Build a Marketing Plan: Step by Step Guide

How to build a lead list longer than when your wife goes in to "get one thing"

When trying to build a leads list, you will need find similarities in your past donors in order to find out the people you need to target. You then need to create a specific message that speaks to your exact target audience in order to lure in the people you want to buy from you. Finally, you need to build out a lead capture system to collect the contact information of interested prospects, and build followup processes so you can convert more prospects.

Our goal from this page is to best equip local businesses that are looking to take their marketing more seriously and predictably grow their business online.

Table of Contents

Figure out who in your market wants what you offer
Understanding why messaging is so important
Guidelines to creating the entire customer journey A-Z
Creating a lead follow-up system that’s sure to convert
Conclusion

Figure out who in your market wants what you offer

Finding needles in a haystack

When trying to market online, you aren’t creating new interest in your service/product, you are just directing the interest that is already out there to your landing page. Its like a scavenger hunt, you need to find the audience that is already on the internet searching for someone to help them with their problem, and you want that person to be you. It isn’t easy though, because everyone is looking for something specific when searching online. The people searching for your service/product in your location(s) is small. Not to mention, you have competitors going after the same audience. So how do you become the local business they work with?

Stop marketing with the lights off

Every single person has their own “taste buds” when it comes to local businesses. There’s an old saying that goes along the lines of “if you try to appeal to everybody, you’ll appeal to nobody”. So how do you pick who to target?

Identify multiple market segments.
- For example, for photographers, the segments may be: Weddings, Corporate photography, Photojournalism, Family portraits
  - Decide which segment is most valuable to you

Once you have decided who you want to target, you need to find out how to “speak” to your target audience. Otherwise, the people you are marketing won’t like you back, just like my high school crush 😞

Why is messaging so important anyways?

When online marketing, your messaging is a lot like your body language, your tone of voice, and your personality. You need to be able to find the people that are interested in exactly what you bring to the table. You want them to say to themselves “this person really gets me”. Think about your friends for a second. Why do you hang out with them? Let me tell you, it’s because you understand each other, not because you need something they have (at least you shouldn’t).

Once you understand your target market, and the messaging towards that potential lead, you’ll need a place to store all your research to reference every time you create a new piece of marketing material so that your messaging stays consistent. If you need help organizing your marketing strategy, you can download our 1 page marketing plan we use for all of our clients. The 1 page marketing plan consists of 9 total sections that include, but are not limited to all of the frameworks we provide on this page. It is a must have resource for the online marketing projects we take on.

Guidelines to creating the entire customer journey A-Z

When creating a customer journey roadmap, you need to step in the shoes of your target market. What will they see at what stage of their journey. For example, if you offer exterior design work, your customers most likely did a fair bit of information gathering before they landed on your local business. It is our job as marketers to step in to the mind of the potential buyer and continue the conversation they are already having in their head, in order to build a relationship with the prospect early in the buying or information gathering stages.

Say they want an outdoor patio. They have a picture in their head of what the finished product looks like, but they have concerns. “What size should we make the patio? what material would be best to fit in my budget? do I want a fireplace or an awning? If you can help them where they are in their buying journey, you will most likely be the expert they call when they are ready to make a final decision.

We see too many people offering them everything they could possibly need from stone masonry, to siding, to eifs. A confused mind doesn’t buy, and in most cases the prospect doesn’t know as much as you do. So Dumb It Down For Them. Make it easy for them to find what they are looking for, and you will see tremendous results.

This can be done through Search Engine Optimization (SEO), google ads, help forums, or more customized landing pages. There is also a way to capture interest from social media, and if you want to learn more about that, you can click here

As you can probably imagine, there are many different ways you can use SEO, google ads/remarketting campaigns, forums, and customized landing pages to create lead capture nets. It all depends on the extent you want to take your online marketing. If you would like to discuss different options, you can schedule a strategy session with the owners of Faithful Frameworks Marketing to point you in the right direction and discuss different options for your specific scenario.

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Create a lead follow-up system that’s sure to convert

Once you build your leads list, and have an online marketing net cast out to continuously bring you more leads in, you need a way to convert those leads. This is where you have some freedom to test different messages and time delays for each followup, as well as what channels you want to use. Different channels could include email marketing, SMS messaging, Social Media DMs, deals, discounts, etc.

The most important thing is that you do the followup. So many people have different strategies and they all can work as long as the prospect is getting followed up with. Don’t let revenue slip out of your fingers. This is the highest revenue producing activity of anything we discussed here.

We recommend using a CRM software to store, and keep tabs on your leads. You could use softwares like Pipedrive, Zoho, or Salesforce Once you have the leads stored in a CRM database, you can go a step further and automate followup processes using triggers that, when hit will send a message, give them a resource, send them a form, or update the status of that lead to even give internal notifications when someone has to reach out to that lead.

We also offer a done with you package to offer support with everything discussed in this post, as well as website hosting, proven automations that work, CRM pipelines, and tracking for everything under the sun. Plus tons more, even including 15 hours of consulting to help transform your dreams into reality.

Conclusion

When looking to increase traffic to your page, there is a lot more to think about other than google ads. When you are looking to create a marketing plan for your business, you will at least need to Figure out who in your market wants what you offer, create messaging that will appeal to your target market, create the customer journey, and build a lead follow-up system that’s sure to convert your leads.

Get the free 1 page marketing plan with SOP(Standard Operating Procedure)