The 6 Business Assets that are More Important than Your Business Plan

One of the most popular questions I get asked whenever I talk about online business building is always about business plans. For one reason or another, the concept of a business plan, what it is, why it’s necessary and how to create your own, always seems to be a primary concern to beginner business owners and/or those who are curious about online business and thinking about starting their own. When you are first getting started creating a business, you have dozens if not hundreds of tasks on your plate all at the same time. If you are lucky, you may have help with your workload, but that still means you have many priorities to balance in order to get your business off the ground. Your business plan is just a document that explains what you are trying to do with our business, which, often times when we are getting started, is a hard concept to define! Until you truly have your business up and running, it doesn’t help you with anything, nor does it legitimize your hard work and effort. For that reason, I think there are way more important items and business assets to tackle before you ever even worry about your business plan. Today, I want to talk about six such items that I think you should have in order as a small business owner before you even worry about writing a business plan!

Website

If you are operating a business of any kind, online or off, having a website is a must. When people hear about your business, products or services, the first thing they are going to do is Google you to find out more about you and unless you have thrown a stake in the ground with your own website and claimed your distinct area of the internet, you are loosing a very powerful opportunity to engage with potential customers and clients. People will search for you online and make many instant decisions over whether or not they want to purchase from or work with your business based on information they find or do not find online. For this reason, putting the necessary time and effort into your website to ensure it provides an accurate and intriguing face to your business is a must!

If you want to learn more about how to build an inexpensive professional website that looks like it cost thousands, click here to learn more about this specific subject! 

Business Model

Another term that I often find thrown around along with business plan is business model. Your business model is the way in which you plan to make money with your business. Remember, until you earn money from your effort, you don’t actually have a business, just a hobby! Your business model is a defined strategy for how money will flow into your business. Until you have your business model worked out and begin earning a steady income from it, there is no reason to even think about a business plan! Until you truly begin earning income from your business, so many factors are up in the air. Spend your time thinking about ways you can earn income and execute on those actions before you worry about your business plan.

Adding income streams and building revenue for your business is no small feat. Try some of these tips to generate passive income to help you build capital. 

Products and/or Services

Your products and/or services are definitely the most important part of your business! Like I mentioned earlier, if your business isn’t earning revenue, it’s not a business, so ensuring you are creating and offering the right products and services is crucial. Your products and services go hand in hand with your business model. Working to develop not only great products that people are eager for, but also defining the right methods for distribution and production (which are essential elements of your business model) will help you to maximize your revenue and grow your business.

If you will be creating products and are interested in learning more about starting an online shop, this dedicated video on the topic should help you get started. 

On the other hand, if you are interested in starting a service based business or adding services to your product based business (this is something that I do!) then these tips can help you get your services off the ground. 

Customer Service Systems

Your business runs on systems. They are the actions or sets of actions you take on a regular basis to perform your business tasks. As a business owner you could have systems for processing payments, systems for paying bills, systems for managing tasks and creating products. Or systems for working with clients! There are a variety of systems that business owners use to manage their day to day workload and keep their business running, and the more deliberate and thought out you can make these systems, the easier your work will be. The most important system that you will want to spend a good deal of time and thought on is your customer service system- those actions you will take to manage customer service inquiries and interact with or troubleshoot issues for your customers and potential customers! Because the success of these systems has a direct impact on your business revenue and growth, this is the first system you should define once you begin making money from your products and services. It will go a long way to helping you develop a customer-centric culture within your organization, and will be your best form of PR!

To learn more about systems for your business, watch this video on systems and workflow! 

Daily Work Schedule 

Perhaps you don’t think of your daily work schedule as an asset for your business, but the truth of the matter is that your time is your ultimate business asset! As a business owner who works solo or even has a team of people working with them, the way you choose to spend your time working on your business is critical to its success. You should first strive to define all the necessary work for your business and then understand which actives and tasks are the highest use of your time and executive function. You will want to do all you can to maximize the time you spend performing duties that actually earn your business revenue and streamline or delegate administrative items that keep the business afloat but don’t earn. If you were to place an hourly rate on your time and an hourly rate on the different activities that need to be accomplished for your business, you want to do higher value work more often!

If you are new to business and want to understand more about how you should be spending your time effectively, here is more information on the subject. 

If you are trying to get your business off the ground while you still work a full time or part time job, here are some additional tips and tricks to help you balance the workload. 

