a point where they stop planning – drifting towards mediocrity, following the path of wholly reactive behaviour, ending in disappointing results.

Clearly a more proactive approach is needed by SME business owners and soon-to-be start-up entrepreneurs. Surely there is a way to follow a proven path to business knowledge and success, a way to combine the more traditional proven marketing tactics with the dynamic and ever-changing new marketing tools?

We passionately believe that in this new world of social media, mobile marketing and online marketing, the winning businesses will be those that learn, apply, review and tweak their ongoing marketing. The losers will be those businesses where the owners or managers don’t plan, don’t measure and don’t implement.

We’re keen to share that we’re still following the same methodologies as we’ve always done: we still read, we still attend events, we still network to learn from others in business and we still make ourselves do uncomfortable things to keep us growing – like writing a book! Recently, to stay up to date in digital marketing we both ended up listening to half an hour of podcasts on digital marketing per day at 1.5 times speed, simply to get through the content more quickly!

This is not a guide for dummies – as we know from the thousands of people we’ve worked with in business, small to medium business owners and managers are not dummies, they’re incredibly strong technically in what they do, it’s just that many of them haven’t had the time to understand marketing yet. This Authority Guide is a practical step-by-step manual that you can come back to again and again for reference. If you put it away for 12 months, simply bring it out to rewrite your marketing plan again. But keep in mind that some aspects of marketing will have changed by then, especially in the digital marketing space. Best SME practice is to rewrite your marketing plan annually. Despite marketing being a wide topic, based on over a decade of working with thousands of SMEs around the globe, we have condensed what you really need to know to grow your business into these short pages. Use the scaled down marketing plan template guide at the back of this book to create your plan, or better still visit THEmarketingcompany.com (search: Authority Guide) for a free online template to save you even more time when implementing. It will be easier to complete your marketing plan as you go through this book, the action points are at the end of each chapter to guide you.

'The winners in life think constantly in terms of I can, I will and I am. Losers, on the other hand, concentrate their waking thoughts on what they should have or would have done, or what they can’t do.'

Denis Waitley author of The Psychology of Winning

2. Our journey

Growing our business has been challenging, fun, overwhelming, exhilarating, scary and wonderful and we’re sure you have experienced this too. As many of you will have learned in your business or personal lives, having a clear motivation for taking action is often a key ingredient to you doing something. For us that motivation came from having our home and investment property mortgaged fully, having our first child and deciding that in order to spend more time together we needed to work together.

So we read every business book that people we trusted recommended to us, we attended paid and free talks, we listened to business and personal development books on CDs, we networked with successful people to ask them questions about how they achieved success and we made ourselves speak publicly in front of audiences (despite our nerves). Through doing all these things, we steadily built our confidence, we accelerated our business and we developed the habit of ongoing learning and implementation.

Our first two challenges were self-inflicted. The first came from starting the business with only NZ$1,500 (then about £500 or US$1,000), without even pre-negotiating access to more bank funds if required. The second came from not knowing that in order to get paid in month two we needed to invoice people in the first month! Four months later and our core values were tested by our first regular monthly client who refused to take the advice we gave them. Our purpose in business has always been to make a positive difference. The client chose to advertise their business a certain way, a way that we knew would generate zero results, and despite our advice they spent their hard-earned profits anyway, achieving zero results. We measured the results with them and suggested not to repeat the mistake again, taking time to explain why it would be another waste of money. They chose to advertise again, this time mentioning that their family loved seeing them advertise as it made them look successful. This was our first experience of ego-based marketing: choosing to advertise for personal pride and not for business gain. Having politely, awkwardly – and financially painfully for us as a young business – let the client go for choosing to waste money, we walked away with two important lessons that we can now share:

• Never compromise on your beliefs or values, your business success will come without the need to change who you are or how you choose to act.
• Never put your own ego above the business, you serve your business and by doing so correctly it, in turn, will serve you.

Having grown the business locally, we decided to open another office with a full-time employee, only to be hit with the tail end of the Global Financial Crisis. Which two things did businesses, large and small, cut back on in recession? Yes, marketing and training! So as a sales and marketing training company we were cut back on both sides, watching our number of enquiries AND our conversion rate of enquiries to sales drop by over 65 per cent! For example, the results from talks we delivered around the country (an example of public relations) changed from 30 attendees leading to 3 sales of our 12-month sales programme, to fewer than 1 sale per event! We did everything good marketers do – we looked at our 4 Ps of Marketing. We changed the Product offering to our marketing boot camp (so it became a two-day commitment not 12 months), we changed the Price by doing this (the boot camp was ¼ of the investment of our 12-month programme), we changed the Place by delivering in new towns and new venues (for our promotional talks and for our marketing boot camp), we even changed the person used to Promote the event and the pitch itself! Despite small changes, the trend was the same: if we really wanted to make up for a drop of 65 per cent, we’d have to treble our marketing activities in the short term to make up for the market change. The lesson we learned was that it’s only by measuring your marketing activities and results that you can truly commit to significant change. We also had our resolve tested: both refusing to give up on the dream of business ownership by resisting offers of full-time employment elsewhere.

While the 18 months of recession we faced were tough, the lessons we learned were priceless and they have led us to grow an international training business and do what we love in life: helping SME businesses make more money through improving their sales and marketing skills, confidence and knowledge. Now we are thrilled to deliver both face-to-face and online training right around the world, helping to change the world one business at a time.

We have seen literally hundreds of our clients double their turnover, their net profits and their impact on the world. We’ve watched in awe as some clients have gone from start-up to million-dollar businesses in a couple of years, and medium-sized ones have broken through their respective glass ceilings in their industries. For over a decade we have been humbled by the stories and feedback people have shared with us.

The key is to take action

Having read this book there are a number of hurdles you’ll likely have to overcome. Ideally you’ll complete your marketing plan as you read through this book – which means you’ll overcome hurdle number one: completing your marketing plan. It may feel like a big task, especially if you’ve never written a marketing plan before. You may not trust in your marketing knowledge so you may face a challenge with your confidence. You may not have someone to support you and hold you to account.

We’ll deal with each hurdle in turn, starting with completing your marketing plan. If you’ve read this book, you have the foundation knowledge to complete your plan. Using our simple online template combined with the book, you can probably complete your plan in a matter of hours. You must start by blocking out time in your calendar: this is likely to be after hours or in your free time. If marketing isn’t your first love in business, we recommend no more than 90-minute blocks of time, giving yourself a mini-reward after every block of time. If you lack marketing confidence, think back over your career or your personal life: everything you’ve ever become confident at you needed to do for the first time at some stage. You likely do something confidently every day, such as using a software programme, analysing a client problem, or fixing an issue, that didn’t come naturally at first. Accountability is important. If you don’t have a mentor, a coach or someone to hold you to account to make you complete your marketing plan using this Authority Guide, ask for someone right now. That way you’ll be held to account by them to finish this book and finish your marketing plan! Stop reading and do it now! Don’t be afraid to hold someone else in business to account in their marketing in order that they ensure you implement your plan. Finally, a story that keeps many of our clients motivated: if your competito...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The changing world of business
• 2. Our journey
• 3. The Profit Pillars of Marketing™
• 4. Marketing proposition: external analysis
• 5. Marketing proposition: internal analysis
• 6. Marketing communication: non-digital
• 7. Marketing communication: digital
• 8. Implementing your plan
• Conclusion
• The TMC Authority Guide Marketing Plan Template™
• About the authors
• Who is THE Marketing Company?
• Bibliography
• Other Authority Guides