Writing A Killer Business Plan

A business plan serves a number of purposes. It allows you to evaluate your operating efficiency and determine where adjustments need to be made. It is particularly important for new businesses that are still tinkering with their operations and formulating the best method for maximizing profit margins.

Even for established companies, business plans can be utilized to introduce new ideas, and analyze whether they will be successful before making a large investment in the process. Here are 5 tips to writing a killer business plan:

business plan

1. Tailor the Format
The tone and format of the business plan must be tailored to fit the audience. For example, if your goal is to obtain funding for a project, your plan should be very detailed with regard to risk assessment and cost, with realistic estimates, charts, and numbers.

If your proposal is to a non-profit organization, consider the impact on the community or environment and what effect it will have on the existing business.

2. References

The reliability of your business plan often depends on the quality of your references and statistics. While the internet provides a wealth of resources from which to glean information, it does not carry the same credibility as more established sources.

Citing publications relevant to your industry will give more weight to your proposal as well as demonstrate the diligence with which you created it. Make a detailed bibliography to ensure that you are not infringing on any copyrighted material.

3. Research
 A solid business plan requires comprehensive research. This includes a full evaluation of your competitors, a detailed definition of your business strategy, and an evaluation of the current and future demand for your product or services.

Mapping out the opportunities and potential obstacles for your business will help you understand whether it can survive in the long term.

4. Business Plan Templates
Once you have gathered a plethora of reference material and market research, it is time to conflate them into a layout that will highlight the data and statistical analysis.

As each business plan is different and catered to a specific audience, creating a layout is not as simple as mimicking another business plan’s format.

However, there are many business plan templates that you can use as a basic foundation for organizing your data, which you can alter and tweak to make it more suitable for your audience.

Many online services offer business plan templates that already include sample headings and various categories that can be replaced without altering the layout. Break-even analysis templates are available to help determine the risk of investment.

Ultimately, the layout is not as important as your idea and the statistical data that proves it is financially sound. Employing a business plan template will save you time on the formatting and allow you to concentrate on marketing your business proposal.

5. Feedback

Even after finishing your business plan, it never hurts to seek out feedback before presenting it to a panel or board of directors.

Visit a local university and ask the advice of economic professors, or visit a trade show where industry experts will be on hand.

Social Media Management Tools

If you are on the internet, you are likely to have a social media account as well! That is how spectacular the rise has been with regard to the use of social networking platforms by users around the globe.

Whether it is individuals, professionals or businesses, most have a significant presence on social media sites. In fact, you are likely to come across a similar set of individuals and businesses on more than one social networking websites, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Google+.

And, therein lies the difficult part! Most people or businesses create their profiles or pages on multiple social networks, but fail to manage the posts, updates or even analytics.

This fuels the need to have efficient social media management (SMM) tools that make it easy for you to handle one or more social media profiles.

In this age of the mobile revolution, most people access social media on the go and, hence, these popular tools empower you to achieve the same by scheduling your posts and managing them from a single dashboard (in most cases).

Importantly, these tools also assist you in achieving more traffic to get more likes or followers. And, for businesses, it triggers a good number of leads that have the potential to convert into sales or customers.

So, what are the top Social media marketing tools? Let us take a look at some of these tools by considering their features as well as advantages and disadvantages.

The objective is to understand which ones fulfil your Social media marketing requirements in the best possible way.

Sendible


Sendible is an up and coming SMM (Social media marketing ) tool suite with an excellent user interface. It’s is a fully integrated social media productivity tool and in my opinion, one of the best on the market. With Sendible you get 20 integrations with the top social media networks, blogs, social sharing sites. You can even hook it up to Slack, which makes communicating with other members of your content marketing team an absolute breeze.

Sendible is a great weapon in the arsenal of a social media marketer / content marketer, as it helps you create content that get’s you and your client the traction you need as well as helping you keep your editorial calendar busy and active.

This all-in-one tool helps you stay on top of the important stuff that appears on your social media profiles through its social inbox. You can track all your name or brand mentions and even immediately respond to any negative comments (from customers or readers) to establish a solid rapport and open a communication channel.

It also provides marketing automation tools and social CRM to drive leads and target prospects for your business.

review the top social media campaign ideas to try this year.

