Why you should bother with a marketing plan for your business? Most small and medium business owners, at initial stage of their business, consider it as a brainy thinking exercise; but as soon as the plan is printed, they start treating it just like an useless pile of paper.

Why it happens? For SMEs, marketing is probably the greatest hurdle. After the costly process of setting up a business, most SMEs persuade themselves to believe that marketing efforts do not require a lot of fund. As big goals sound good, they set unrealistic marketing goals at that time. But sooner or later reality strikes and when they start realizing that the goals are unattainable, they stop putting serious efforts into their marketing.   

Marketing objectives
Therefore, setting realistic marketing objectives is very important for SMEs. If your finances are limited, you should pick up a handful of objectives, prepare a smart marketing strategy and choose the right marketing tactics to achieve your goals.

Find below some tips  to set your marketing objective intelligently:  

* Don't spread your marketing activities too wide. Choose only 4-5 marketing objectives and make it sure that you have the financial capability to achieve them.

* Align your marketing objectives with your sales and financial objectives. When there is a common goal and you work towards achieving it, success is most likely to come with more ease.

* Marketing objectives should be specific, measurable, and time specific. The plan should include a schedule of key tasks, what will be done, how and by when.

* Take a plunge into market research and try to determine the number of your existing and potential customers. When you have the numbers, it becomes easier to set realistic objectives.

* While setting the marketing objectives, keep the customers in your mind. Try to set the goals in terms of customer. For example, you may set an objective to increase the number of your customers by 1000 during a financial year.

Marketing strategy
After setting some realistic marketing goals, you can now move to develop a marketing strategy that enables you to achieve your sales and marketing objectives. The marketing strategy of a business should focus on how to keep the existing customers loyal, how to maximise the existing customer relationships, and what should be done to attract new customers.

Marketing tactics
Along with setting realistic marketing goals and preparing a simple and clear strategy to achieve those goals, it is also important to choose the right marketing tactics that are required to support the marketing strategy. Here again, a good budget planning is important for SMEs; you should decide first how much money, resource and time will be required to implement each tactic. Also, track the effectiveness of each marketing tactic so that the learning can be included in future planning.

With a limited budget, it is not wise for SMEs to focus too much upon advertising. Of course advertising is an effective marketing tool but most traditional advertising media like print, television and radio are too costly for businesses with small budgets. Alternatively you may consider advertising online or just try some guerrilla marketing techniques.  

Concluding, SMEs need to create a high-impact and low budget marketing plan and optimize their limited fund and other resources. However, it does not mean that you should be naive in setting high goals. Only, the objectives should be realistic; there should a proper strategy and a right set of tactics.