Developing a Marketing Plan for Creative Entrepreneurs

1. Course Intro: Hi, everyone. Welcome back. This is Generals on the creative behind the freelance life on YouTube and the owner of Bella Sophia Creative Studio. You may know me from my sculpture classes or my videos right here on YouTube. Have a background in the corporate marketing and design industries, and I've taught as a professor and higher ad for almost 10 years now. I also run Balance Sophia Creative Studio. We focus on things like digital stationary, physical stationary, graphic design and illustration. So today I wanted to focus on a tutorial for my creative business. Siri's marketing is an incredibly important aspect off running a creative businesses, a freelancer. Whether your marketing, your services or products, you have to get the word out to potential customers. The whole idea of If you build it, it will come. This whole idea is a fallacy. Why? Because they won't come if they don't know about you. So this is why I think Internet businesses have really taken off. People have been really smart and strategic in terms of finding ways to get their name out there. Using online resource is like email on social media platforms. Yeah, I feel like a lot of small business concepts and marketing ideas are shrouded in buzzwords and multi level marketing. Talk on that could be really complicated and convoluted for most people to understand. So in this tutorial, I'm gonna break down these ideas for you so that you can apply them to your own creative, small business and a really simple and strategic way. So today we're gonna be focusing on the importance of marketing plans and why they're an integral part toe. Any freelance or small business strategy. Whether you're creative or not, this video most likely be able to help you. So my degrees and much of my career experiences have been focused and marketing and creative design. A lot of the courses that I teach at the university focus on marketing and promotion, and many people could get turned off by the sales e feel and vibe. I'm in terms of pitches that surround digital marketing in the online space, and I have found that while some of these, like videos and other things and resource is that you find online can be helpful, some are complicating some really 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 that you can take to market your brand or product or your service is I will be walking you through ah, principal marking plan that I created just for this tutorial. It's for sale in my Etsy shop, but I've included a free download link in The resource is below. Throw me like and subscribe if you end up downloading and finding it helpful. Andi, if you're watching this on skill share, make sure you print it out for your final class project. So marketing plans. What are they? A marketing plan essentially helps you decide how you will sell your products or your 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 kind like a road map to success for your brand. I also consider it what I call a living document because it's likely to go through many iterations and change based on the needs of your company and your consumers and marketing glands are highly highly important because the reality is that? Well, we wish we had all the money in the world market. We have to be smart in terms of the budget that we have. So a marketing plan can really help us be decisive in our marketing goals and decisive and deciding which consumers who want to connect with and why. 2. Course Project: So as you watch this tutorial, I would suggest downloading the marketing plan printable and working through it with me. As I go over each of the sections, feel free to positive video and fill out each section before you move onto the next. The template I created consists of three key sections that have found to be the most important when coming up with a marketing plan. Your customer profile, which is basically kind of like an overview of your target market and your product and services. Ah, positioning statement to help you establish how your product or your brand serves a customer. And a funnel plan, which is basically like your promotion strategy plan. If you're watching this in school share, make sure you share final plan in the class Project gallery and be happy to offer any feedback. If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments below. All right, so let's get into each section in more detail 3. The Customer Profile: the first section we're gonna look at is our target market profile. This is important, and I usually start with it first, because when we know what we're doing and who were trying to connect with, we can more clearly explain a positioning statement in the section. You want to explain what your product there were. Services. What do you offer? What do you do? Explain it here and really simple terms and then further explained some reasons you think potential customers will buy the product or use your services. This is important as we will be elaborating on this in the next section of the plan. Think about your potential customers problems. What are their needs, whatever their wants and what is the problem and how will you solve it for your customers? Why would they use your product or service? Once you kind of get through these 1st 2 sections, then you want to outline some potential obstacles you face in getting people to actually purchase your product. Maybe your product is higher price or it takes a lot of launch. What can you do to offset these were overcome these potential obstacles and turn them into something positive. So, for example, if prices an obstacle, maybe a tired customers who are willing to pay a higher price for quality and even showcase how your product or service is stand out against the rest in terms of that high quality. Now let's get into the customer section of this page. Customer segmentation is a really vital tool to developing a marketing plan. You can pull this out of your head and just make it up based on what you think you know about potential customers for the section, or you can go the extra mile, take it a step further and use a website like sunspot gov or Claritas prisms. Code Search to get some real data driven information about nationwide segmentation. I'll include some links below. So what is marketing