Building a Marketing Strategy Outline

An effective marketing strategy outline doesn't have to be a complex chess game. This article outlines five simple strategies to help you focus on growing your small business.

Strategy #1: Define Fewer Goals
When putting together your overall marketing strategy outline, focus on a smaller number of high quality goals. I see a lot of small business owners that want to do it all, and the mistake they make is to define numerous goals that are difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.

I recommend selecting no more than 3-5 major goals for your business each year. Don't overdo it. It's much better to focus on three critical goals than it is to outline ten that spread out your efforts and don't allow you to focus.

Strategy #2: Tie Yearly Goals to Revenue
When building your marketing strategy outline for the year, find ways of tying your marketing goals to your yearly revenue projection.

Here are some examples of goals that should be easy to tie to revenue projections.

Number of unique web visitors
Number of newsletter subscribers
Number of new prospects
Conversion rate of prospects to customers
Number of new prospects
Landing page conversion rate
Return-on-Investment for all direct mail projects
Web sales per visitor

Whatever you end up defining as a revenue goal for your business, monitor it on at least a monthly basis.

Strategy #3: Get Employees Involved
The more employees you get involved in the creation of your yearly marketing strategy outline, the higher the chance your employees will take ownership of the individual goals created. If you have more than one person on your business team, get them involved in the actual creation of their individual goals as well as the overall company goals.

Strategy #4: Spend the Minimal Amount
So how much should you spend each year on your marketing program? Some companies take a percentage of the past year's revenue as the budget for the upcoming year. I don't like this as it assumes that a fixed amount of money must be spent irrespective of business conditions.

Your marketing expenses will naturally be higher in your first few years of business. As you put referral programs in place and get your website traffic up, you will start flushing in new prospects and the need to spend a large chunk of your business budget on marketing will decrease.

So, how much should you budget?

As little as possible to achieve your goals.

In other words, your yearly budget should be driven by the goals you need to achieve during the year, not by some fixed percentage of last year's revenue.

Strategy #5: Monitor, measure and adjust
Use Google Analytics and the Google Website Optimizer to drive up traffic and conversions. Calculate return-on-investment for your direct mail, and send out customer questionnaires. In other words, find ways to constantly measure your results and then tune them based on the customer response.

These five strategies will go a long way in helping you define your overall marketing strategy outline. If you would like a step-by-step method of building your business profits through what I call Integral Marketing, then you should take a look at The Integral Marketing System™.