Things are really tough in tech this quarter, and while the looming recession indicated that layoffs were imminent, it’s really starting to hit home as employees lose their jobs just weeks before the holiday season.

We all saw the news and clatter on social media. Elon Musk took ownership of Twitter and promptly fired tons of employees, and he isn’t stopping there. He just gave the axe to 80% of contractors and the majority of Twitter’s India staff. 

And it seems like other big tech giants are following this pattern:

• Meta laid off 11,000 employees
• Amazon plans to trim 10,000 corporate jobs
• Apple is instilling a hiring freeze
• Snap Inc. will say goodbye to 20% of employees
• Microsoft cut 1,000 jobs in October (and they may not be finished)
• Intel layoffs are reportedly “around the corner”

When the vast majority of people hear about these tech layoffs, they typically think only engineers are being affected. But, as any seasoned marketer knows, when the time comes to make cuts, marketing is usually the first budget to be affected. 

While marketers are a resourceful bunch, determined to land on their feet, it doesn’t make the situation feel any better. So where does that leave marketing professionals who find themselves unmoored from their employer? 

Just as seasons turn, so will the job market, and companies will be hiring again before we know it. But in the meantime, turning to freelance work is a great way for marketers to keep their skills up and the money rolling in. 

To help, we’re sharing tips for how to start your freelance marketing career and the tools necessary for your freelance marketing stack. Let’s get started! 

Steps for Starting Your Freelance Marketing Career

1. Prepare to Change Your Mindset

Do you live to work, or do you work to live?

When working for a big corporate tech conglomerate, you’re essentially at the whim of your CEO. Their rules/how they want their company ran is instilled in the management team, which trickles down to the rest of the company. There’s typically a certain time you need to clock in, and most times, you can’t log off until certain tasks are completed. In exchange, you receive a steady paycheck, maybe some benefits, and “security.”

However, if these layoffs are showing us anything, it’s that security can be an illusion. But something that isn’t an illusion is believing in and investing in yourself.

Freelance work allows you to set your own terms and rules. You’re essentially working for yourself, so you have a bigger role to play in how you do business. This is a far cry away from the mentality you may have had when working for a larger company.

When embarking on a freelance career, shifting your mindset is step number one. You may find that moving to a team of one is daunting, so give yourself some time to get in the right space mentally so you can take ownership of your new responsibilities and make sure you see yourself as your boss. 

What You’ll Need:

• A notebook – To write your thoughts and organize your plan of action
• Coffee, lots of coffee
• Meditation – If that’s your thing, download apps like Headspace or Aura

2. Zero in on Your Skillset

What is it that you plan to offer in your freelance endeavor? What did you provide your previous employer, and what professional skills have you worked hard to sharpen these past few years? 

For this step, it’s crucial that you have an honest conversation with yourself about what you’re capable of providing to potential clients. It’s not just enough to offer services; you want to make sure that the services you offer are good enough to maintain steady, repeat clients. 

Once you’ve listed out a few services you can offer, put together a blurb that explains exactly what you do. Be specific and concise so you can entice and be transparent with potential clients. This blurb will serve as the foundation of your personal branding efforts. 

What You’ll Need:

• A marketing plan – This will help you put together everything you need to take your skillset and translate it into something sellable. Download our free Marketing Planner Workbook to get started.
• Webinars or eCourses – It’s not a bad idea to sharpen your skills by taking an educational course of some kind. Digital Marketing Institute offers regular marketing webinars on a variety of topics. 

3. Establish Your Audience

Who do you want to appeal to? Who do you think your services would benefit most? Narrowing down your target audience is one of the biggest steps you can take as a freelancer. While it may be tempting, you don’t want to accept work from just anyone. You want to make sure that you can deliver on specific needs and that you completely understand what it is your potential client is looking for. When you understand your audience, you understand how to deliver on their expectations, which will set you up for a successful relationship that could mean more business down the line. 

What You’ll Need:

• Audience personas – These will help you refine and pinpoint the exact kind of person you should be targeting. Download our free Buyer Persona Workbook to establish and keep track of your target audience.

4. Get Started Building Your Personal Brand

Social media is a huge part of our lives. What started out as a fun way to share our day-to-day is now a big part of how people make their income and how brands reach their audience. 

When becoming a freelancer, building a social media presence will help you boost a personal brand and get you in front of more people who may need your services. You probably already have social media accounts, but consider creating new ones solely dedicated to your freelancing and target platforms that you feel make the most sense based on what you offer and where your audience may be. 

You’ll also want to give your LinkedIn account a refresh so that it better represents where you currently are in your professional career. Make sure it highlights your freelance services and skills, and consider asking colleagues for endorsements for an added boost. 

Also, consider creating a website for your freelance work. This can be a place where potential clients can go to learn more about what you offer and reach out to you for a quote or proposal. It’s also a great place to showcase your work or previous projects. 