segmentation and why is it important? Marketing segmentation involves dividing a large, homogeneous market of potential customers into clearly identified segments. Customers are divided based on meeting certain criteria or having similar characteristics that lead them to having the same product needs. So segments are made up of customers who will respond Cimoli to marketing strategies. They share common interests, needs, wants demands and there are three key parts that we look at when we're segmenting a population. The first area I tell students and anyone who is a small business owner or creative that are looking to create a plan like this is to look at demographics. So this big, funny sounding word is basically data. Um, it includes data like age, marital status, education, income, gender, things like that. The others to sections are also important because it kind of revolved around each other Geographics and cycle graphics. So we look at dividing out a segment we want to look at where they're located. So Geographics basically include information on physical locations, things, exempt codes and cities and towns. And what that means to you is it gives you a deeper understanding of who these people are, what they're about. And then finally, second graphics includes information on ah, groups, personalities, their values, their opinions and attitudes, their interest in lifestyles. This includes things like their needs and wants in terms of their lifestyle. And all these pieces together kind of helped create a much more realistic, humanistic version of who your potential customers so that we can connect with them in a much much deeper level. This can help you figure out what kind of marketing channels that they frequent. For example, they email users are they on social media like Instagram and Facebook or Twitter? Or perhaps they watched things like YouTube, and it makes more sense to advertise to them in this manner. Or maybe they're more likely to see traditional ads like commercials on TV or radio ads or billboards. So all of this helps you kind of decipher what your messaging might be, what you're going to say to them and where you're gonna say it. I also like to list marketing channels within the section different marketing channels that a consumer might frequent. This gives me a head start that will help when I work on the funnel plan. Marketing channels are basically the places that you will promote your products or services , things like social media platforms, m o marketing, digital marketing using search engines like Google or traditional marketing like newspaper ads, commercials and radio ads awful under these marketing channels. Finally, I like to include a list of possible influencers and brands at the target market. Might like these could be potential PR opportunity system products to, Or they could just give you insight to the overall lifestyle off your potential customer and also give you some insight to potential competition within a field. 4. The Positioning Statement: So the next part of this plan that I want us to look at is the positioning statement. So before we can get into the marketing peace, we have to take a really good look at our brand. When you can clearly state what your goals are in terms of how you serve your customer, you come better market to a specific segment of people. Ah, positioning statement is a clear expression of how your brand fills a particular customer need in a way that the competition doesn't positioning statements are really critical in the early stages of your company and also along the growth stages. So this idea of the elevator pitch and this also plays into how you're gonna message what you're saying to your consumers. All of this is really, really helpful. That comes to building out your marketing campaigns, building out those messages, building out your brand and product presentations, your website and your overall branding in general because it kind of gives guidance to who you are, what you're doing and why you're here on what need your filling in the market. So think about what problems your customer has. How do you solve that? problem and what makes your brand better or different than any of the others out there, Why should they pick you? So you want to start with your mission statement here and a really simple sentence, or to explain what your company does? This is a short statement of wine. Organization exists, what its overall goals are. It also helps to identify the goals of its operation, what kind of product or service it provides its primary customers or market and his overall geographical operation. And you know what sounds like a mouthful of different things to kind of including something sweet and simple, and it's okay to start off longer. But after you start that after you get you know, you kind of peace out what this section is, and maybe it's longer than a sentence or two, then you want to go back and start to cut it down so that you can have only one or two sentences that are succinct and very simple and easy to remember. So once we've gone through this this first section, then we want to begin to further explain what such you apart from the competition, take your statement from the target market profile and elaborate on it. Think about what you can offer that others can't. Then, and when you think about what value you offer your consumers, think about how your product value can then also be associated with your pricing. After this, I like to look at my pricing strategy. Once I understand what I'm offering, why im important in the market? Why customers should still, you know, should choose my services or choose my product. And I have, ah, better understanding of the overall value that I can start to really map out what my pricing strategy will be. I'm not gonna get to induct in this one because they have feeling they'll probably do a video on pricing in the future. But I want you to think about these basic ideas. Think about the costs associated with your base product or your service. Then you want to add on any overhead costs like labor and materials, and then think about your time, effort and energy in terms of what you're putting into it, especially if you're an artist. Things like copyright come into play here. Are you selling out full rights in terms of, you know releasing