5 Steps to Create a Marketing Plan for Your Business | 134
I am a big fan of business coaching, but there is one thing that drives me crazy. Some coaches have very scripted plans for their clients. When they create a marketing plan, it’s the same for each person across the board. They aren’t creating a marketing plan for your unique business. This can end with business owners being really frustrated and not moving the needle forward.
Instead, your business plan should be unique to you! Let’s look step-by-step at how to craft a customized marketing plan that works for your business and is specific to your needs.
#1 Start with Holistic Marketing
If you’ve been around here at all, you know I’m a big fan of holistic marketing. Holistic marketing has four components: long-form content, email marketing, community building, and relationship marketing.
When creating a marketing plan for your business, you want to start by focusing on long-form content or email marketing. If this is your first time planning, just pick one. If you’ve been at it for a bit, you can also add social media for relationship building.
I recommend mastering each area before building on to the next. This makes sure each area gets the time and attention it deserves and it has a sturdy foundation. You don’t want all the elements of your holistic marketing plan to be on rocky ground.
#2 Determine What You Need to Sell
Likely if you’ve started a business, you have an idea of what you want to create or sell. But sometimes, we get in it and realize people aren’t as excited about our ideas as we thought. It doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea, but it means you need to do some market research.
Talk to your audience and your ideal buyers in the DMs, or invite them to join you on Zoom for a coffee chat. Encourage them to reply to your emails or engage with them on Reddit. Wherever your audience is hanging out, go there.
The information you get from these conversations will help you learn what people need and what they are struggling with. You can then create (or adapt what you have) to fill those needs.
#3 Grow Your Email List
A big part of creating a marketing plan for your business is having multiple places you can connect, nurture, and eventually sell to your audience. Email is the perfect place to do that. Part of creating a marketing plan is to determine how you will get people on your list and then what will happen once they are there.
One essential part of growing your list is making sure the freebies you create will bring you people who want to buy from you. It needs to connect to your offers and your pillar content.
#4 Determine Your Content
We are reverse engineering things, so the next part of creating your marketing plan is to determine the type of content people want from you. What type of content will bring your audience closer to a sale?
You can brainstorm these ideas based on the market research you did. Think about how you can warm your audience up, nurture them, earn trust, and more.
#5 Create the Content
This can be the most tedious part of creating a marketing plan, but without the actual content creation, there wouldn’t be any implementation. If you create content and at first it isn’t working, don’t throw your hands up. Try some new messaging, switch things up, and play around with it until it works.
Ultimately, these five steps are what make the marketing plan for your business customizable. It is tailored specifically to your audience, their needs, and what you can provide them. It’s not a cookie-cutter script that may or may not fit in with your business.
Don't forget to follow me on Instagram @heyitsjenzaia and tune in next Saturday for more business tips and strategies!
xo, Jenzaia
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Episode Transcript:
Hey there - I'm Jenzaia and this is Market Scale Grow - a podcast created for ambitious teacherpreneurs looking to have a bigger impact on the world, achieve freedom, flexibility, and ultimately make more money. With weekly strategy sessions and inspiring stories from fellow teachers just like you, my goal here is to help you create a customized marketing strategy so you can grow your teacher business beyond your wildest dreams.
Hey, you're listening to Market Scale Grow. I'm your host, Genzaia, and this is a Saturday Strategy Session. Today we're going to be talking about creating a marketing plan for your business. And something that's really, really important to me is making sure that it's a customizable marketing plan so that it fits your business.
I don't like cookie cutters. I don't like one size fits all. I don't like when a mentor tells me, well, I did it this way. You need to also do it this way because each business is different. Each individual is different. And I talked about this a couple episodes back when I was talking about gardening and how I'm in southern Ontario.
So what's going to work for my garden and what I can grow is going to be different than somebody who's living in California, for example. Our weather is just completely different. But also, if someone else who's living in eastern Ontario tries to plant the same things as me, Soil composition, even though our weather is pretty similar, their soil composition is completely different than mine.
And so, that also impacts things, right? So, each business is kind of like each little ecosystem or microcosm, if you will, for a garden that is dealing with different soil types and different climate and different whatever else it might be. Also, gardener's choice. Like we love tomatoes in my house. We love cucumbers and we love peas.
And so we have a four by four garden that has four, eight, 12. It has 16 spots, like one by one squares in the four by four. So there's 16 different spots. And 12 of the 16 of them are taken up by tomato plants because we love tomatoes. It just makes sense for a family to grow that many tomatoes. We also have, we have three corn plants.
First of all, we planted six and three didn't grow, which is fine, that happened. But we've never grown corn before, so I have no idea how this is going to go. I know that you need corn to fertilize corn, so it could not go anywhere. But it's been a fun learning experience and I'm really enjoying it. So, your marketing plan needs to be like your garden, individualized for your own preferences, but also for your climate and your soil type and all the different factors that go into your business.
