Marketing plans shouldn’t be complicated.
For most small to mid-sized businesses, marketing plans can be a page or two with a few essential pieces of information. A marketing plan is a road map telling you a little about where you are, where you are headed and how you will get there.
The following example should be a helpful guide. This is not a real marketing plan – it is one I made up as a sample.
A short marketing plan should allow someone who knows nothing about your business, get a quick and clear understanding of what you do, what you hope to achieve within the year, how you plan to do it and what success looks like through your efforts.
Marketing Plans for SAGE BROWNIES – Baking A Difference
Background or Situational Analysis: We are in the business of selling small, decadent luxury baked good to help consumers enjoy a spectacular treat and who want to support the disabled community. We bake the world’s most amazing double chocolate brownie with a clean, ingredient label, free of preservatives and filled with extraordinary flavor. More importantly, our bakery employs physically and mentally-challenged individuals who need a little extra help in the workforce. In 2017, we project revenue of $2.5MM in sales and a $100,000 profit as measured by EBITDA.
Distribution channels. We sell our brownies through a range of stores from ice cream shops, specialty gourmet stores, cheese shops, convenience stores and grocery stores. Our products are sold at checkout counters as an impulse item or frozen. We use the freezer as our natural form of preservation. Today we sell to 1,000 convenience stores. There are 100,000 conveniences stores in the U.S. also; we sell 500 specialty food stores. There are more than 75,000 food shops in the U.S.
To reach these retailers, we sell directly to them through our company trucks as well as through distributors who can store products frozen. Some of our distributors sell ice cream and other frozen goods. We do have some distributors who don’t have freezer trucks, but they do have freezers to store our product before bringing them to shops. We sell to 7 distributors today out of 4,200 food distributors in the U.S.
The Bakery. We make our product in a wholesale bakery that we own and operate. It has 10,000 square feet, and we have the capacity to make five million brownies per year running five days/week, 8 hours per day. The equipment is mostly standard equipment and includes a few custom tools to help reduce labor. We employ 25 physically and mentally-challenged individuals as well as 15 non-disabled people too.
Marketing Strategy. The community we serve is consumers who care about the physically and mentally-challenged. We serve that community by employing individuals who would have a difficult time finding meaningful employment. We work with this community to market a spectacular brownie and to provide useful work.
We don’t sell brownies – we sell optimism, opportunity, and hope.
- Target Audience. We sell to two groups of consumers, those who are passionate about serving and supporting the disabled community and those who are passionate about chocolate.
- Marketing Tactics. Our focus is selling wholesale through retailers and distributors. To tell our story to them, we do the following tactical marketing activities:
- We have a simple website that tells the story of six of our employees. Each profile is about one-minute long and in the form of a page in a video scrap book. We want our customers to see us as a caring, family business helping a community of individuals – and the family scrap book format is a useful metaphor. We do sell our brownies on our website, but our mission is more important than talking about our brownies.
- We reach new stores and distributors by using Facebook sponsored ads that tell our story. By getting in front of store owners, in their newsfeed, we offer them the chance to join our movement by selling our product. Many store owners, managers, and employees self-identify their jobs on Facebook, so we are testing this avenue. Our goal is to gain four new distributors and 1000 retailers in the next six months.
- We employ a full-time public relations professional who pitches stories about the company to editors, radio shows, tv publication, podcasts and other outlets. This person spends 50% of her time on traditional PR and 50% on social media. This person has a family member who is disabled, so she is attuned to our mission. She also helps us give our disabled associates a voice on social media too.
- Since we sell millions of brownies each year, every brownie has our URL on it and offers to buy and send gift baskets of our treats. We ship year-round, and our direct to consumer business is a very productive contributor to our growth. It also enables us to reach a broad range of stakeholders from advocates for our cause, media and others looking to support this community.
- In 2018, we will begin testing Facebook and PPC ads to see if we can attract new customers. These tests will be small at first, but our goal is to invest $5,000 in the cost of the first half of the year in ads, to see if we can increase our customer base by 15%. We are hiring an assistant marketing manager to help us develop and test this concept, to see if we can get growth from this avenue. Every million brownies sold employees eight more individuals.
Budget Considerations: Our total marketing budget for 2018 will be 5% of projected revenue. Our revenue is expected to be $2.5MM in sales, so we have $125K available to spend on marketing. We will invest these dollars to hire two new entry level marketing people. ($40K per person + 30% benefit package – $100,000. Also, we will invest in FB ads and PPC (pay per click) to see if we can generate revenue and drive traffic to order directly from us. In total, we have $25K available to spend on FB/PPC and several other marketing software like MailChimp.
What Does Success Look Like? (Our goals)
Since we are a benefit corporation (for profit and supporting non-profit causes), we do not measure success by earnings and profit alone. Our goals are:
- To achieve a 10% return on invested capital
- To make a 15% profit margin to the EBITDA line
- Add five new employees to our workforce. We want to employee difficult to employ individuals with physical and mental disabilities; they can work independently and safely in a carefully monitored work environment.
- To tell the story more broadly of the possibilities that disabled can achieve by gaining at least 1mm impression through traditional media.
- To help alter the misperception of a misunderstood community by increasing our social media reach with an increase of followers on twitter, FB and Instagram of 30% year over year and to increase engagement by 25%.
This sample marketing plan illustrates how you can inform others of your plans and how you will measure success. It doesn’t need to be 100 pages long to communicate the essence of your future efforts. With everyone aligned to our plan, we can break down each activity into specific actions.
Think of a marketing plan like a road map. You know where you are going and have some idea of the planned stops along the way. It makes sure everyone is heading in the same direction.
Do you have a basic marketing plan that everyone on your team understands?
Do you have a clear path forward for your business? Do you need help crafting a short, marketing plan that you can monitor and track during the year? I can help. Call me at 919 720 0995 or email me at jeffslater@themarketingsage.com
Photo by rawpixel.com on Unsplash