Visual Content

The online marketplace is saturated with content, there is no doubt about that, but there is a clear trend illustrating that visual content and visual platforms are where businesses get the most bang for their buck! If you have minimal time to produce content, even promotional or marketing content, spend your time wisely and focus on visual mediums and platforms. Places like Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube command the most traffic and attention online, so learning how to optimize your business for these types of platforms will give you a competitive edge. To optimize your business visually, you need to get very clear on your visual branding and start using graphics and styled stock photography to tell your brand story. Sharing visuals of your products or styled images that define your services, help your potential customers connect and engage with your business.

If you want to learn more about using photography and visual content to elevate your brand and business online, click here for more information on my styled stock photography course created for creative business owners and entrepreneurs!

Don’t let the idea of needing a business plan hold you back from moving your business forward, especially in infancy stages. You have more important work to do for getting your business off the ground and writing a business plan before you have clear proof of income and concept for your business is a waste of time. With time your most precious commodity, everything you choose to spend it on should be moving your business forward or growing your revenue! So, know I want to hear from you! When starting your business, what did you consider to be the most important activities you spent your time on? If you are thinking about starting a business, what’s currently holding you back or causing you pause? Let me know in the comments below!

xoxo,

How to Plan a Marketing Campaign for Your Business

Today I want to talk to you about how to plan a marketing campaign. Some of you may already know that within my CEO Strategy Planner, there is an insert dedicated to creating a marketing campaign for your business and that is the process I am going to share with you today. If you already own the CEO Strategy Planner, perfect! You will be able to use your insert to map our your own marketing campaign quickly and easily with the help of this little tutorial. If you don’t already own your own copy of the CEO Strategy Planner and you are someone thinking about or currently trying to manage campaigns, you’re going to want this insert because it really is a tremendous tool to use to streamline and execute your marketing campaigns.

Before we get into the process itself, I just want to introduce you to how I use marketing campaigns and ease your mind a bit if you are someone who is overwhelmed at the idea of planning and executing one for your business. So, a marketing campaign can be any time sensitive promotion for your business, products or services. Think of it like a dedicated period of time where you are going to share marketing materials to attract your audience and create buzz around your products. I think a lot of times business owners just getting started can get overwhelmed with marketing campaigns because they think they need to do all the things in order to execute on a success campaign, but I’d like to reassure you that you can plan a simple, elegant campaign for your business that hits your goal without having to go overboard on content and messaging. In fact, I think simple is best when it comes to creating a successful campaign. I like to err on the side of simple instead of complicated because I’d rather have a simple campaign that I complete than a complicated campaign that overwhelms me and doesn’t get finished.

Now, in order to execute on a marketing campaign, you are going to need at least one online platform that you use to attract and talk to you customers. For me personally, I have a few different platforms that I use. I have my blog, my youtube channel, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and of course my email list. When I am planning a campaign for myself, I might use all of these platforms, but if I’m trying to keep it simple, I like to stick to just a few. At the very least you need one. And there needs to be an active audience on the platform you choose. That’s important. You see, there are two ways to market online. You can pay for ads to send your message to new folks that might not already know you, or you can market for free to the audience you have. The later is what I do and thats the process I am going to show you how to plan right now.

Planning a Marketing Campaign

Step 1: Name Your Campaign

The first step to creating your marketing campaign is to name it. I know it seems like a little thing but when you are planning out your marketing for the month or quarter you need to have a name or designation to use that clearly refers back to the different campaigns you are running. So make sure you have a clear name to use that is descriptive but simple. A recent campaign I finished was called CEO Strategy Planner Launch– it’s clear what product was being promoted and what type of campaign it was, a launch.

Step 2: Define your objective

For every marketing campaign you need to have a clear objective that you are trying to reach. It could be the number of sales you are trying to make of a product, the amount of money you want to earn, or even the amount of followers you are trying to gain. If I didn’t mention that before, campaigns don’t necessarily have to be able making money, they can be about gaining followers as well. Again, they are just a dedicated period of time where you are focused against marketing your business in some form or another. As an example, for my CEO Strategy Planner Launch campaign, I set a target for the number of units I wanted to sell during the launch period. It’s always good to have objectives defined, but if you feel unsure about where to start with setting them, I recommend trying the good, better, best method where you define what objective would mean you had a good result for your campaign, which would be better, and which objective would be the best case scenario. That way you can start learning how to set expectations for objectives like this.