What You’ll Need:

• A social media calendar – Staying consistent on social media and regularly posting will help boost your credibility and ensure you’re putting your personal brand out there. If you need help, download our free Social Media Calendar Template. 
• Social media photo and video editing apps – You’ll want to make sure the photos you videos you publish on social media look aesthetically pleasing and high-quality. Download apps like VSCO or Adobe Premiere Rush. 
• A website builder – You don’t need to know code in order to build a beautiful website easily. Check out tools like Wix, Squarespace, or Weebly.
• A CRM – You’ll want an intuitive, easy-to-use way to keep track of each customer you accumulate from your freelance business. BenchmarkONE’s CRM for small business offers you insight into your customers and prospects, as well as the marketing tools you need to nurture them. Request a free account today!

5. Look Into Freelance Websites

It may feel like you’re shouting into the abyss when it comes to putting yourself out there as a freelancer. If you’re having trouble getting work or building your client base, make sure you look into freelance websites and platforms out there for some additional help. 

Sites like MarketerHire, Fiverr, Upwork, or Freelancer.com are great because they give freelancers a platform to showcase their expertise. They bring the work to you by making you available to their vast network of users, all looking for various needs within the professional sphere. 

What You’ll Need:

• A headshot – An app like Headshop can help you create a professional headshot in seconds. You can use this for your website and add it to your profile on any freelance site you join.
• A list of freelance websites – The more sites you’re on, the more exposure for your freelance brand and the more client possibilities you can experience. Make a list of potential sites and then fill out profiles on each. Just make sure you are prepared for the amount of work that may come your way. 

Keep Freelance in Your Back Pocket

Freelance work may not be a permanent solution for you. Perhaps you’re only doing it until you can find another job. If you eventually decide to venture out of the world of self-employment, don’t totally abandon your freelance gig. Instead, turn it into a side hustle. 

It’s never a bad idea to have a second source of income. You never know; circumstances may change again, and having a side gig may come in handy. 

We know that times seem a bit bleak right now, especially for those experiencing the latest big tech layoffs first-hand. We hope this guide offers you a viable solution for getting your freelance career off the ground so you can take back control and feel confident heading into the new year. Good luck!

 

A marketing funnel is a visual representation of your customer’s journey from the moment they come in contact with your brand till they become a paying customer. Other marketers also refer to marketing funnels as purchase, conversion, and lead funnels, among others.

We’ve already discussed marketing and sales funnels, the differences, and the various marketing funnel types. However, in this article, we’re taking a closer look at the marketing funnels so you can get a better idea of how to start using them in your marketing and sales strategies. 

Why Do You Need A Marketing Funnel?

Having a marketing funnel is essential for every business, especially now since so much shopping and research is done online. Your marketing funnel is essentially the act of generating leads on your website, identifying the needs of those leads at each stage of their journey, and mapping out the best ways to engage them and encourage them to take action, be it downloading your content or making a purchase.

A marketing funnel allows you to optimize your marketing efforts to influence your customers and get them to take actions beneficial to your business. However, it’s crucial to note that your marketing funnel is powered by marketing automation software. By using an all-in-one marketing automation tool, like BenchmarkONE, you’re able to generate leads and keep track of them in your CRM. You can tag your leads based on certain qualifiers, which make it easy for you to determine where they are in their buyer’s journey, and you can set up automatic nurture campaigns to go out to your leads based on actions they take. These efforts help you not only engage your leads but push them through the funnel closer to a sale. 

6 Types of Marketing Funnels You Need to Know About

There are different types of marketing funnels. The one you choose for your brand will depend on several factors, including your audience, your goal, and your product or service. Also, you are not limited to one funnel; you can create different funnel types to push different CTAs to achieve your marketing goals.

Here are some of the most used funnels by marketers:

1. Email Funnel

The email marketing funnel is a marketing funnel that involves the conversion of a prospect to a paying customer using promotional and educational emails. 

Creating an email funnel typically involves:

• Collecting prospects’ contact details, including name and email address.
• Offering education to prospects on your brand and product via nurturing email campaigns.
• Including offer-based promotions and conversion-focused CTAs in order to convert prospects into customers. 

Examples of email funnels are:

• The free consultation funnel. This email funnel is a series of emails that nudge a prospect towards signing up for a free consultation. 
• The cross-sell funnel. The goal of this email funnel is to get a customer to purchase another product or service. 
• The upsell funnel. This email funnel leads a customer to select a product or service that has a higher price point than the one they’ve already purchased. 
• The product launch funnel. When you launch a new product, you can create an email funnel that is focused on educating prospects and customers about that new product. 

2. Video Funnel

The video marketing funnel is designed to convert prospects to customers through videos. To do this successfully, you have to create videos that will attract, educate, engage, and convert your leads at every stage of their journey.

People love video content because it’s entertaining and simple. In fact, Facebook gets about eight billion video views daily. If you’re looking to increase your content engagement, you should consider adding videos to your rotation. 

However, for video funnels to be successful, you have to do the following:

• Identify the traffic source for the top-of-the-funnel content. Lots of marketers turn to social media and Youtube.
• Map the buyer’s journey and fill the funnel with video content that’s relevant to each stage. 
• Include a strong CTA and links to supporting content, and brand your videos with custom intros and outros.
• Use video in your paid ads, as this will get more top-of-the-funnel traction.

