Hello everyone! Welcome back - in this class I wanted to focus on a tutorial for my creative business series. Marketing is an incredibly important aspect of running a creative business as a freelancer. Whether you are marketing your services or products, you have to get the word out to potential customers. The whole idea of If you build it, they will come is a fallacy - why? Because they won’t come to you if they don’t know about you.
This is why I think internet businesses have taken off, people have been able to find really smart and strategic ways of getting their name out there using online resources like email and social media.
Yet, I feel like a lot of small business concepts and marketing ideas are shrouded in buzzwords and multi level marketing speak that can be complicated and convoluted for most people to understand. So, in this tutorial I am going to break down these ideas for you so that you can apply them to your own creative or small business.
What You will be learning
Today, we will be focusing on the importance of marketing plans and why they are an integral part to any freelance or small business strategy - whether you are a creative or not, this video will help ya. I’ll be helping you create your very own marketing plan.
My degrees and much of my career experiences have been focused in marketing and creative design. A lot of the courses I teach at the university focus on Marketing and Promotion. Many people can get turned off by the sales-y sounding pitches that surround digital marketing in the online space — I have found that while some of these can be helpful, some are complicating basic general business and marketing strategies. I’m going to simplify the process of developing an in-depth marketing plan that will lead to actionable steps you can take to market your brand, product or services.
I will be walking you through a printable marketing plan that I created just for this tutorial - make sure you print it out for the final class project. You can find it in the class resources - I've included a zip file with the JPEG versions and a PDF file of the plan.
What are Marketing Plans?
So, marketing plans - what are they? A marketing plan essentially helps you decide how you will sell your products or services to consumers. It also helps you focus on the key people who are most likely to buy your product or use your service. Just like a business plan, I consider it a roadmap to success for your brand. I also consider it what I call a living document - because it is likely to go through many iterations and change based on the needs of your company and consumers.
As you watch this tutorial, I would suggest downloading the marketing plan printable and working through it with me as I go over each section. Feel free to pause the video and fill out each section before you move on. The template I created consists of 3 key sections that I have found to be the most important when coming up with a marketing plan.
- Your customer profile- which is an overview of your target market and product/services -
- A positioning statement to help you establish how your product or brand serves your customers
- A funnel plan/Marketing Channel Plan (which is basically your promotions strategy plan)
When you are done filling this out, make sure you share your final plan in the class project gallery - I’d be happy to offer any feedback.
