Important Questions to Answer When Building a Marketing Plan for Your Business
By Stephanie Chandler on Jan 06, 2013 with Comments 7
Whether you’re working on your first marketing plan for your business or refreshing your current plan (which should be 
done regularly!), it’s important to think about your target audience and overall goals. Following are some important questions to answer before you choose your marketing tactics. Feel free to copy and paste these into your marketing planning documents.
Who is my ideal target audience? (age, gender, occupation, location, income level, and other distinguishing factors)
What are the biggest challenges for my audience?
How can we help with each of those challenges?
What is the overall mission for our company?
What are our core values?
Are there specific clients we do NOT want to work with?
Describe what we do in THREE sentences:
Describe what we do in ONE sentence:
What marketing tactics have worked well for us? (Hint: Do more of those.)
What marketing tactics haven’t worked for us?
What marketing tactics have we not yet tried?
How solid is out social media presence?
What are the top three to five products or services our clients ask for that we don’t yet offer?
How could we offer those products/services? (Partnerships, referral partners, in-house)
List our revenue streams and whether performance is up or down for each:
Should some revenue streams be removed?
Should new revenue streams be added?
Rate our website on a scale from 1 to 10:
What improvements should be made to the site?
Is it time for a site redesign?
Does the site have a call to action on most pages?
Is it optimized for the search engines?
Does it include a blog that is updated a minimum of once per week?
What is our revenue goal for the year?
What is our marketing budget for the year? (Most companies dedicate 10% to 15% of revenues for marketing.)
What new investments will we make this year? (technology, staffing, expansion, etc.)
What are our top goals for the business in the coming year?
What steps do we need to take to reach those goals?
You can download a free marketing plan template here.
Filed Under: Marketing • Marketing by SC
Comments (7)
Comments Rule! 5 Reasons to Leave a Comment on This Post
- We link your name to your website which may improve your site ranking with Google.
- Because we include your web link, other readers may click through and visit your site.
- Contribute to the conversation. Did this help you? Do you have something to add? Share with our readers!
- It's good karma! You just might get more comments on your blog as a result, not to mention visibility with other readers.
- We pay attention to comments and appreciate users who take the time to contribute!
Leave a Reply
Related Articles
7 Essential Steps to Build an Online Presence for Your Business
I’ve been speaking about the topic of online marketing for many years now, yet I still come across people every day who are struggling to put the pieces together. It can sound overwhelming to build a brand online, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Following are some important and effective steps you can [...]
From Entrepreneur to CEO: The Most Important (and Profitable) Change You Can Make in Your Business
For years I have watched hundreds of entrepreneurs with tremendous potential struggle to grow their businesses. I have listened to their stories and watched the frustration that so many of them experience. Having built several businesses myself over the years, I eventually identified the common denominator: trying to do it all. By nature entrepreneurs are [...]
20 Ways to Generate Blog Content Without Writing it Yourself
For years I have been preaching the value of blogging for small business owners and anyone who wants to build an audience online. When you update a blog regularly (at least twice per week, though more is better), your website traffic should increase over time. Google gives higher priority to websites that update content frequently, [...]
How to Analyze Your Revenue Streams and Prepare for Significant Business Growth
Several times each year I go through an exercise where I analyze my revenue streams and forecast where I want them to be. There is a lot to be learned in this process, and it can have a significant impact on the growth of your business. No matter what kind of business you run, you [...]
Simple Guidelines to Help You Write Great Copy for Your Website
The content on your website is as important, if not more important, than the actual site design. You could have the most beautiful website design, but if the content—your website copy—doesn’t deliver the right message, then your website will fail to do its job. I recommend hiring a professional web copywriter to help you develop [...]
Market research is so important even if we are making a small product or providing a service but many avoid this. You have provided a useful blog, there are so many important questions. Thanks for sharing.
Building a marketing plan for your business is a very crucial stage for any business. This is because all the major factors have to be finalised related to the business and the ways how it will be promoted and made visible to the targeted audience. These questions provided by you make complete sense when we come to building an effective marketing plan.
Nice post. I was just a little confused that its title focused on “Marketing Plan.” Seemed like a post that was covering many of the bases involved in business plans and strategic planning. A marketing plan is merely a subset of a business plan.
You’re right, Jeff. Many of these questions are part of business planning! Either way, it’s important to reconsider them periodically.
Nice read! Marketing plan is very essential for all businesses. Along with it, strategic plan and business plan are the other most important planning documents that a company should prepare. Your questions are worth considering when drafting marketing plan. Also, a businessman must be aware of what pain is their target market avoiding and what pleasure are they moving towards.
A marketing plan for any kind of business needs extra attention and brainstorming. You need to ask yourself a lot of questions before settling down for a particular plan and a specific way to move ahead with the process. Marketing needs to be done strategically and effectively.
Excellent list of questions, I really like them. This is a great list for a small business to use who are new to taking a more formal approach to marketing. BTW, I always advocate the idea of learning from past activities so seeing the questions about marketing tactics that worked and didn’t work resonated with me. Too often, I’ve observed, folks don’t pay enough attention to past activities.