3. Webinar Funnel

The webinar funnel is a marketing funnel that attracts visitors by way of webinar promotion and registration, converts them to leads, and finally turns them into paying customers. A typical webinar funnel starts with generating traffic to your webinar landing page and ends when they purchase your product or service.

With webinar funnels, the registration point is where you collect details of prospects interested in your webinar. You can include emails in this, as you’ll need to send reminders to registered participants before the webinar event itself.

When creating a webinar funnel, make sure to do the following:

• Include a form on your webinar’s landing page that asks for names and email addresses, and include key details that will be covered on the webinar to entice more registrants.  
• Have your marketing automation tool add a tag to each webinar registrant, identifying them as someone who signed up for your webinar. This will be indicated in your CRM and help you understand their needs more. It will also indicate who is in your webinar funnel. 
• Set up a confirmation or thank you page after registration.
• Send out an email to each registrant that includes how they’ll log on to the webinar the day of the broadcast. 
• Promote your webinar. 
• At the end of the webinar, promote a special offer for registrants to redeem. 
• Send a follow-up email after the webinar that includes the slides, recording, and special promo to boost conversions. 

4. Lead Magnet Funnel

The lead magnet funnel involves offering your website visitors a valuable resource in exchange for their contact information. This resource can be in any format – video, case study, eBook, template, white paper, or product trial.

The beauty of the lead magnet funnel is that it attracts high-quality leads interested in the content you are giving them. Furthermore, the lead magnet funnel will help to establish your brand as an authority, making you top of mind when the prospects require a service or product you offer.

With lead magnets, make sure you

• Begin with an incentive that your potential customers will find valuable.
• Design your landing page and your follow-up email series for lead nurturing.
• Promote your lead magnet and use social media marketing and PPC campaigns to send high-quality traffic to the page.
• Watch your list grow, and analyze your campaign performance.

5. Live Demo Funnel

The live demo funnel is often used in SaaS and product-based businesses. It’s an effective marketing funnel because it involves hosting a live demonstration of your product so leads can see first-hand how it works. 

One of the benefits of the live demo funnel is that it gives your brand a chance to answer your audience’s questions directly. As a result, you can remove all their friction and doubts about your product, convincing them to make a purchase.

Furthermore, using the live demo funnel will help you establish a relationship with your customers and begin the journey toward ensuring their lifelong loyalty.

For a live demo funnel, you’ll want to establish the following:

• An on-site CTA for visitors to sign up for a live demo.
• Create an email series aimed at encouraging leads to schedule a live demo.
• An email series to deploy after a lead has sat through a live demo. Since demos are typically experienced when a lead is closer to making a decision, this email series should offer them additional bottom-of-the-funnel resources, such as case studies or testimonials, to help them make the decision to buy. 

6. Home Page/Landing Page Funnel

The landing page is the page on your website where visitors arrive after clicking on an ad. The purpose of this page is to persuade website visitors to take action. This can be anything from signing up for a webinar or downloading a resource to buying your product or service.

Typically, the landing page funnel works with other funnel types for maximum results. Therefore, it’s recommended that you have a clear CTA on your homepage to serve as a catch-all. Keep in mind, however, that not everyone who enters this funnel is qualified. Therefore, you’ll want to ensure this funnel is focused on offering education and allows you to mark leads as qualified once they perform a specific action that takes them further down the funnel. 

Marketing funnels are valuable marketing tools that allow you to build relationships with your customers through the buyer’s journey from awareness to action. They consider various scenarios, allowing you to offer your leads more personalized nurture to address their specific needs. Use a combination of the marketing funnels listed above to drive engagement and boost conversions for your business.

Webinars enable you to engage one-on-one with potential and existing customers. Whether you want to boost brand awareness, educate customers, or generate and nurture leads, webinars will get you there because they reach a wider audience.  

However, when you host a webinar, not all your existing customers or followers will attend. Plus, out of those who attend, only 40% pay attention from start to finish. As a result, some attendees are bound to miss crucial details that are being covered. 

Given an opportunity, these customers would love to consume the content in different formats. And by using that webinar content to create different forms of content, you’re able to engage even more people. In this article, we’ll show you the various different ways you can repurpose your webinar content and use it to engage and educate more prospects.

1. Transcribe Your Webinar 

If you want your webinar to rank better in search results, you have to optimize your video for SEO. One of the best ways to do so is to transcribe your webinar.

First, create a blog teaser that includes the keywords and search phrases you want this content to rank for. Second, publish the teaser on your website together with the webinar video and transcription. Chances are good that the webinar will rank better on Google SERPs, resulting in increased traffic and leads. 

The transcription will come in handy when sharing your webinar video on sites like YouTube and Wistia. Remember, while YouTube automatically generates a transcript for every video, they include a few misspelled words here and there — so it’s still best to create one yourself.

2. Write a Blog or Series Post-Webinar

During a live webinar, you have less than one hour to put across the concepts. That time might not be enough for the speakers to share the nitty-gritty details of the topic of discussion. Writing a blog post or a series allows you to share a more in-depth version of the webinar. 

