What is a business coaching program without a marketing plan? When it comes to starting, building and growing a widely profitable and valuable business nothing is more important than marketing.
Any Great Business Coaching Program Starts With a Marketing Plan
Although tips for marketing for coaches are very helpful, creating a marketing plan to bring it all together will make your marketing efforts much more effective. A marketing plan provides a roadmap for running and coordinating marketing program. It helps align many people and organizations involved in communicating your products or services. For a clear understanding let’s define what a marketing plan is.
What is a Marketing Plan?
Simply put, a marketing plan is part of a business plan which focuses on the strategies to be followed by an entrepreneur to operate and complete the marketing of their products or services. It clearly spells out the advertising and the marketing efforts as well as the techniques that helps a business decides on how to achieve it aims and objectives within a set frame of time using its available resources.
Just like in other businesses you need a good working marketing plan to be as successful as you have envisaged as a business coach. I do not see any reason for a “business to be in business” if your customers do not know you exist. Having a great product without having a marketing execution strategy is just like a great plan on paper which never saw the light of day.
A formal written plan is a great way to document the planning process. As a business coach this plan should be able to answer the questions; where you are now? Where you are going to? how you hope to get there? In what time frame… And the list goes on depending on what your business aims and objectives are.
Importance of a Good Marketing Plan
The importance of a good marketing plan as a business coach cannot be over emphasized in order for you to achieve success in your business.
- A marketing plan provides a roadmap for running and coordinating your marketing program.
- It helps align many people and organizations involved in communicating your products or services.
- A good marketing plan captures all the things you and your team have learned about the market, your competition and your customers. This information is critical because it becomes the evidence for the strategies that you and your team decides to pursue.
- The plan serves as a tool for you to align the organization. Marketing involves many people, so you need to get everyone on board, going to the same direction.
- The written plan becomes a source document to create, presentation, conduct training and give direction to external partners. It also provides a set of coherent and coordinated set of marketing programs and schedules so you can run a smooth operation.
To be successful in this, from the start of your business coaching program write out your proposed plan. You should expect to make changes to it as market conditions changes that means you should keep up with regular updates about the market conditions and make appropriate changes in order to stay ahead of the competition.
Major Factors to Consider
- Analyze the market: Explore important issues about the market conditions, your potential customers and the competition; this is also known as situation analysis. Analyze the market condition and know how to strategize for achieving success.
- Describe your strategies by segmenting the market, writing how to target your specific customers, and how you will position your products and services in the marketplace.
- The four Ps: You need to understand how to implement your products or services advertising campaigns, your pricing approach, promotions and market communication programs, then your placement or your channel designs. As Forbes states, these are basically known as the 4Ps of marketing.
- Financial section: Describe the budget that outlines the financial and other resources needed to implement your marketing plan and strategy. Have a forecast of your future revenue and how you will measure your success. Have a set budget on how much you would be spending on each and every step on your plan.
- Have a marketing plan team comprising of both internal and external experts from whom you could draw knowledge and expertise on how to implement your marketing strategy.
- Lastly creating a calendar with all of your plan clearly outlined within a workable time frame also helps you in achieving success in marketing your coaching business which eventually leads to more conversions and increased revenue.
Leading Your Business Coaching Program to Victory With a Great Marketing Plan
In summary, as a business coach having the belief of becoming successful in marketing and getting more customers and revenue, a solid strategy should always form the foundation of any marketing campaign tactic or idea you have. Your coaching skills no matter how good they are doesn’t matter to anyone, if nobody knows you exist.
A good marketing plan connects businesses to customers and customers to businesses. If they know you exist and are still not coming to you, you can improve on your existing plan or change it completely, that is, your individual tactics or tools that didn’t deliver the results you were hoping for. Create winning marketing campaigns that focuses on your strategies and tactics. Note that a simple and strategic plan performed consistently overtime will deliver incredible results.