Back to: Business Planning 2 Marketing Basics: Video Course
Please note: the sound on this recording is a little low, you may wish to listen through headphones.
Section 4 of the Business Plan, and a crucial business planning activity, is to review start up and ongoing financials.
One of the reasons we create a marketing plan before we complete the financial section of the Business Plan, is so we have our costs or our marketing expenses ready.
These costings come in two forms – start up costs (the money we require to open the doors on day 1), and operations costs (the money we require to keep the doors open and the lights on a monthly basis).
Let’s start this discussion with refining our Start-up Marketing budget.
So what should be included in a Start Up Budget?
Effectively, all the marketing costs involved in getting that door open.
Some things it may include are:
- Website development costs
- Branding related activities
- Signage if you have a retail storm
- Cost of initial print materials
- Launch online or offline ads
- Open day festivities
Figuring out your marketing start up costs now will enable you to simply slot those figures in when you get to the Financial section of your plan.
Be as accurate as you can, espeically if you are planning on financing your business start-up as a bank or other organisation will ask you to justify your numbers.
If you are planning to ask a third party to help you with your launch, you may wish to get several quotes as part of this process, so you don’t under or significantly over budget.
For your monthly Operations Budget, go back to the tables you’ve already completed about your marketing activities:
- Ensure you’ve costed out your day-to-day activities.
- Cost out your campaign activities.
- Add these costs together to create your monthly marketing operations budget (you may decide to create equal monthly amounts or show increases to the budget at the times of year when you are running campaigns. The latter tends to be more accurate.)
- Ensure you include any software or services you will use to facilitate your marketing ie an agency, e-list software or web software, etc.
For now, that’s it where financials are concerned, we’re now going to look at the final step of creating your overall marketing strategy, Assessing your Results.
Community Futures Capital Region