And so with that being said, I have some steps for you to take. Number one is let's talk about holistic marketing. Because y'all know I'm a fan of that. When I talk about holistic marketing, there are three main components and then a fourth one if you're a service provider or a one to one coach or someone offering one to one services.
So you have your long form content, podcasting, blogging, video content. You have your email marketing, which is sending out weekly emails, also growing your email list. And then you have your community building, which is probably your social media strategy, whether it's a Facebook group or Instagram or Tik TOK, wherever you want to be hanging out.
LinkedIn is another great place these days. That's your community building. And then if you are like a one to one service provider or one to one coach, then relationship marketing or just networking in general is also a very important strategy. Having a plan for building up your holistic marketing strategy is very, very important.
And if you want more about like what each of them entail, we will link some of the past episodes I've done on holistic marketing down below. But what I really want to talk about today is how you can create that. So number one, your community building. So this is your social media strategy. At first, I recommend you just have like an ish go at it thing.
You want a presence, you don't need a really like sound strategy, you don't need anything concrete. You just need to be showing up on social media, building your community as best you can. I highly recommend for your first 90 days you are working on either building your long form content strategy or your email strategy and then doing your ish best you can social media.
So 90 days of Let's just say long form content marketing and then 90 days of email marketing. And so now we're six months later and we've been doing the best that we can with social media as we've been building up those other strategies. And so then once the long form content. Strategy is all set up and built and your email marketing strategies all set up and built.
Then, and only then, do you give yourself 90 days to actually create an amazing community building strategy where you can ramp up what's been working in your ish strategy and get rid of things that aren't working and really create a plan and strategy. To support your long form content in your email marketing.
So that's the first thing that I really highly recommend that you do is you get that holistic marketing strategy up and running. So over the course of, I say 90 days, it could be 60, 90 over the course of probably 6 to 9 months, you're going to be building out those three different pieces. The long form content marketing, the email marketing and your community building.
So that all of them are running seamlessly. I don't want you moving on to the next one. Like, so if you're on long form content building or marketing, sorry, don't move on to list building or email marketing strategy until you have systems procedures in place. ready to go and that, you know, you can continue doing that and also add on the email marketing until, you know, you can add it on.
You need to just continue to build the systems, the procedures. And remember, when I first started this podcast, my quote unquote system or procedure for a new episode was Friday night at eight 30 after my kids went to bed, panic, figure out a topic, record said topic, edit said podcast. Put it up on Buzzsprout, hopefully before 11 p.m. when my husband would come up to her bed, and if not, go downstairs, because my podcasting studio, if you will, is our closet. So hopefully be done by 11 o'clock. If not, go downstairs, panic finish all the things that need to be done, so that Saturday morning, the Saturday strategy session, came out every single week.
I now have a significantly better process in place, but that was it. And when I felt confident that I could do that every single week, then I added the next piece in, and that's what I want for you too. So that's the first part of your customizable marketing strategy. And as you'll learn in those other episodes where I've talked more specifically about what goes into each piece, customizableness.
In each one of those that you can decide like for long form content, for example, a podcast is a great idea. A blog is a great idea. Video content is a great idea. Consistency. Are you going to be creating that content once a week? Are you going to be creating it every other week? Are you going to be creating it monthly?
There's so many different things that you can make choices. And make it work for your business and make those choices. Also, you can have three content buckets. You can have five content buckets. You could have themes instead of content buckets. There's so much choice within that bucket of long form content marketing.
And the same is true for email marketing and the same is true for your community building. So that's the first piece of that customizable marketing strategy. Now, you're like, okay, Jones, but what content am I actually creating? How am I actually getting people on my email list? What am I actually emailing them?
And that's what we're going to spend the rest of the episode talking about. Once you are ready to create this marketing plan. The first step really is to figure out what you're selling. Starting with the end in mind allows everything to seamlessly flow together nicely. And I really, really, really, really strongly believe that reverse engineering is the best way to get that seamless customer journey so that people feel like they understand what they're going through.
It all makes sense. The dots are all connecting. So step number two, I guess. Is to start with what you saw next. We want to consider your audience and what they need to feel, hear, and see to buy from you. And what this means is do some micro research. Talk to your people, whether it's in the DMs or you sit down for coffee chats.
Find out where they're stuck, where they're feeling frustrated, and how you can support them. What they've already tried, what's worked, what's not worked. Again, how you can support them. They're going to tell you. And this piece is what's going to help you figure out everything else. It's going to help you brainstorm content ideas.
It's going to help you refine your offer so that really is supporting your people. It's going to help you decide what your free lead magnet is. Everything comes from that market research. So it's worth the time and energy and discomfort that we feel when we have to do it. Next step is to get them on your email list.
