Understanding Marketing Plans

As a small business owner, you know, you should invest in marketing, but where to put the money, how to allocate it, and what percentage of revenue you should even consider as your budget becomes a mystery. In this episode, we solve that. Let's get into it. Hey everyone. If you're a small business owner, you probably have skill sets in different parts of the business. Oftentimes small business owners tend to have the the skill set around sales, but marketing does not come nearly as natural. It sure as heck did not come nearly as natural for me. So in today's episode, we're going to talk about— in fact, this is part of a 3-part series all about marketing. This week we're going to talk about understanding what we mean by having a marketing plan, what exactly goes into that, and how do we have very simple under— Very, very simple plans. Number 2, next week we're going to talk about how do you understand certain marketing metrics? What metrics do you need to understand? What are they? How do you calculate them? And then number 3, the following week, we're going to talk about creating a marketing dashboard so you can actually track results against benchmarks and against your targets. And how well are you actually performing. So without further ado, let's get into it. So understanding a marketing plan. So specifically, I want to make sure that I differentiate. We are very— we attempt to be very detailed in what we name things. And so in other words, if I'm saying a playbook or a process or a system or a plan, those mean different things. So I am not referring to your overall marketing playbook. Your marketing playbook encompasses every single possible thing that goes into your marketing. Things like your messaging, things like your website, the budget you spend, uh, where the money is going, tracking mechanisms, everything in the business fits under what we consider your marketing playbook. Playbook from a marketing perspective anyway. So what I'm talking about today is more tactical in nature. When you're putting together a marketing plan, there are two main things that go into a marketing plan. And before I get into that, let me share this. I think that— talked about this often— that you really kind of want to follow this idea of the three S's. We want to keep things simple. We want to make things a system and then we can go and scale it. And the reason I bring this up right now is because we want to make sure as a small business owner that we keep this very simple. And so with a marketing plan, there are two very simple things. Number one, what is your budget? What is your budget? And we're going to talk about what, how to decide what your budget is going to be. And then number 2 is going to be your strategies. Now you may say, oh, everybody starts throwing around marketing strategies, etc. All it means is where are you going to allocate that budget? And what I'll attempt to do is give you a handful of examples. Okay, so where do you begin? First and foremost, when you're creating a marketing plan, we have to establish our budget because budget informs allocation. Here's what I mean by that. You don't want to necessarily come up with all of the ideas. Let's just say you sat around a boardroom table or conference table with your team and everybody starts throwing ideas out about where we should spend our marketing dollars. Well, let's throw some money to Meta. Let's do some local field marketing with activations locally. Let's go to baseball games. Let's do things on Google PPC. Let's spend some money on Google LSA. How about some SEO work that we can do? So on and so on and so forth. We don't start there because we want the budget to— our budget to inform the allocation because At the end of the day, you're only going to have so big of a budget to operate off of. And so once you know the budget, then you can make sure that you're putting money, putting enough dollars towards certain allocations. I'll get into more details in a second. So first and foremost, how do you determine what your budget is going to be? Do you determine your budget based off last year's results? At the time of this recording, it's early 2026. And so what I look at my 2025 results and spend as a percentage of revenue off of those results or off what my 2026 targets are. I believe that you spend it based off your 2026 targets. That's why setting a proper revenue target is so critical because when you do that, it begins to set into motion many other different things. So let's just say that your business hypothetically did half a million dollars in, uh, uh, 2020. I'll tell you what, we'll do a million dollars just to make it easy. Let's just say in 2025, your business, a hypothetical business, Acme Company, did a million dollars in top-line revenue this year, and they have the vision that they want to double in 3 years. And so they know to do that, they've got to grow 26% this year. And so we take that million dollars that they did in 2025 and we multiply it against 22— 26% profit, or 26% growth, excuse me. So they need to do obviously $1.25 million, $1.26 million this year. The second thing, now that we have that number, we then need to decide what percentage of that number are we going to invest in marketing. Now, let me give you a range. I think ranges of success help. You want to be somewhere between 5% and oftentimes 10% of total top-line revenue invested in marketing. The more you want to grow, the more that the, the bigger you want to be, the more you want to grow this year as a percentage of revenue growth, the more you need to invest in marketing. So in this case, this company wants to grow 26%. So if it's only going to invest 3 or 4% of top-line revenue, it's going— it's not going to be enough. They need to put the money where the mouth is. And so to do that, let's just say hypothetically, This business pulls out and says we're going to invest 7%, 7% of top-line revenue in marketing. So we've got our $1,260,000 revenue target for the year. We've already established that. Number 2, we've decided we want to invest 7% in total top-line revenue. So we multiply that times 7%, and in this case, we now have an $88,000 budget. $88,200 to be specific. Great. We know what our revenue target is, $1.26 million this year. Step number 2, we've established what our marketing budget is going to be, which is 7% of that number. So now we've got an $88,000 budget. Great. We've already now handled step number 1 of creating a marketing plan. We've got our revenue target. We've got our budget number. Now, where are we going to put it? So now this gets into allocation, allocation. Now there's a lot of different ways to look at budget allocations. I'm going to give you two broader buckets in general as a best practice, as a starting