Social Media Campaign Ideas
Build social proof
Post offers and discounts online
Showcase happy customers
Host contests
Create calls-to-action on your posts
Encourage engagement with polls
Put together an influencer giveaway
Go live
Have a takeover
Publish behind the scenes content
Livestream events
Design a viral campaign
Write event hashtags
Interact with your customers
Use the holidays as inspiration
Provide educational content
Repurpose high-performing content
Curate content
Participate in popular trends
Adopt new social media platforms
Plan “caption this” contests
Design geofilters on Snapchat
Generate hype for your launches
Come up with human interest campaigns
Develop entertaining segments

You’ll be reaping the rewards from these guides for years to come:

How to Write a Great Value Proposition
How to Become a Marketer Who Thinks Strategically
How to Use Surveys to Hook More Customers
28 Business-Boosting Marketing Activities You Can Do in 1 Hour or Less
Why Most Marketing Campaigns Fail Within 3 Months
22 Unconventional Marketing Tactics that Always Work
26 Marketing Tools for Non-Tech-Savvy Marketers
7 Simple Things You Can Do To Fix Your Marketing
Marketing Framework Guide
8 Marketing Ideas to Grow Your Start Up to Mythic Proportions
How to Become a Marketer Who’s Obsessed with Metrics
16 Most Costly Marketing Mistakes I’ve Ever Made
25 Ways To Increase Website Traffic
The Step-by-Step Guide to Building an Audience Before Your Business Launches
A Step-by-Step Guide to Generating Clients by Writing Case Studies
The Most Effective Ways to Generate Leads for Your Business
The Top 9 Marketing Trends
The Power Of Emotional Marketing
The Ultimate B2B Marketing Guide
How to Tell Your Brand’s Story
Customer Acquisition Strategies That Won’t Break the Bank
A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Reader Personas
Marketing Tips and Tricks
In digital marketing, the number of tips and tricks is quite vast.

ALL ABOUT DIGITAL MARKETING

Unlike many of the old marketing channels that have enormous barriers to entry, every single business can use digital marketing to grow their business.

Even better, the more you put into it, the more you get.

If you’re just starting to explore digital marketing, start with our Beginners Guide to Online Marketing. It covers all the core topics that you’ll need to get going. If you only read one guide, I’d make it this one.

When you’re ready to go deeper, we’ve put together hundreds of guides across the site, including the guides below that cover every aspect of digital marketing.


Marketing Foundations
Digital marketing changes fast but the fundamentals always stay the same.

Here are some top examples of content types from brands who knocked content creation out of the park.

1. Blog Posts & Articles
CMI Article - How to Take an Audience-First Approach to Your Content

One of the most common content types is blog posts and articles.

A blog, in particular, is a great content platform because it gives you a foundation for lots of posts, pages, and content that all point back to your site.

Think of a blog as a tree trunk. Your individual blog posts are the branches that reach out into the corners of the internet and search engines. Users can find your branches and follow them back to your core site. That gives you a greater shot at leads and sales.

For a great example of blogging content, look to Content Marketing Institute. They create troves of valuable, useful content for content marketers in order to teach, instruct, guide, or inspire.

The result?

Devoted fans, followers, and customers for their events, training, and consulting.

2. Infographics
Infographics are fun, visual ways to present valuable information.

They use charts, graphs, pictures, and illustration to explain concepts. This type of content is easily digestible and totally shareable.

Here’s a fantastic example of an infographic about baking bread from RJ Zaworski:

Baking Starter Breads Infographic

And here’s another highly-shared infographic from Curata about the anatomy of a content marketer:

curata - the anatomy of a content marketer

3. Case Studies
Another popular and effective form of content is a case study.

In general, a case study is an in-depth look at some action your brand or business completed that had measurable results for success.

Usually, this translates into something you accomplished for a client.

Here’s a great example of a case study by Fractl:

Fractl Case Study

In it, the agency showcases how they executed a successful content campaign for a real estate brand. They talk about how it came together, the “whys” of the project, and the results (presented in measurable stats).

This type of content is an awesome trust-builder for obvious reasons.

4. Podcasts
For those of you who shudder at the thought of writing a blog post or in-depth article or case study, there are content mediums out there for you.

Podcasts are huge.

Keyword Research Just Got An Upgrade.
We've given our keyword research tools an overhaul. Now, get data like you've never seen. More keywords, better insight, higher ROI. Try it free.

Try it Free
ADVERTISEMENT
They’re similar to the storytelling and news radio shows of yore, except people can download them and listen to episodes however and whenever they want.

Here are some stats gathered from around the web to help give you an idea of why internet/content marketing stands tall:

By 2019, content marketing is set to be an industry worth $313 billion.
91 percent of businesses already are convinced of its power and have already adopted it as an essential marketing tactic.
Content marketing costs 62 percent less than traditional, outbound marketing, but pulls in 3x as many leads.
If you’re a small business with a blog, you’ll rake in 126 percent more lead growth than your competitors without a blog
If you have a blog and publish content, you’re likely to get 434 percent more indexed pages on Google, on average
And there’s more.

From my own content marketing endeavors, I have seen my small business take off.

With 99 percent of our focus on content marketing, we managed to grow our worth to millions of dollars.

Bottom line: This stuff works.

5 Content Examples: Providing Value for Big Returns
Reading about great content marketing is not enough to truly understand how it works. Instead, you have to see it in action to grasp its fundamental value.

Because when content is really good, it can do amazing things.

Here are some top examples of content types from brands who knocked content creation out of the park.