Often, small businesses are being run on teams of 1 to 10 employees that aren’t hyper-focused in their particular area of expertise or are doing multiple jobs at once. While that may not be a problem for the types of work they are doing, especially when they are related to one another, it can be a serious problem when trying to piece together marketing. Most small businesses pick one or two forms of marketing without ever actually spending time putting together a plan. The best tip for marketing for small businesses is to make a marketing strategy and stick to it. Here are some tips on preparing for small business marketing.

Prepare your plan

There are many different ways to go about this, but there are a few things every good business plan needs to have in place, according to Entrepreneur. They include the following.

1. Look at your situation: Take note of your business. What do you sell? Is there competition? And is there anything you do better than the competition that you can take advantage of in marketing strategies?
2. Look at who you are selling to: If you haven’t stopped to do this yet, it is one of the first steps every business should go through. You need to know your target audience if you are going to have any idea how to sell to them.
3. Make some goals: Make goals on what you want your marketing to do. Do you want to bring in more customers? How many per month? Do you want to retain customers? At what rate? Are you looking to increase conversion rates on the site?
4. Strategize: Now that you know your main goals, you can come up with ideas on how to accomplish them.
5. Budget: This is a big factor for most small businesses because marketing budgets are often small. Consider what you want to spend on your campaign and re-strategize based on the budget.

Focus, focus, focus

The reason why this is so important is because a plan that has been laid out, put in writing, and shared with appropriate members of your team is more likely to keep you focused. No more randomly throwing money at some marketing technique somebody shared with you. Instead, you can focus on the strategies you agreed to put in place, including things like social media advertisements and SMS marketing. And most importantly, keep track of the success and review your plan once in awhile to determine if it needs to be updated or if it is working for you.