point. And then I'm going to share with you uh, specifically one of the companies I'm a part of and how we have thought about that marketing allocation and the buckets that we're putting the money in. So number one, you want to think about direct response. Direct response is the marketing, uh, the places you spend money in marketing that you feel like that you can track pretty well the number of leads that you get. You can track your cost per lead, you can track, um, kind of all the way through how many of those leads that you actually close, etc. It's easy to find the numbers in direct response, or easier certainly. But number 2, it's also really important that we make investments in branding. Now branding, just like direct response, is is a really broad term. So what are some of the things that would go into direct response? Meta ads, LinkedIn ads, Google PPC, maybe even Google SEO in some situations. Those are going to be your biggest drivers. I am giving money to Google, I'm giving money to Meta, and in exchange for that money, They're handing us over leads and hopefully qualified leads. But in branding is where you're going to get things like TV, radio, billboards, local kids' sponsorships at the local rec center, sponsorships at, um, sponsorships at the, the baseball, uh, stadium, the football stadium, the basketball arena, things of that nature. Local schools that you're sponsoring. And I know many of you do that. Also, I think in branding is where content can come into play. And boy, has content become a much bigger thing. So you may be investing in a company or maybe even yourself to be posting on your social media feeds. And I think content is a version of branding. And so let's just say we take a look at our $88,000 budget that we've established, which is 7% of total top-line revenue. And we want to start to try to figure out, well, where are we going to put that? The more that you want to grow, the more you're typically going to see money spent in direct response. To give you just a broad kind of percentage allocation, it's a little bit different for each business. There is some nuance involved in this. But you're going to typically look at about 75% in direct response, 25% in branding. The more that you begin to kind of want to establish yourselves, especially as a local business, the more you'll start seeing money shift over into more branding efforts, more TV spots, more billboards locally, more promotional materials, wrapping of vehicles, things of that nature. And so you may start seeing a shift of 60/40. My personal recommendation is you probably don't want to go below a 50/50 split, 50% of direct response, 50% in branding. Now, I promised you that I would give kind of an example. And we actually have 3 buckets in one of the companies. We have a $200,000 budget, specifically $203,000. We are investing 7% of our targeted revenue this year. That business, its target is $2.9 million in sales. So if you take the $2.9 million times 7%, you'll see that is a budget of $203,000. So how are we looking to begin to kind of allocate the money across that? Well, number one, we are looking at direct response, so paid, you media specifically. Think, uh, Google, Google LSA, Google PPC, even some Google SEO work. Number 2 would be branding and content, and we're looking at spending, you know, somewhere around $80,000 or so in branding. And then the 3rd bucket is kind of unique. We call it field marketing. Oftentimes you'll hear the word called activations. So field marketing differs from maybe your local branding efforts like I gave the example to. So your sponsorships where there is no human-to-human interaction, you give money to your kids' school, to the booster club, you give money to the football stadium to put the sign for your business up. I look at that, all of that, as branding. Same thing with a billboard, same thing with a website. All of that falls under branding, and that's great. But if you go to events, let's just say you go to an apartment complex, you go to a local museum of art, you invest in a golf tournament where you and you bring some of your team members out there to that location, and now there's human-to-human interaction, hence activations. To me, that falls under a bucket called field marketing. Now you may do field marketing, you may not do field marketing, depends on, on your business, and you may— that may not be a strategy that you have, but that's how we look at it specifically. As a starting point, I would look at direct response as a broader bucket, number one. And then number two, I would look at branding and content as a bucket. And if you want to, you know, bring in a third bucket, you could certainly bring in field marketing and activations as a part of that. Okay, so that's step number 1. That is creating a marketing plan. So let's recap real quick what we talked about today. We want to try to keep things as simple as possible, and we want to have some general best practices and some guides. Number 1, we're going to start with a budget because our budget informs where we allocate the money. What's our revenue target for 2026? What percentage of that number are we willing to invest? We use 7%. Some of you may be closer to 10%. I don't think I'd recommend going below 5%, to be honest with you. I think you've got to invest enough in marketing to continue to, to, to, to get wind under the sails of the company. So somewhere typically between 5% and 10%. Then we're going to take that budget, whatever that is, if that's $36,000 for you, or if that's $200,000 for your business. And we're going to begin to allocate that across broader buckets. Some direct response, some branding, and maybe even some field marketing. Now next week, now that we have our marketing plan in place, we've got our budgets and our strategies where we're going to put the money. We got to start to understand some marketing metrics. And there's a handful of metrics that are important to, to understand. That's what we talk about next week. Then the following week, we talk about creating a marketing dashboard. How do you actually measure and what are the things that are important to actually measure and how often should you do so? Look forward to getting into those topics with you. Hope this served you well. By the way, later this month, we are hosting a marketing intensive workshop. If you want to— want help in building these specific things, in creating a plan, creating a marketing dashboard, and understanding metrics at even a deeper level than what I've been able to do in this 10 or 15-minute podcast, go to blueprintos.com/assets, and you'll see the link to be able to register for my upcoming Above the Business marketing intensive workshop. I look forward to seeing you there. Till next time, lead well. And go be great.