Have you ever had a leaky faucet? You know what I am talking about. It never fully turns off and drips a little in your sink every now and then. What do you typically do with a leaky faucet? Do you fix it right away or do you put it off, figuring that it really isn’t hurting anything and there are more important things to do? I have good friends who ignored the dripping spigot in their kitchen sink. One night someone accidentally put the plug in the drain. The next morning they woke up to a flooded kitchen! The sink filled up and overflowed one drop at a time.

Marketing plans can be like a leaky faucet. They are easy to put off for another day. You may know you need to make a change in marketing, but other things are more pressing and you just never get to it. Then one day you discover that you are at a strategic disadvantage and you need to make a change. In most instances, this causes a knee-jerk response to marketing. You mimic the advertising of your competition, which does not help because it does nothing to set you apart from them. In the customer’s eye, you look the same as the next guy. You try a new website, but don’t get any more traffic than you had with the old site. You try to write a blog and discover you have little to say. You try to post content on social media, but again, it is just overwhelming so you lose interest and momentum begins to swing backwards.

There is an answer to this. Carve out time to make a strategic marketing plan. What are the components of a good marketing plan? First get together some preliminary information. Discover what is unique about what you are selling. What problems does it solve? What makes people want to buy it? Next, identify your target market. Who is likely to buy what you are selling? After you have identified your market, ask what they really want from you. This goes beyond just the product or service you are selling. It involves the experience your customer has with you in the process of buying from you. Finally, who is your competition and how do you stack up against them? What are they doing to steal customers away from you? What is the one thing you can do to set yourself apart from them and make your target market take notice of the difference? (A note of marketing wisdom: Make sure the feature that sets you apart is also important to your customers or you will find that you are uniquely alone!)

When you have this preliminary information, begin to formulate a campaign. How can you brand the distinction between you and your competition? How are you going to get this information in front of your target market? What needs to be communicated to get a potential customer to say yes to your brand? Build this into your advertising materials.

So many times the leaky faucet of marketing makes us complacent about making any plans. But there are three killers of good business: procrastination, lack of planning, and poor communication with your customers. Don’t let the dripping sound you’re hearing become the flood that sweeps away your business tomorrow - make time to put a marketing plan together today.