Warning: The mere reference of “marketing plan” in conversation with fellow entrepreneurs can give blank expressions, nervous giggles, and a half dozen excuses of why we don’t have one.

I’m with you, girl. We have a overstuffed inbox and scattered to-do lists all over our desks, stuck to our planners, and inside our purses. The idea of pausing it all — to make a plan — sounds impossibly hard. Not the fun kind of work we want to be doing.

Today, I’m sharing why creative business owners NEED a marketing plan and organized strategies in their life. You my friend, are made to shine in this business! Here are five reasons to get planning:

1. All of the marketing efforts in your business need to be tied to a WHY or you’re wasting your time.

All too often, I hear my friends saying, “I know I should be doing an email newsletter right now. I know I should be doing X posts per week. Everyone is doing Y and Z… but honestly, I really don’t know why I should be doing these things.”

Yes, you might have ten dozen ideas and business strategies you need to implement. Really though, you need to know the WHY behind all of these things, or you’re wasting your time! More than likely, you don’t have a lot of time to spend on your business, and you’re trying to get the most out of every precious minute you put into it. Therefore, it makes no sense to be spending hours on Instagram or hours on this other channel, and really not knowing the purpose or intended results these activities will or will not give you. When you’re not sure, you give up. You decide it’s not worth it. A marketing plan is going to answer that for you and plan your invested time for you in the best way possible!

2. Have any plans at all to launch a new product or service this year? A marketing plan and strategy is going to be your “playbook” to making it happen.

Marketing plans are created to give you predictable results. I don’t know about you, but I’m all about predicting things in my business. If you have a new product or service coming out, mentioning it a few times in a social media post and hoping for the best is NOT going to cut it. If you’re going to spend the time and energy to create this new product or service, you need to give it the best chance it has to reach as many people as you desire!

3. You and your business are more than just “creative.”

If you thought your creative business was just going to be “creative” all day long, I have news for you — it’s time to graduate to the big leagues! If you’re ready to say “yes!” to truly making this business work and being successful, then marketing plans and learning new marketing tools are some of the things that you’re going to have to stop resisting and start embracing.

4. Big wins need to be celebrated + you need to know how to get more of them!

Did your inbox fill up with dozens of order receipts or client inquiries? Hooray! Let’s analyze how that happened so we can go and make sure we get more of them. Marketing plans do not need to be complicated, they can be simple. Our whole goal in them is to make sure the activities that we’re doing to market our business are producing results. When we have a plan in place, we can easily see what’s working and what’s not working, then pivot as we need to. I don’t know about you, but when I’m ready to toss confetti, I want to know that it’s because I made it happen, not because luck was on my side.

5. Marketing plans take out the guesswork of what to do next.

Are you sitting down at your desk each day not really sure what to do next on your to-do list? A marketing plan will outline step-by-step what needs to be done, on which day, so there’s no guesswork. This will also give you the ability to hand off tasks to other team members if you have them. You can decide the best way to implement the plan, for you. Maybe you want to knock out a bunch of content all at once (called “batching”) on an upcoming day where you’ll have a solid chunk of time to work on your business? Your marketing plan is going to be your to-do list! No more will you feel scattered, but instead feel focused and productive.

Are you sold on the idea of creating a marketing plan for your business?

Great! I have a wonderful FREE resource for you!

Sign up below to receive the Kickstart Your Marketing Plan workbook. It’s designed to help you plan out the big picture of your marketing plan in under an hour! This will be a great resource to help you map out your marketing plan for the year (no experience necessary!) and it also comes with a FREE video training where I will help walk you through the workbook. Just think: you, me, your favorite drink (mine will be in a mason jar!), digging into your marketing goals — what a fun strategy soiree it will be!