The final post in the year end marketing review series to help small business owners get their plan ready to kick off a successful year.

So far in this series we have:

Identified whether our ideal client has changed over the last year;
Set our goals for our business;
Tweaked our product and service offerings to align with our ideal client;
Determined our differentiator and reviewed our messages to ensure we are communicating it effectively;
Reviewed our marketing content for consistency and accuracy;
Evaluated our marketing results to determine what’s worked and what hasn’t;
Assessed our online reputation to see what is really out there.

You search the web for “marketing plan small business” and you get terrifying results ranging from marketing plan templates that are too cumbersome for small business owners to articles such as the one from Microsoft called 5 easy steps to create a marketing plan where the 5 steps they list are 1) position your product; 2) tap your braintrust; 3) listen to your customers; 4) draft the plan and 5) track results.