So you’re ready to hit the ground running this year with a marketing strategy for your small business. 2020 and 2021 may have been dismal, but what it taught you was strength, perseverance and the commitment to keep going, because your business and your ideas are worth it.
What we know is that planning your year in advance can lead to big results. In fact, businesses that have a plan in place grow 30% faster than those who don’t. Plus, 71% of the fastest-growing companies in North America have a business plan.
The thing is, sometimes it can be challenging to align your marketing strategy with your business goals. It can be difficult to pinpoint what is working versus what should be left behind. Fortunately, we’ve got that answered for you with our picnic social downloadable template for your 2022 marketing strategy.
Read below how to use this template and understand the four steps to creating a bulletproof marketing strategy for 2022.
The Four Steps to a Bullet Proof Marketing Strategy
Once you’ve downloaded our template you’ll see a worksheet that includes 4 steps to prepare your marketing strategy.
Every Marketing Strategy needs to have:
- Defined Business Goals
- A Sales Target to Reach Business Goals
- Marketing Tactics to Lead to Your Sales Target
- Evaluative Measures to Watch Performance and Results
Below we’ll go through each step and how to accomplish them.
1. Define Your Business Goals
The first step in your marketing strategy is to write down your business goals.
Now, you may be thinking, “I thought this blog was about a marketing strategy?” but you can’t make a marketing strategy without deciding what the end result will be.
Your business goals need to be planned for the upcoming year, in order to evaluate what you accomplished and what you will continue to do the following year.
At picnic social, we follow SMART goal setting to make realistic targets during a set period of time.
SMART Business Goals should be:
- Specific: your goal is well-defined and focused.
- Measurable: Your goal can be measured by foreseeable targets.
- Attainable: your overall goal has smaller, manageable steps that are based on time and resources.
- Relevant : Your goal is in line with the realities of your business climate.
- Time-Based: Your goal has a clear end date for deliverables to be achieved.
In our marketing strategy template, we want you to start thinking about what your financial projections will be. It can also help in deciphering the budget for the year.
For instance:
- How much recurring revenue do you need per month?
- How many customers do you need a month to achieve sales targets?
Some examples of Business Goals can be:
- Sell 100 units a month to achieve $150,000 a year.
- Bring in 35 customers a day to sell $8,000 a week.
- I need to sign two new clients a month to double my profits by the end of the year.
Write down SMART projections in the template and next, we’ll add sales targets to accurately measure these business goals.
2. Create Your Sales Targets
Next, you need to create a sales target to quantify your business goals. This requires a bit of calculation, but it needn’t be complicated. Often it starts with averaging the number of customers you see before making a sale.
For instance, on average at picnic social, for every deal we’ve signed, we usually have five booked calls beforehand. Therefore, we understand we need to drive people to our booking page to book more calls and sign more deals.
The same can be said for an eCommerce website. One hack is to look at your website analytics and calculate how many views you have compared to how many sales. Your sales focus then is on driving the number of views to your product page.
Below are examples of different sales strategies:
- To sign two new clients a month, I need to book 8 consultations a month. To get more consultations, I need to drive people to my booking page.
- For my store to sell $20,000 a week I need to get 50 customers per day. I need to drive foot traffic to my store.
- To sell 100 products on my ecommerce page, I need to get 10,500 views on my product page. I need to drive traffic to my product page.
Your next step in our downloadable template is to calculate how many steps are made before achieving a sale and where your focus should be in driving those sales.
3. Choose Your Marketing Tactics
Now is the time to choose what tactics you’ll be using to get to your sales target. But with so many marketing tactics out there, what is best for your business?
To help answer that, in our downloadable template, we have three columns to work with that split effort between current tactics and new explorations. We call this the picnic social trifecta.
From our template:
| Tried and True | Something New | Something Risky |
| Review your analytics. What has given you the most success in gaining clients/customers? Budget 50% for this area | Is there a tactic that is popular among your customers? Is there a tactic you see competitors using? Budget 20-30% for this area | What seems more risky but relevant to your audience segment? What are you willing to test out and roll the dice with? Budget 20 – 30% for this area |
In the Tried and True column, you will want to continue budgeting for the tactics that have already proven to be most effective in getting you sales and traction. By reviewing your POS and your Google Analytics, you will be able to gather information about where you are getting the majority of your referrals from.
However, Something New and Something Risky are just as important to add to your budget and should not be overlooked. Why? Because marketing and your audience is constantly changing, you will need to explore new avenues in order to remain relevant and seek new customers.
4. Evaluate Your Performance
In the last step of the strategy worksheet of our template, you are to evaluate the performance of your marketing strategies. This way you know what’s working and what’s not.
In our downloadable template, we provide examples of the types of metrics you will want to follow based on your marketing tactics, but you can also follow from the sheet below.
| Website: | Views, Visits, Referrals |
| Events: | Visitors, Promotions, Sign-ups |
| Social Media: | Website clicks, Saves, Shares |
| Email: | Subscribes/unsubscribes, Clicks,Opens |
| Google Business | Calls, Searches, Views |
These metrics will provide the most value in deciphering how your marketing strategy is performing. At the end of each business quarter, bring your team together to review the metrics and their results. Include this information into the Timeline Worksheet of the template, and by the end of the year, you will have gained new insight from each quarter into what is performing well in your marketing budget.
Bow Wow Doggie Daycare – Example of a Marketing Strategy
Need a business example to visualize what your marketing strategy can look like? We’ve got you covered with our friend’s doggie daycare business! Chris owns Bow Wow Doggie Daycare and his business goal for 2022 is to earn $50,000 a month in recurring revenue. To make this happen he knows he needs to bring in more potential clients to his daycare where he can showcase the benefits of his business.
Sales strategy: For the next 6 months, Chris’s goal is to bring in 2 doggy owners and their dogs into his store for Meet & Greets every day, where he can showcase the benefits of Bow Wow Daycare. This way, he will grow a larger recurring client base each month that will earn him $50,000 in recurring revenue.
From our template, he identified multiple strategies to help grow brand awareness of his business and build new leads.
| Tried and True | Something New | Something Risky |
| Referral Program, Social Media, AdsCar Wrap, PPC, Retail Signage 50% Budget | Community Events, Chamber of Commerce 30% Budget | Sponsoring off-leash community trails 20% budget |
From Strategy to Execution
Now that you have put the thought and foresight into your Marketing Strategy, it is now time to execute it! With the third page of our template, we have included a Timeline Worksheet where you can add in your marketing tactics for each quarter, whether they are short-term or long-term plans, and the metrics to evaluate them.
At the end of each quarter, fill in the results of your marketing tactics, and form insights of performance of each tactic. At the end of your year, you will be able to evaluate how your tactics led you to the completion of your business goals.
From our template:
Are you ready? Get started with a marketing roadmap
Are you ready? Then go get started! Let us know how it goes and whether you need help along the way.
If you need our support, then the picnic social marketing roadmap is right for you. We make your marketing plan easy to implement with a visual profile of your industry, competitors, customers and market position. Visit our marketing roadmap page to learn how we do it and to book a complimentary consultation to talk to us.