Ask the guest speaker to write a blog expounding on what they discussed or share the details they didn’t get time to discuss during the webinar. Publish the blog as a guest post on your website and include links to your applicable content, as well as other content from the contributor. Doing so gives the guest speaker more incentive to share the article out, getting it more exposure and making it reach a wider audience. 

Alternatively, if the guest speaker is unable to write the blog, do it yourself. Using the webinar transcription, draw out tips that are tangential to the webinar theme. Create a blog around the topics, publish it, and share it on social media. Make sure to tie the webinar in your social post and tag the webinar speaker so they can easily reshare. 

3. Create Slides and Upload Them to SlideShare

This study shows that 29.8% of your customers want webinars served as a mixture of video, audio, and slides. You’ve given them the webinar in video and audio format. Sharing the webinar in slide format is the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle. 

One of the best platforms to share webinar decks is SlideShare. The service is unique in that it reaches a new audience outside the channels you use for inbound marketing.

Repurpose your webinar into slides, making sure to insert the right keywords into the text. SlideShare automatically creates a text version of the slides and puts it on the page, so if the slides feature the right keywords and phrases, they will appear more on SlideShare searches.

Moreover, while it’s standard practice to focus on the main points when creating the slide, it’s wise to add a lot of text to each slide. SlideShare works well for self-explanatory slides – those that are less graphical and more text-based. 

4. Repurpose The Webinar into an eBook 

This method won’t work for some webinars, but if your webinar discusses a topic that merits a deeper explanation, it might lend itself well to the creation of an eBook. 

One mistake people make when repurposing a webinar into an eBook is converting the slides or transcription directly into written format. Rather, use the slides and transcription to build a solid outline for the eBook. Use the webinar as an expert interview or background research. Draw out quotes and data to add credibility to your content, then flesh out the outline with unique and fresh content.

You can offer the eBook for free on your website or share it as gated content to generate leads for your business. 

5. Turn Visuals, Quotes, and Key Takeaways into Social Posts

While social media is an effective channel to market your webinars, it requires smart tactics to get the most out of it. The most important thing is to determine where your target audience hangs out and to share your content there.

Pull out the most interesting, insightful, and fun facts and quotes from your webinar recording. Keep in mind different types of content work best for different social platforms. For that reason, repurpose these quotes, facts, and stats to suit each channel.

For example, create a five-minute highlight reel showing the key takeaways of your webinar on TikTok. Alternatively, you could create a Twitter thread out of the key takeaways or post stunning graphics of the most insightful quotes on Instagram.

6. Gate the Webinar on Your Website

Webinars are wonderful for lead generation. However, not everyone who may be interested in tuning into your webinar hears about it in the initial promotion. Make sure you record your webinar broadcast; that way, you can put it up on your website’s resource page and make it available to site visitors. Gate it so you can generate new leads from it long after it’s aired. 

Once your broadcast is over, make sure you get as much out of your webinar recording as possible. Doing so will help you expand your reach and generate more leads, as well as provide different formats of content to further engage your audience.

The holiday season presents unique opportunities for both businesses and consumers. It’s a time when consumers happily purchase products for family, friends, and loved ones. For businesses, it’s a chance to increase sales, brand awareness, and engagement.

Every year, the holidays are pretty promising for small businesses. Some even know that they’ll make the majority of their sales for the entire year in these couple of months. However, this year, with a looming recession, rising costs, and lingering uncertainty around supply chains, holiday sales may not soar to the same heights as in past years. If you want this season to be as impactful for your small business as possible, then you should start planning your holiday marketing now.

We know that it can be hard to prioritize this in your marketing plan with all the other things that come with running your business. But we’ve got a list of steps for you to take that will ensure you’re ahead of the game. 

Why Should You Plan Your Holiday Marketing Campaign Now?

You may think you’re jumping the gun a bit, but, as they say, the early bird gets the worm. Here are some reasons you should start planning your holiday marketing right now: 

• Even if this year isn’t as busy as last year, you should still anticipate a rush in business, and nothing is worse than having an increase in online orders and foot traffic with limited products or resources. By starting your prep now, you can estimate the number of sales to expect and therefore prepare your inventory to match the demand.
• When you’re prepared, you can rest easy. Being prepared and setting up your marketing ahead of time will give you time to enjoy the holidays instead of worrying if you scheduled that Thanksgiving promotion email to go out. 
• You can be more strategic in your approach because you aren’t scrambling to get a campaign together. By starting early, you’re giving yourself more time to come up with effective holiday promotions, the right amplification approach, and partners to join forces with. Plus, you’ll have more time to identify the most effective marketing channels to use to reach your audience.

Step-By-Step Guide for Prioritize Your Holiday Marketing

The reality is with every passing day; you’re losing the chance to make this year’s holiday campaign as profitable and successful as possible. We know you’re busy, but you don’t want to be kicking yourself when December comes, and your sales are behind last year’s numbers. Here’s a simple process that will help you get your holiday marketing going this year. 