Step 3: Outline your key messaging

With every campaign and objective there is going to be some key messages that you are trying to share with your audience. This could be information you are trying to share, or it could be a call to action you are trying to get your audience to fulfill. For example, if you were creating a campaign to sell a product, one of your messages might be about the limited time sale price or bonus’ the customer would receive. Another might be the key outcome your audience can expect to receive from purchasing your product, and a final message might be the end time for the promotion. We want to outline these key messages for a reason- so that all the messages we send out, all the posts, videos or emails associated with your campaign hit those few key points that you want to drive home. Knowing these message points going into a campaign makes it much easier to create all the different posts and updates you will end up sharing during the campaign itself.

Step 4: Define the start and end date for the campaign

Again, a simple detail but a very important one. After all, marketing campaigns don’t last forever, so you need to define the time period where the campaign and it’s objective are going to be your top priority. The time period you define for your campaign is going to be up to you and your schedule and the objective you are trying to reach. You could be holding a one day sale in your shop, planning a week long launch event or focusing on increasing your IG following for a month or more! Whatever the time period you think makes sense, define it so you aren’t working on this campaign forever!

Step 5: List out the marketing assets you will need for the campaign

A marketing asset is any digital promotion material that you can use or reuse as needed during your campaign. I break my assets into four categories. First, are Copy meaning text that I might use for blog posts, emails, or social updates. Next, are Photo meaning pictures or graphics I will use. I also use Video assets, pretty self explanatory but any video content I need to produce to go along with the campaign. Finally, I have an Other category where miscellaneous assets might be listed, like sales pages on my website, email landing pages, or opt-ins. Creating this list is important because its like the pre-campaign to do list of all the things you need to create to successfully market your business and meet your objective.

Step 6: Define the metrics you will track during the campaign

So, I’ll be honest, this step is one that I think a lot of business owners miss when they are planning a campaign but it is a crucial element that you can use to not only track the effectiveness of your campaign, but to also learn from to make future campaigns more successful. So, a metric is some factor that you are going to track to understand the success and impact of your campaign. Going back to my example of my CEO Strategy Planner Launch, I used the metrics of Sales, Email Opens and Email Clicks to measure the effectiveness of my campaign. Sales is an obvious metric. I had set a sales goal as my objective so tracking the target sales vs actual sales would be a good indicator of how successful the campaign was. I chose email opens and email clicks as well to gage the engagement of my audience. But I could have chosen from any number of other metrics as well. Video views, clicks on a specific tracked link, etc. If you are just getting started with marketing your business, some of this might be new to you, so take it slow and just strive to understand key factors that you can track to use a metrics for the success of your campaign.

Step 7: Compile a list of all broadcasts

The second full page my campaign builder from the CEO Strategy Planner is dedicated to a Broadcast Tracker. This is essentially a master list of all the messages I will need to send out during a campaign. Again, we are preplanning these messages out so this master list is important. On this list of broadcasts I make sure to track the date the broadcast will go out, you could also list out the time if that is important for your promotion as well. I list out the platform for each message so I know if its a blog post, video, IG Story or post or email, etc. I track the message itself, by providing a brief summary of what the message is about, and finally I track it’s completion with a checkbox. Looking at my CEO Strategy Planner Launch campaign page, I had 14 broadcasts that I made over a period of six days that spanned four different platforms, so that was a lot of communication to not only create, but ensure I was posting on time for my launch. Having a list like this helps me manage my workload going into a campaign and manage my daily expectations because I can see what the most important thing to do for my campaign is each day.

Well, that is exactly how I plan a marketing campaign for my business. I hope this information helps you to create your own marketing campaigns in the future, and of course, if you need a simple, strategic tool to help you make these plans, I highly recommend checking out the CEO Strategy Planner inserts. Not only do you get access to the Campaign Builder and Broadcast Trackers mentioned earlier, but you get a total of 60+ different business planning inserts to help you make a strategic plan for your business. The CEO Strategy Planner covers everything from Brand Vision, Yearly, Quarterly, and Monthly Business Plans, to Marketing, Objectives, and Finances as well. So, get your copy of the CEO Strategy Planner today because this is the ultimate business planning tool with everything your business needs in one bundle!

xoxo,