You NEED a Marketing Plan

You need a marketing plan

One of the biggest mistakes that I see a ton of small businesses make, not just in the location based entertainment industry but in every single industry is they don’t plan. Primarily, they don’t have a marketing plan, they just go by the seat of their pants and do whatever comes to them. Radio station calls and offers a good deal, sure why not; business is slow today, better make a facebook post to try to drum up business.

This is the worst and least sustainable way that you can run your marketing. To avoid things like this, you need a marketing plan. One of my favourite quotes that goes to all things not just marketing plans is: “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail” - Benjamin Franklin, and that is the truth. If you don’t have a plan, you’re just making every decision based on how you’re feeling that day.

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Sitting down and working out a marketing plan is instrumental to your businesses success. If you’ve been in business for over a year you know what to expect, the highs and lows, off seasons and peak seasons, mid week vs weekend, you’ve learned them all for a full year. The reason I bring that up is because you know when you need to plan your marketing efforts. 

When you have a marketing plan in place it makes it so much easier to make those marketing decisions. In a local business setting you will be getting targeted left and right by people trying to sell you marketing opportunities that “are a guarantee to 10x your ROI”. Stuff like your local sports team wants you to pay to advertise in their venue, the local hotel wants you to put your ad on their kiosk at check in, the newspaper has a great deal, radio station, billboards, everything, the list goes on. Those sales people don’t care what ROI you get on your ads, if your business is a good fit for those ads, or really anything about you and your business once you sign on the dotted line. It is their job to get the sale, and then from then on it is some account manager's problem to keep you happy.

Not to say that those things aren’t good marketing options. But if you have a plan with a budget you can save a whole lot of time, money, and potentially wasted advertising, when you know what advertising you want to do. Having a plan keeps you in check, keeps your business going, and gives you the option to test what's working and what’s not. 

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I once had a client that spent $10,000 a year to put an ad up on his local semi-pro hockey teams boards, he also spent about $8,000 a year on Facebook ads. His problem is he wasn’t sure what was working at getting him business so he didn’t want to stop doing either. He was heartbroken when we implemented pixel tracking from his Facebook ads to his website and found that majority of the traffic to his booking site were in fact from the Facebook ads and not the ad on the boards in the hockey arena. Now if this client had an efficient marketing plan with ways to track his results in advance, he could’ve saved years of sponsorship dollars, put that into something more inline with his business, and ultimately had better results.

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Moral of the story, if you have a marketing plan that is thought out knowing when you're going to do promotions, knowing when your slow times are, and knowing what you can expect in return. Not only does it make your general day to day operations so much smoother, but it also keeps you from wasting time and money on different methods you don’t need. Little Tommy’s soccer team needs a sponsor? You don’t have to think if that aligns with your marketing budget or not, you already know and can make educated decisions. 

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