1. Begin With the End in Mind

What is the purpose of your holiday campaign? What do you want to achieve at the end of the campaign? Whether it is to get at least 500 new customers or triple your current gross profit, defining your goals before you start will set the path for your campaign’s success.

Make your holiday marketing goals SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely). Setting unrealistic expectations for yourself will only make you anxious and disappointed.

2. Remember Who You’re Selling To

You should already know your target audience long before creating your holiday campaigns. However, sometimes the holidays open you up to a new audience or a specific subset of your current target group. Either way, zeroing in on who you want your holiday campaigns to reach will only make it easier for you to achieve your goals and ensure you get your promotions in front of the right people. 

Use identifiers like location, gender, age range, income level, and interests to help you better understand your target audience’s behavior and needs. Tap into the social media platforms they use, as that will tell you where they spend most of their time and where you can run paid ads that will reach them. The more you understand about your target audience, the better informed your decisions will be when creating campaign content, offers, and promotions. 

You may be wondering how you can access this kind of information. The best way is to use a small business CRM so you can capture as much lead data as possible. An all-in-one CRM, like BenchmarkONE, brings your sales and marketing efforts together, so you can not only tap into rich customer data but use that data to implement your holiday marketing campaign seamlessly. But more on that later. 

3. Create Optimized Offers and Landing Pages

Once you have your goals and a solid picture of your ideal holiday buyers, the next step is to craft your offer (or offers) and a landing page that you’ll drive traffic to. This page will be where your audience can sign up to take advantage of your holiday promotion. 

Will you offer your customers discounts, free delivery, or something else you believe they’ll appreciate? If yours is a service-based business, what will you do differently for your customers that they will find valuable? Keep in mind that whatever you go with has to be compelling enough to encourage a quick purchase decision. 

Make sure you build a landing page that includes everything your audience needs to know about your holiday offer and how they can benefit from it. Include things like: 

• An attention-grabbing headline
• Engaging copy that clearly highlights the benefits of your offer
• Captivating, branded visuals
• An opt-in form to track sign-ups

4. Promote Your Offer

Now that your offer is ready, you need to get it in front of your target audience. You need to draw up your promotion plan and identify channels where you can reach your audiences through paid or organic efforts.

Promotion channels you can use include:

• Email marketing – Gives you the opportunity to reach your audience directly with tailored, personalized messages.
• Social media ads – You can tap into each platform’s vast user base and narrow it down based on criteria and characteristics that align with your audience. List the assets you need for each platform ahead of time, such as images, copy, and social media ad spec size, which will help you get your ads running efficiently. 
• Blogging – Create a promotional post and add your holiday promo CTA to it. You can also include the CTA in your top-performing blog posts. 
• PPC Ads – It may be helpful to include your holiday promo in your pay-per-click advertising if that is part of your marketing strategy. 
• Partner or influencer marketing – Reach out to influencers or brand partners to see if they’d be willing to share your promotion with their audience. Just make sure their audience aligns with your target audience for your holiday campaign.

5. Nurture and Build a Connection with Your Leads

Once your holiday marketing offers and campaigns go live, how do you plan to convince prospects to become paying customers? What happens to leads after the holiday period ends?

Encouraging repeat business from or retaining these new customers is just as important as acquiring them in the first place, and developing a lead nurture strategy is the most effective route. 

In step two, we emphasized the importance of knowing your audience. We touched on how BenchmakrONE is an all-in-one tool that allows you to tap into key customer data and use that data to implement marketing and sales strategies. By using BenchmarkONE, you can put together effective, personalized email nurture campaigns that provide your customers with content and education they need to make repeat buying decisions. The best part? These nurture campaigns can be automated based on triggers you set up based on specific customer actions and criteria. So, all those new leads you acquired from your holiday campaign can be automatically followed up with while you’re busy doing other important things for your business. 

6. Identify Metrics for Reporting and Measuring Success

You’ll want to know if your campaign was actually successful, so make sure you clearly define metrics and look back at your goals to make sure they were achieved. Things like conversion rate and the number of sales you generated will help you understand if your promo landed with your audience. Also, make sure you create tracking URLs for each promotional channel you push your campaign out on, as this will tell you which generated the most sales and leads. 

The holiday season is an opportunity for you to give back to your customers through exciting offers, discounts, and rewards. It’s also a time of your for your small business to increase sales and be as productive and successful as possible. This year, say no to ignoring your holiday marketing and last-minute campaigning. Start planning your campaigns now and enjoy the holidays while reaping the rewards!  

Small business owners take on many responsibilities and have to handle numerous tasks with only a few team members to help if any. This makes it challenging to put sufficient effort into important aspects of your small business, such as marketing.

Implementing a solid marketing strategy will ensure you can consistently sell to existing customers and convert new prospects without losing track of other vital aspects of your business.

Marketing is especially important today. There are fewer brick-and-mortar stores and more trends toward eCommerce and online shopping. Therefore, it is essential to establish a strong online presence and make your business visible and accessible to the 5.3 billion people on the internet.

In this article, we’ll show you how to create an effective marketing plan — but first, let’s discuss the basics. 

What Is a Marketing Plan? 