So we know what you're selling, because we started there. We know what they want to, or that they need to feel, see, and hear to buy. But before they're going to buy, they need to be on your email list. So how do we get them on there? Knowing what you know about your audience, you have to figure out how you're going to deliver this piece of free content.
Is it going to be a free PDF download, or an e book, or a checklist, or a guide? Is it going to be some sort of video training, whether a live webinar, or a workshop, or a video series? Is it going to be a challenge, paid, free, boot camp, right? There's so many different options. You really want to give them one single win in this freebie.
They really need to feel confident and like you're the expert who can help them with their problems. And so, really making sure that you tailor that freebie so that the people who want the freebie are going to be the same people who want to buy from you. And that's why we reverse engineer. Step the next one.
I got confused with the numbers, okay? I'm really sorry. So step the next one. Is to figure out your long form content and your email content again based on that customer journey that we've reverse engineered so we know what we're selling, you know how we're getting them on the email list now, what kind of content and emails do people need from us to bring them closer to that sale?
That is the kind of content that you want to create, and that's where, again, going back to the market research, you can brainstorm the content ideas so that you are able to fill in those gaps, move them closer to the sale, warm them up, nurture them, help them to trust you, get them to know you, like you, all of that, and that is what makes this all so customizable is because we're really starting with you and with your audience And then with the holistic marketing strategy with all the customizable pieces, like how often are you emailing your list?
Is it once a week? Great. We are going to brainstorm three months worth of email ideas. Maybe something will happen and things will need to shift and change and that's fine. But if you brainstorm out those 12 to 15 different ideas of emails, then you can start creating the emails and getting them in the right order.
will naturally lead to other topics, then you can put them in the right order. And having that plan just helps take some of the pressure off of you and lets you relax and know, okay, I know what the topics are that I'm going to be talking about for the next 12 weeks or whatever. One less thing to worry about.
And the last step is to create all of these things. I highly recommend that you start with the freebie and then be building out those emails, be building out the long form content, be building out the sales piece, all of that. And be ready for the need to reshuffle. Not scratch everything and restart, but reshuffle.
Messaging is often the biggest problem that I see when something isn't working, but I also see a lot of people who are just like, ah, it doesn't work. They throw their hands up. They don't change anything. They don't try anything new. They just say like, ah, it's not working. And then they throw the whole thing out.
If they're willing to try and make some small adjustments, messaging issues are the biggest issues that I see. And the smallest changes and tweaks can have significant Very large impacts, improving the performance of the content of the freebie of the offer, whatever it might be. So as a recap, create your marketing, your holistic marketing plan so you know what type of long form content you're putting out, how often you're putting it out.
How often are you emailing your list? What social media platform are you going to be using? How often do you want to be posting on it? Give yourself. Six to nine months to get that up and running. And when you're trying to fill in the blanks of like, what am I talking about in my emails? What am I talking about in my long form content?
What am I posting on social media? Start with the end in mind. What are you selling? Who is your audience? How can you serve them? What do they need to hear, see, and feel to buy from you? Then figure out what freebie is going to take people and is going to bring in the right people to buy your offer from you.
And then fill in those gaps of the content. What do they, what content do they need? What emails do they need? And start creating there. Actually, you know, start creating with your, your freebie first. Make sure you get that guy up and running as quickly as possible. I really hope that this was helpful in creating that custom marketing plan.
There's no right answers here. For some people, a blog is hands down the winner. For me, it did not work. It never worked. For other people, like myself, a podcast is the winner. I've been able to consistently podcast for over two years now. Whereas a blog, I would do like three or four, and then it just like would fizzle out.
Same with emailing. I am able to email it every single week. There's other people that it's once a month, and that works great for our individual businesses. I have clients that have content pillars, they talk about these three different topics all the time on repeat. I also have clients that have themes.
In January, they talk about multiplication. In February, they talk about division. In April, they talk about decimals, like whatever it might be. And then within those themes, they have more like of a structure. I'm going to talk about a resource. I'm going to talk about a book. I'm going to talk about a lesson plan instead of content pillars, where like this week, I talk about marketing strategy.
The next week, I talk about holistic marketing. The next week, I talk about Facebook ads. The next week, I talk about entrepreneurship. And so it just works differently for different people, different businesses. And I just want you to feel like you can trust yourself. You can trust your intuition. You can make those choices for your business.
So I hope this was helpful. I will be back next week with an exciting interview. Yay.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Market Scale Grow. I'm so thankful that you've taken some time out of your busy schedule to make me part of your journey. If you love this podcast, don't forget to share it with your friends. And then head to your favorite podcast app to subscribe so that you won't miss next week's episode or any of the upcoming ones. And if you loved it, be sure to leave a review on Apple Podcast so that other people can find this podcast and we can impact teachers and teacher business owners around the world!