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5 Elements You Need to Have in your Marketing Plan
It’s no secret that a marketing plan is one of the must-have documents when starting a new business as a licensed beauty professional. Your business’s marketing plan is the cornerstone of how you plan on presenting yourself to your customers. Marketing plans are essentially a guideline of where your beauty business is right now, where you want to be, and how you’re planning on getting there.
If you’re like me at all, when it was time for you to start your first marketing plan for your business you went straight to Google and typed in ‘marketing plan template.’ This naturally sounded like a good idea because you go into this Google search with no idea what to expect, but one of those templates can leave you with a bland and basic marketing plan with very little room to expand on your future growth in the industry and absolutely zero passion behind it.
After spending a few minutes searching around on Google, you probably found one that worked decently enough for you, (I did) but now you are left sitting there looking into the white space of the page wondering what you should include in your marketing plan that is relevant.
Here are the top five elements that you need to have in your marketing plan as a licensed beauty professional.
1. A Growth Strategy
Like I said, a marketing plan helps you understand where your new business is right now and what you expect it to grow towards. Your marketing growth strategy as a licensed beauty professional should be unique to your specific niche (or specialty) of the industry. The emphasis on this element is ‘strategy,’ because it needs to be just that, strategic. Get real with yourself about where you want to see your business grow and how you plan on getting yourself there.
2. Actionable Goals
Listen, hopes and dreams are nice, but rarely happen by staying daydreams. When developing your growth strategy, lay down some core goals that you are making a top priority in the marketing side of your business. Remember to make them SMART goals. (Ugh yes, I am taking you back to that 8th-grade group project you did all the work for, sorry for that.)
Goals are great, but goals need to have very actionable tasks attached to them with deadlines and attainable ends. This will push you further and give you something to base your marketing growth on.
3. Your Marketing Mix
The marketing mix is an essential part of the marketing plan that so many new business owners overlook. Your marketing mix is basically a set of actions that you are going to implement to promote your business. When developing your marketing actions, it’s good to keep the 4 P’s in mind, those are most commonly known as price, product, promotion, and place. This is the time to determine how you are going to market your services in a way that answers pricing, promotions, products, and place (the where.)
4. Competitor Analysis
The competitor analysis is pretty self-explanatory, but it’s purpose rings true. The competitor analysis is to determine the strengths and weaknesses of the competitors within your market, strategies that will provide you with a distinct advantage, and the barriers that can be developed in order to prevent competition from entering your market.
When developing your competitor analysis in today’s society, I would branch a little further out than just the spa’s and salon’s in a 20-mile radius to you. We also have to think about online competitors and large retailers. What makes you different from those competitors? What makes you the most unique in the market?
5. Performance Indicators
This element of the marketing plan often gets left behind or becomes more of an afterthought. When we develop big goals, it can be easy for us to feel like we will just know when the goal happens. In reality, large goals don’t come all at once, but through a series of small wins. Having performance indicators/metrics to look at as you make progress will help you understand where you are seeing growth in your marketing and what is still lacking.
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