A marketing plan is a document that outlines your paid advertising, social media, email, SEO, or content marketing strategy. Think of it as a strategic roadmap showing your starting point and the path to your destination.

In this case, the marketing plan describes the objectives of your strategy, such as increasing traffic to your website, building product awareness, or growing lead generation. Besides that, it details the action plan — the things you need to do to achieve those goals — and stipulates a timeline for each.

While not all marketing plans are created equal, they share a similar structure that includes: 

• A list of goals
• Research including SWOT analysis, competitor analysis, buyer purchase cycle, and buyer personas
• Your detailed strategy
• A definition of your key performance indicators (KPIs) and result tracking methods.
• A tactical process

What Are the Benefits of a Marketing Plan?

It Informs Your Content Marketing

An effective marketing plan gives your content marketers a North Star to follow. It clearly outlines the goals and expectations, as well as how to attain them. 

For example, if your goal is to increase funnel conversion, your marketing plan will highlight the things you need to do at every stage of the buyer’s journey. Perhaps you need to publish more blog posts that address questions at the consideration stage of the journey. Or, maybe you need to create more case studies to help prospects on the fence make a decision to convert. Or, if you aren’t seeing enough leads enter your funnel, then you know it’s time to up your social media and guest content. 

Even better, the plan offers an outlined process for creating content and distributing it so that it sees as much value as possible. This ensures that your strategy has legs and gets put into motion. 

Serves as a Guide for Your Marketing and Sales Efforts

Beyond guiding your content marketing efforts, a marketing plan streamlines your sales process. It gives your teams an instruction manual or blueprint that lets everyone know exactly what steps your sales team needs to take to see results. 

Let’s say your website brings in 10,000 visitors a month, 3% of which converts. That means every month, you get 300 customers. If you want to double the number of customers every month, then it means you have to double your web traffic or improve the conversion rate. With a marketing plan, you have your conversion goals tracked so you can easily check-in and see if they’re being met.

It Tracks Your Goals and Strategy

Having measurable goals is the only way to be successful in actually meeting them. Since your marketing plan is guiding your sales and marketing efforts, it can easily connect the dots to marketing and sales metrics you’ll use to measure the success of your efforts. Not to mention, it provides a framework with which to track your progress.

For example, if your goal is to double web traffic within one year. You can measure traffic growth in the first quarter and see if the numbers match up with what you laid out in your plan. If you’re falling off track, you could re-evaluate your plan and tweak some aspects to get everything on track. 

Constant evaluation and refining of the strategy enables you to ultimately achieve your goals.

It Keeps Your Teams Aligned

Despite their similar goals, your sales and marketing team has its own agendas and processes to follow. Your marketing plan can help ensure they stay aligned, so things don’t fall through the cracks.

More than anything, though, it gives teams a clear, shared path, allowing them to see both the forest and the trees when it comes to the overarching marketing objectives.

For example, if you’re looking to build awareness for a new product, a marketing plan ensures the teams are aware of the target audience and the means to reach out to those customers. 

Doing so ensures everyone can focus resources and efforts towards a common goal. Ultimately, that streamlines marketing practices and enables your teams to operate more efficiently. 

Basics of a Marketing Plan

A marketing plan is a document that clearly details your business’s roadmap to organize and implement its marketing strategy over a specified period. Marketing plans enable businesses to consider important factors before launching a campaign. Such factors include campaign goals, marketing tactics, buyer personas, and deliverables.

For any effective marketing plan, the following are non-negotiables.

• Conduct Market research
• Products and offerings analysis
• Target audience definition
• Marketing goals (tied to your business goals)
• Planned budget and timeline for the execution of your marketing strategy
• Your KPIs and how to measure them

How to Create Your Small Business Marketing Plan

A great marketing plan is a major competitive advantage and is worth the time that it takes to put together. Here’s an in-depth guide for how to put one together.

1. Start With Market Research

You might have a general idea of where you want to go with your marketing, but you have to put that idea into the appropriate context of a customer persona – more on this later. This means performing market research to understand the scope of both your industry and your audience, with an eye out for nuances that could directly affect your plans.

To truly understand your market and what makes your audience tick, you need to ask yourself a series of questions that uncover the unknowns and the truths. 

• What platforms does your audience utilize?
• What does a standard buyer’s journey look like in your field? 
• What are your competitors doing with their emails, their social media, and their blogs?
• Finding the answers to questions like these will help you shape your marketing plan from the outside so that you target your efforts and don’t waste time on fruitless endeavors.

Make sure you also pay special attention to the key stages of market research. The last thing you want to do is breeze through your research and miss anything, or not give a certain stage the attention necessary. Doing so could make you miss out on something crucial, and if you miss the mark on knowing your audience, you won’t know the best way to speak to them. Here are the five crucial market research stages you need to know: 

• Market Analysis
• Competitor Analysis
• Trends Analysis
• Customer Analysis
• SWOT Analysis

If you need to, or if you have the resources, outsource an agency that can help you dig into these areas. The more in-depth you’re able to get, the more you’re able to uncover that can serve you later.

