If you're a small business owner, you know that creating and executing a marketing plan can be essential to your success. The problem is you have a lot of questions about it. What should go into a marketing plan? What does one even look like? So, you turn to Google and get a ton of answers, but it still leaves you in a spot where you're unsure of what to do next. Well, we want to finally clear things up and give you the concrete examples you're looking for—and ones that will help you really see what it is you need to do. Read on and keep this all in mind as you create your own plan because they will help you reach your goals and attract more customers! And when you're done, you'll know:

• The five things your marketing plan needs to include
• What each one of those elements looks like
• How they can help you better achieve your goals
• How Enji makes creating a marketing plan super easy for small business owners!

Let's get started!

Marketing goals

Goal setting is critical for any marketing plan—without them, you won't be able to measure your success or progress. But what counts asa goal? Well, most of the time, you'll read advice about making sure your goals are SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. And, while this isn't bad advice, sometimes it makes you feel like your big and aspirational goals don't fit. But we think it's totally okay to have goals that are only most of those things—they don't have to always be all of them. For example, the goals we ask you to pick from when building your marketing strategy in Enji are:

• Launch my business
• Launch a new product or service
• Make my brand more recognizable
• Increase number of leads
• Get better leads
• Increase sales and revenue
• Do a better job with SEO
• Get more clients
• Get more customers

Sure, all of these things are specific, relevant, and achievable, but they are not always measurable (in the traditional sense) or time-bound. And that's okay because the most important thing for you to do is at least have a defined set of goals that make sense to you and help define where you are going.

Marketing objectives

After you've set your goals, it's time to start thinking about your marketing objectives. Now, it can be confusing to understand the difference between a goal and an objective, so we want you to think of marketing objectives as more specific goals that help you start to define what marketing tasks you should put on your to-do list. Here are a few examples of objectives that work with the goal of "get better leads":

• Make updates to your website
• Build an email list and start email marketing
• Increase word of mouth referrals

Objectives help you define your to-do list (like we mentioned above) but they also help you set your key performance indicators (KPIs). You can learn all about key performance indicators here.

Marketing tasks

Tasks are the nitty gritty details of your plan that will help you achieve your objectives—and eventually reach your goals. These can be ongoing or recurring things like "post on social media every day" or"send out a monthly newsletter." But marketing tasks can also be bigger picture items like "rebrand" or "create a new website." The important thing to remember is they should always support your objectives. So, if one of your objectives is to make updates to your website (with the goal of getting better leads), then a few of your tasks might be things like:

• Update branding and images
• Update your website copy 
• Put pricing on your website
• Put client reviews or testimonials on your website
• Add a virtual tour or instructional video
• Add a brand video

The key is to create a list of marketing tasks that is manageable and doesn't set you up for failure. We know it can feel like you should try and do as many things as possible, but in the end, it's most impactful for you to commit to fewer things you can do really well (and on a continual basis).

Customer information

As you start thinking about marketing to potential customers, you'll want to have some information about them so you can better target your efforts. Whether that is creating content that helps solve their specific problems or marketing messages that make them feel like you understand them, you don't want to market your business to a super generic idea of who your customers are—you want to get to know them. This is often called customer personas or buyer persona research, and it can be helpful to think about things like:

• Who are your potential customers?
• What do they care about?
• What are their motivations?
• What might prevent them from working with you?

By doing this kind of research, you can start to build a picture of who your ideal customer is and what you can do on the marketing side of things to catch their attention and encourage a sale.

Marketing metrics

The final piece of the puzzle is understanding how you'll measure success. This part is critical because it's easy to get caught up in busy work that doesn't actually move the needle on your business goals. That's why we make it easy to set up key performance indicators (KPIs) and track progress—and see where you might be wasting your time (which is an important part of the marketing game).

Some common marketing KPIs small businesses track are things like: 

• Website traffic
• Number of website leads
• Email list growth rate
• Social media engagement (likes, comments, shares)
• Website conversion rate (leads/website visitors)

These are just a few examples, but the point is to choose KPIs that make sense for your specific business goals. If you're not sure where to start, Enji can help! All you need to do is answer our marketing strategy questionnaire and we'll recommend a base set of KPIs that are based on your goals and objectives!

Start your free trial of our small business marketing tools today and get to growing your business with a super smart and easy-to-do marketing plan!

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