A lot of people I meet who run small businesses are working really hard to grow those businesses. They are doing loads of marketing, spending lots of their valuable time and quite a bit of their hard earned money on it. Despite all the hard work, they don’t feel they are making enough progress, or they find that marketing is taking up too much of their time and money.

All these people have one thing in common – they don-t have a plan for their marketing. They think that they have do masses of marketing to get enough new clients. They assume that they have to try things out, to see whether or not those activities will work for them. My job is to stop them wasting their efforts and help them get the results they need, by helping them create a Marketing Plan. When you know what marketing you need to do, to whom and when, you’ll get much better results than the scatter gun approach you’ve been relying on.

The first thing to think about is where you business is now. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• What resources do you have? What expertise and reputation do you have?
• What are your products and services – what do you really sell?
• Who are your clients? Why do they buy from you?
• What makes you different? What’s your ?USP??
• What marketing do you currently do- How much does it cost and what results do you get?
• Who are your competitors? What do they do differently to you? Why do people buy from them instead of you?

You need to be able to answer all these questions, before you move on. Not knowing where your business is now is like telling the sat nav in your car where you want to go, without first telling it your starting point.

You may also be pleasantly surprised by the answers to get to those questions. When I ask some of my Marketing Mentoring clients about their businesses, it can be quite an eye opening exercise for them. Michelle had been providing the same HR services to the same type of clients for some time, because they kept coming to her, or being referred by other consultants. She had been labeled as someone who did particular work for certain types of companies. As we went through the process, it became more apparent that the work Michelle had been doing wasn’t actually what she loved doing. As I asked Michelle more about her business, we started to work out what work she really liked doing and the clients she wanted to work with. Knowing the current, or starting point for the business, meant it was simple to decide where to go next. If we hadn’t talked about the current state of the business, Michelle may not have realised just how much she wanted to change what she was doing and who she was doing it for.

The result? Recently Michelle won an exciting project from one single new client that is worth a fifth of her annual turnover, and four times the annual investment she makes in marketing support.

What’s your starting point? Where is your business now?