your your illustrations or your artwork. All this plays into the overall value of that and product on. Then you add a typical markup, which is usually about two times the original based cost to produce. But pricing does take trial and error, so don't ever feel like you're stuck with the pricing that you initially set up. It's OK to increase or decrease prices based on your consumer needs, based on your overall a company needs as well. 5. What are Funnels: once we've gone through those 1st 2 sections. Now we can jump into the very core of marketing plan, which is basically the promotions and marketing pieces. So we're gonna be talking now about the importance of funnels and using marketing channels effectively. So this funnel plan is essentially the part of the plan that gets you to the action. Ah, marketing funnel is a system designed to attract and convert customers or clients to your business. The idea is to create awareness and attract the target market that you've established. You want to create interest by showing you have a solution to their potential problems. Then you need to convince them that you're the right solution and finally convert them and get them to make that final decision toe by product or pay into your service at the first stage. In this process, you need to create awareness. So what are your bulls to get discovered and then what kind of action steps can you take to get discovered? Do you share pictures of your product instagram or see that are do you son free samples to influencers that you outlined in the very beginning portion of your plan? maybe use Facebook or Google ads and target key customers using things like a CEO and targeting tools through those platforms. What platforms can you used to get your product in front of the eyes of your potential market? As I said earlier, if you're researching based on data, if you're using what it's like Florida's or if you're using this census, that guff site, they talk about these types of things. What The's people's lips and needs are kind of platforms in Ondo technological, you know, aspects of their lives they're able to use and research with. So all this research essentially is helping you to get a better idea of where these customers are, what they're listening through and how you're gonna be able to actually connect with them. Then you need to connect and gain the trust of your potential target market. The idea is to educate and highlight the features and benefits of your product or your service. Maybe you can offer free download or maybe a free sample kind of like what I do with my video sometimes something that offers information that is beneficial to the potential customers that you want to connect with Andi, then tied in with something like an email sign up. I don't always do this because I know sometimes it could be a pain in the butt for people to sign up for emails, and maybe they don't want to be on an email list. So every so often, like what I'm doing with this video. I like to include things just as a free resource without any strings attached. But more often than not, I like to have some sort of transactional element. You get a free thing for me. I given email from you. More often than not, you'll see people using simple platforms like Male Trip to start. This basically gives the client something to test run your product and also gives you a chance to gain an email so that you can connect with them again. Further down the funnel line, you can not offer things like promotions of product updates, so you can get them to take action to actually make a purchase or sign up for a service. So once we've gone through the whole connecting in, gaining trust, then we want to continue to build relationships with our customers. The idea is to get repeat customers and have your customers were for potential customers your waist. With a simple idea of becoming an advocate, you can utilize the email list or even things like social Media to connect with those customers that you've already established communication with. You can send email offers, promotions and even coupons to repeat customers to reward their patronage. The idea is to figure out what each of your goals is for each level, the funnel, and then be very, very specific on the action steps that you need to take to reach those schools. So one really good example of this is basically offering that free download, as I mentioned, right? So the goal here is to connect and gain trust with your customer base. I'm not. In order to do that, you're creating a free download that they sign up for email list, and then they get that download sent to them after they signed up. So what are the different steps that you have to take? To do that, you have to first create the product, right? So create your PDF download or whatever it might be. Maybe then after that, you have Teoh figure out setting up your funnel. So maybe you are setting up for mail chimp, and then you have to figure out how to design a landing page. And then once you design the landing page, you have to design the email that goes out with the actual product attached. You have toe little the product to some sort of cloud based system that allows you to connect a link to the email that gets sent out automatically once someone has signed up for your email list. So there's all these different sects that play into this, and that's the whole purpose of this being action driven. Once you figure out what the goal is, then you can break it down into little bits and pieces so that you can recycle and then moves to the next step, you know, within the whole process. So once we know what funnels we're gonna be using, now it's time to move on to the final piece of this whole market plants of the marketing channels. So basically, this section is where you really map out what platforms you plan to use for your funnels. This printable outlines read different channels to start with you can print out more pages and do more, but I think that three isn't overwhelming, and it still allows you to reach a wider afraid of potential customers. So I suggest always incorporating email marketing as one channel Social Media as you're to others, so you can pick any two platforms that you feel you can stick to. You can even include more traditional outlets like PR, like public relations or advertising