2. Analyze Your Product and Offerings

Along with your sales team, you need to be the leading expert on the product or service that you’re selling. While you obviously know a lot already, try to come at it from a new perspective. Again, here are some questions you should be asking at this step:

• What kinds of product-related questions would somebody who knows nothing about your brand have? 
• What are the stand-out features that separate your offerings from the competition? 
• What about your competitors’ products gives them an edge? 
• What are the most common issues your customers have with your product?

Analyzing your product or service from all possible angles will help you hone in on knowledge gaps and educational opportunities, both of which will guide your plan. 

A great way to gain insight into this kind of information is to analyze your CRM data. Your CRM can be used for more than just sales. In fact, it can influence numerous areas within your business, including product lifecycle and development. Look into data on upsells to see what about your product is so impressive that it’s leading to more purchases from your clients. Or, look at why certain customers may be terminating the use of your product to determine what features just aren’t cutting it. Your CRM can also give you information on the original selling point of your product, so you know what not to change in the future.

3. Define Your Target Audience

You’d be amazed at how many small businesses haven’t officially outlined their ideal buyer or target audience. They may claim to know exactly who that person is, but the truth is, over time, the target audience changes and evolves. Just like businesses, things adjust as the market adjusts, and who you initially thought you’d be selling to may look a little different a few years in. 

That’s why it’s imperative that you periodically examine who your target audience is but nail down exact characteristics and document them. This is all a part of having an effective marketing strategy, because after all, if you don’t know who you’re marketing to, then you won’t be able to sell your product. 

Know your target audience inside and out before embarking on your marketing plan. This includes diving into their wants, needs, pain points, and demographics. Segment your buyer personas in the same way you’ll segment your marketing efforts, creating robust profiles of your target customers at various stages of the funnel. From there, you can better define your goals, as well as how you hope to achieve them.

Again, a CRM can help you gain insights into who your ideal customers are by telling you common characteristics, like industry, company size, revenue, etc. You can also use an NPS (Net Promoter Score) to get even deeper into information around your most loyal customers. 

Here’s an example of a buyer persona and the kinds of information you can access on that persona using an NPS: 

Maggie the Marketer

I want to:

• Capture leads from free and paid marketing channels, like SEO, PPC, and social media.
• Communicate with Prospects and Customers consistently through smart campaigns.
• Track lead sources.
• Integrate with marketing campaigns.
• Tie marketing activity to ROI.
• View website activity and take action.

 

You can ask your customers that fit this persona even more specific questions, like:

• What features of your product do they use the most?
• What parts of your product do they use the least?
• What do they dislike the most about your software?
• What do they wish your software provided them?

The more specific your questions, the more insights you’ll gain into what about your product pulls your target audience in and what you can do to increase their attention over time.

4. List Your Goals

Speaking of specifics, get as specific as you can with what you want to achieve with your marketing plan. “More revenue” is an obvious objective, but it’s far more helpful to break it down into smaller, tangible goals. 

Making your goals real ideas instead of just something you know is necessary for your bottom line makes it easier for your team to figure out how to achieve them. Also, it helps identify the various ways you’ll measure the success of your efforts, ensuring you’re meeting or getting close to meeting those goals. 

So instead of listing “more revenue” under your goal section, try these specific goals on for size:

• Grow our email marketing list by two percent by the end of Q3.
• Produce three pieces of blog content each week.
• Get one piece of content published on a marketing site our audience reads a month.
• Generate 100 leads from social media each month. 
• Generate 200 inbound marketing leads each month.
• Increase demo requests by two percent each quarter. 

Having too many goals isn’t a bad thing, so long as you have ideas for pushing them forward. Create a mind map of sorts, starting with your big goals (more revenue, more customers, etc.) and forming offshoots with the smaller goals that will help you get there.

5. Think Tactics and Strategy

Now you know your goals, so it’s time to talk strategy. For most marketing plans, your tactics will be divided into five core initiatives:

• Content marketing
• Email marketing
• Paid advertising
• SEO
• Social media

Figure out how your goals fit into each of these tactics, as well as how they come together to form your bigger marketing strategy. For instance, if you know one of your goals is more lead generation, make sure you’re creating and publishing the right content to generate leads. Map out specifically what efforts you’ll be using and which goal they help achieve. Including this in your marketing plan will help you easily identify how you plan to track whether those efforts are successful.

Notice how well these things work on their own and together, and keep in mind there will likely be a lot of overlap. For example, any content you create could also be used as fuel for email marketing and drip campaigns, your social media strategy, and SEO. You’ll want to fit together with each piece of the puzzle in a way that aligns with what you’ve learned through market research and building audience personas, as well as to lay out how you’re going to prioritize different tactics.

6. Include Your Budget

Nobody gets into marketing because they secretly love accounting. But regardless of how good you are with numbers, prioritizing your small business marketing budget is instrumental to your marketing plan. Not many of us have an unlimited marketing budget, so we can’t just be spending dollars without a care in the world. 

