The Power of an Integrated Marketing Plan for Small Business Owners

“Marketing is a process, not an event. It has a beginning, a middle, but never an end. You improve it, perfect it, change it, even pause it. But you never stop it.” 

From handling daily operations to strategizing for growth, marketing is only one of many priorities on a small business owner’s plate. If you don’t have the luxury of a marketing director, it’s understandable that marketing might feel overwhelming. Is your marketing budget draining you without delivering results?

An Integrated Marketing Plan (integrated in that it considers all advertising channels and aligns messaging) offers a solution. An Integrated Marketing Plan complements your business plan by detailing the budgets, messages, channels, tools and timing you use to communicate a cohesive brand message and provides a roadmap that guides your team, aligns your strategy and budget, connects sales goals to specific campaigns and provides a system for tracking your return on investment.

What’s An Integrated Marketing Plan?

An Integrated Marketing Plan is your master plan to ensure all marketing works together smoothly – with no channels overlooked and synchronized messaging across print ads, social media, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Instead of producing random ads, or scattered social media posts, or concerning yourself with every ad salesman who comes your way, this plan details your activities and budget in advance. You can be confident in your budgeting decisions and you’ll know what your monthly expenditures are. Then your team can focus on executing clear, consistent campaigns about your product or service.

How Does It Work With Your Business Plan?

An Integrated Marketing Plan works alongside your business plan by aligning marketing efforts with your overall business objectives. While your business plan outlines your company’s overall strategy, goals, and direction, your marketing plan details how marketing activities will support and achieve those business objectives with specific tactics and budgets.

Why Does Your Business Need One?

Marketing plans are crucial for any marketing team, but especially beneficial for smaller businesses that might have a small or junior marketing staff. A marketing plan will teach best practices and provide a detailed roadmap that your team can update in the future. Key benefits of a plan include:

• Maximize Your Budget

Because every dollar counts, an Integrated Marketing Plan ensures that your budget works harder for you. By coordinating your efforts, you’ll avoid redundancy and create synergies that amplify your message without inflating cost.

• Build A Strong Brand Identity

Consistency is key to building recognition. When your message is aligned across all platforms, it reinforces your brand, making it more memorable to prospects. This type of consistency is essential for a small business competing against bigger brands.

• Reach Customers Where They Are

Today, consumers are used to seeing and interacting with a brand across many platforms. By building an integrated strategy, your campaigns will be viewed across platforms from LinkedIn to email to social media, providing a cohesive message to guide your prospects into your sales funnel.

• Enhance Data Collection And Analysis

With an integrated approach, you can more effectively track and analyze each of your marketing efforts. This comprehensive view allows you to see which combination of channels and messages deliver the best results. This enables your team to refine the strategy for even better results.

• Did Someone Say Better Results?

By aligning your marketing effort across platforms, the result is often improved conversion. Results are more coordinated and there is less guessing about what’s driving traffic. You’ll know because every effort is measured.

How Do You Go About Getting An Integrated Marketing Plan?

At BroadBased, we help you to gather up all of the individual strands involved in marketing – the analysis, goal-setting, message creation, creative implementation and results analysis – and weave them into a unified whole.

The creation of your plan will help you sort through all of those elements. And a clear and harmonious plan will let you make the most of all opportunities to promote your product or service in the marketplace – at the right time, using the right media, with a clearly defined product and the right promotion strategy.

When all of those elements are working together, you and your products or services will shine. And you’ll have the benefit of the highest possible return on your investment for your marketing dollars. At BroadBased, we have the tools and expertise to guide you through the complex process of developing your marketing plan and strategy.

Ready to take control of your marketing and achieve real results? Contact Chris Ramaglia at BroadBased to get started and let’s get to work!