if it's within your budget. But if you're working with a really minimal budget shoestring budget, just start up email. Marketing and social media will be your best spots to grow your audience. So this plan allows you to map out your ideas for what your promotions will say and how often they will go out. You'll hear this word frequency. This is an important aspect of this whole thing. You can send something out once, but maybe some of Mrs it sends something out again. Often more often than not, you're likely to connect with someone, So frequency is is an important aspect of your marketing plan. So, for example, you can pick social media as a channel, but specify what platform. So perhaps you decide on Instagram, then under frequency. You should highlight how many times you plan on posting A week, a month, a day, Maybe possibly you're gonna do one time a day, five days a week. Or maybe only plan on posting two times a week on Mondays and Wednesdays or Wednesdays and Fridays based on research. Maybe you're posting on Tuesdays and Thursdays because that's what the research says. People were gonna be online looking at this platform during. Finally, you should also outline your content topics and your ideas for the promotions. Will you share photos and video? What will those photos and videos consist of? Will you host giveaways? What products will be given away and how often? What do customers have to do to enter for a chance to win? In these little ways, all these details are important to include in these sections. Well, you re share images with things like hashtags for your company that are posted by other customers. You want to use this part of the plants, spread out solid ideas that could be turned into actionable steps that will then help you stand track with your marketing goals. I hope you found this tutorial. Interesting and informative. This plan ish truly kind of like a living document that you should revise as you see fit and change when things are not working. You want to keep track of what is working and why, and figure out how you can keep those same successes. This is a really simple plan and a simple way to start out, but it allows you truly map out your marketing goals and guide you along little process, but it does require some up front work. So take the time to leave. Think about your marketing goals and how you can achieve them, and use this principle as a way to really help you to organize your thoughts and begin building the base in the foundation of your overall business strategy. If you're watching this on school share, make sure you share some snapshots of your final plan in the project gallery. If you have questions, feel free to leave them in the comments and thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one by 6. Understanding Marketing Channels: So once we know what funnels we're gonna be using now it's time to move on to the final piece of this whole marketing plan. So the marketing channels So basically, this section is where you really map out what platforms you plan to use for your funnels. This printable outlines read different channels to start with, You can print out more pages and do more, but I think that three isn't overwhelming, and it still allows you to reach a wider array of potential customers. So I suggest always incorporating email marketing as one channel Social Media as you're to others so you can pick any two platforms that you feel you can stick to. You can even include more traditional outlets like PR, like public relations or advertising if it's within your budget. But if you're working with a really minimal budget shoestring budget, just start up email. Marketing and social media will be your best spots to grow your audience. So this plan allows you to map out your ideas for what your promotions will say and how often they will go out. You'll hear this word frequency. This is an important aspect of this whole thing you can send something out once, but maybe some of mrs it sends something out again. Often more often than not, you're likely to connect with someone. So frequency is is an important aspect of your marketing plan. So, for example, you can pick social media as a channel, but specify what platform? So perhaps you decide on Instagram, then under frequency. You should highlight how many times you plan on posting a week, a month, a day, Maybe possibly you're gonna do one time a day, five days a week. Or maybe only plan on posting two times a week on Mondays and Wednesdays or Wednesdays and Fridays based on research. Maybe you're posting on Tuesdays and Thursdays because that's what the research says. People were gonna be online looking at this platform during. Finally, you should also outline your content topics and your ideas for the promotions. Will you share photos and video? What will those photos and videos consist of? Will you host giveaways? What products will be given away and how often? What do customers have to do to enter for a chance to win in these giveaways? All these details are important to include in these sections. Will you re share images with things like Hashtags for your company that are posted by other customers? You want to use this part of the plants, read out solid ideas that could be turned into actionable steps that will then help you stand track with your marketing gold. 7. Final Thoughts: I hope you found this tutorial interesting and informative. This plan ish truly kind of like a living document that you should revise as you see fit and change when things are not working. You want to keep track of what is working and why, and figure out how you can repeat those same successes. This is a really simple plan and a simple way to start out, but it allows you truly map out your marketing goals and guide you along the whole process . But it does require some up front work, So take the time to leave. Think about your marketing goals and how you can achieve them, and use this principle as a way to really help you to organize your thoughts and begin building the base in the foundation of your overall business strategy. If you're watching this on school share, make sure you share some snapshots of your final plan in the project gallery. If you have questions, feel free to leave them in the comments and thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one by