Determining first what your budget is will indicate what efforts are reasonable and which need to be tabled for the time being. Once you know how much you’re able to spend, you should divvy up your budget by putting the most spend behind the effort you think will reap the most reward. You may be guessing on this at first, and that’s fine. Do some research to see what other small businesses and direct competitors are putting spend behind and why. Then, as time goes on, you can evaluate the ROI of your various efforts to determine if your spend is being used wisely. There’s always room to make adjustments and tweak your budget, so you’re spending in the right areas. Just continue to put your money where it will go the furthest, and you’ll avoid wasting dollars on marketing strategies that are under-delivering.

How to Utilize Social Media Marketing

Social media has become essential in marketing and no marketing plan would be complete without it. With 4.70 billion people using social media, it is undoubtedly a valuable way for small businesses to reach their target audience. Social media is also a cost-friendly option as it relies more on creativity and strategy than funding. To use social media as part of your small business marketing plan, it is critical to:

1. Develop a Strategy

Social media is an excellent marketing tool, but it is also an incredible time-waster if not used properly. This means that developing a strategy for your social media marketing is important. You must identify the following:

• The platforms your audience is using
• The marketing patterns of your competitors
• The best content medium for your audience
• The content style that is appropriate for your audience

2. Publish Helpful Content on a Schedule

Content is everywhere on social media. The only way to gain your audience’s attention is to post helpful content relevant to their needs and pain points. Focusing on creating valuable content demonstrates your authority, expertise, and value to your audience, ensuring that they stay with your business long-term.

If you decide to post three times a week, ensure you are consistent with the frequency. Be honest with yourself about the posting schedule that you can realistically commit to, especially if you don’t have a social media manager or a team handling that for you.

The key is to stick with whatever posting schedule you come up with for the best results. To ensure success, put together a social media calendar that outlines what to post on which platform every day. 

3. Use Each Platform Appropriately:

While social media is an avenue to build personal relationships with your audience and communicate directly with them, each platform is a fit for different things.

• LinkedIn: LinkedIn is a formal platform appropriate for slightly more substantial written content and B2B businesses.
• Instagram: Instagram is better suited for visually stimulating posts that are short and catchy, a plus for eCommerce businesses.
• YouTube: Video content like tutorials, how-tos, or demos is great for this platform.
• Facebook: Facebook is versatile and can accommodate nearly all forms of content. It is great for community building and frequent interaction with your customer base. Long and short videos and written content do well on Facebook, and you can also take advantage of the live-streaming option.
• Twitter: Twitter allows for short-form written and video content. It is also great for quick, real-time conversations and conveying information to your audience.

How To Market Your Small Business – Creative Marketing Ideas

Small businesses often mistake channeling their marketing efforts on gaining new customers only. While it is important that a business consistently increase its client base, it is perhaps even more necessary to maintain healthy communication with your existing customers.

Your marketing strategy should create opportunities to establish long-term relationships with both existing and potential customers. Here are some creative marketing ideas that can help you reach new people and increase sales to your existing client base.

Publish High-Quality Content

Content marketing will help demonstrate your authority, expertise, and desire to benefit your audience. There is content everywhere, and your audience is swarmed with content from all sides, even your competitors. The only way to set yourself apart is to create helpful content that is relevant to your target audience.

You can distribute your content by publishing it on your blog, official pages on social media, email newsletters, or even guest posting on other websites you know your audience spends time on.

Post Content Consistently

Success on social media involves consistently posting compelling, engaging content. Sharing helpful content makes your business look trustworthy. It is also a great way to show your expertise and that you care about your audience enough to interact with them. Make sure you are also posting blog content regularly to help fuel your email and social media campaigns. Consistency makes you reliable in your audience’s eyes, and with reliability you’re able t build trust and stay at the tops of their minds. 

Interact With Followers

This helps customers feel secure about purchasing from your business and makes them more receptive to future campaigns. You can do this by asking your audience questions and creating a community.

You can also utilize engagement tools, like Instagram Live or webinars, to start exciting discussions while promoting your products and services and giving your small business the visibility it needs.

Use Video Marketing

Video marketing is easy with today’s devices and social media apps like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. You can introduce variety into your content format using videos. Your videos can be instructional, how-to guides, short vlogs, or docu-series. This also increases your engagement and can help you generate inbound leads.

Host A Social Media Contest or Giveaway

Apart from marketing your small business and increasing engagement, organizing contests and giveaways gets you on the path to building a community for your business, increasing your subscriber count and followers, increasing visibility, and getting more sales.

It is also a great avenue to get lots of user-generated content depending on how you structure your contest/giveaway and its terms.

Establish A Customer Referral Program

Word-of-mouth marketing is still one effective method of gaining new customers. With referral programs, you are tasking your existing customers with being brand ambassadors who spread the benefits of your products and services.

You can incentivize customers with free products, subscriptions, and other rewards for referring new customers to your small business. It is a cost-effective marketing strategy when done right.

We know that putting together an official marketing plan can be intimidating. But every step outlined above will help you get closer to reaching your goals. And if you need to tweak it, these steps will provide you with a solid foundation of knowledge, so you aren’t navigating those changes in the dark. With the steps above, you’ll be well on the way to meeting your marketing goals and effectively tracking your progress.