Your Website is not Your Marketing Plan

Your Website is One Component of Your Plan

Some small businesses, hunting outfitters and fishing lodges included, believe that their marketing plan is simply to put up a website and hope for emails and calls. This is not a Marketing Plan. A website is only one component of a Marketing Plan. Let's put the Marketing Plan into some some context. Your business should have a Business Plan, a written description of how to plan to make your business successful. Your business should have a Marketing Plan, that integrates with and supports the Business Plan. Your Marketing Plan should outline the role of your website, as a component of the Marketing Plan.

A Marketing Plan

A simple definition of a Marketing Plan probably helps as well. A marketing plan is a strategic guide that helps businesses map out their advertising and promotional strategies to attract prospective customers and connect with their intended audience. It offers clear and detailed direction on how to achieve business objectives through targeted marketing efforts. [source: AMA]. Now, I'm not going to try and bore us all (me included) with the differences between a Marketing Plan and a Marketing Strategy. Let's just summarize with a Marketing Plan is the actions that you will take to publicize your business, it is the "how-to" part of marketing as opposed to the philosophical "what are we about and why should anyone care".

Marketing Plan Components

All Marketing Plans should be slightly to completely different from each other, as they should represent the Marketing Goals of the business and how the business is going to achieve them.  For the purposes of this article and helping Hunting Outfitters and Fishing Lodges work on their marketing plan, you can break down your Marketing Plan into the following components:

* Marketing Goals
* Target Market
* Marketing Mix
* Budgets
* Schedule

Marketing Goals

Marketing Goals are simple statements that follow a pattern such as "Generate 50 inquiries for summer fishing by May 15th", or "Increase the number of website visitors in 2025 by 15%". A Marketing goal typically has a measureable outcome by a date.  It is the Marketing Goals that will help you decide on your Marketing Mix and your Budgets.

Target Market

If you have been running your outfitting business or your fishing lodge for a number of years, you likely have a pretty good profile of what your current customer base is like.  Age, gender, location, income levels, interests, etc. are all part of defining your target market. One simple strategy to target marketing is simply to define your target market as more of the same. This is a very successful way and leads to a marketing plan that is similar, continuing to do more of the same activities to attract the same type of market. If that is enough to fill up your booking calendar, then that is likely your ideal Marketing Plan. 

If you have some significant holes in your booking calendar, then you may want to think about adding to this target market, looking at the variables of age, gender, location, income levels, interests an deciding which to tweak or expand. This is often referred to as customer profiling or developing buyer personas. For a Marketing Plan intended to create growth, it may be necessary to develop multiple buyer personas. Your existing customer base as one buyer persona, then another buyer persona with some similar gender and location characteristics, but perhaps a younger and a lower income level. Keep in mind that your message to these different personas may need to be different and you may need a different product/service offer for them.

Marketing Mix

Now let's talk a bit about the title of this article, your website. In your Marketing  Plan, in your Business Operations, your ability to change the traditional 4 P's of the Marketing Mix (Price, Product, Place, Promotion) is usually limited to the P of Promotion.  Your Product, such as fly-in fishing, or waterfowl hunting, is not likely to undergo substantial change. Your Pricing is likely a steady component.  Place, where your customers experience your outfitting / guiding services, is pretty consistent year to year. That leaves us with the Promotion element of the mix. Now keep in mind that in the context of the Marketing Plan, Promotion is not exclusively the offering of a sale or a discount, in fact, it is usually not that at all. Promotion is a much broader term consisting of all your communication and sales efforts, including your website, Search Engine Optimization, content development, social media efforts, online advertising, print advertising, TV/radio, tradeshows, email campaigns.

Some of these elements of your Promotional mix, or your media mix, are more productive, when properly executed. Typically these are your website, Search Engine Optimization, content development, social media efforts, online advertising, and email campaigns. The older marketing channels, the traditional marketing channels of the 80's, 90's and 2000's are far overshadowed by the performance of Digital Marketing tactics. Now let's get a little more specific. Your website is likely going to be your most important component of your Promotion Mix, the central element in your Marketing that you drive traffic to, and what will be the tool that converts your traffic from interested browsers to converted leads, people who have reached out to gather more information, via your website forms, phone links, or email links. But it might not be the most expensive part of your budget.

Marketing Budgets

So here is where the Plan, where the Marketing Goals meet up with reality. If you want to attract new customers, you need to spend money. As we mentioned early in this article, a Marketing Plan is not simply to put up a website and hope for emails and calls.   You need to put money and time resources behind your Marketing Plan, in your Marketing Budget. This is a great time to look back at what Marketing activities you have invested in, what those investments have produced, and where you will need to invest to achieve your Marketing Goals.  Sometimes it's easy. Last year we spent $1000 on activity A and we got 100 somethings, so we are going to spend $2000 on activity A and expect to get 200 somethings.  Some others budget amounts are a little harder to put together and may require quotes from suppliers, especially if it's a new activity to support a new Marketing Goal.

Marketing Schedules

Schedules tend to be the element of a Marketing Plan that are least well defined and least top of mind for small businesses.  A Marketing Schedule can also be thought of as a Marketing Calendar and it is the critical link between the Goals, Budgets, and Activities. We highly recommend developing a detailed Marketing Schedule which outlines what activity will occur when, the target audience, and the budget allocation.  This Schedule gives you discipline, the recipe for carrying out a successful year of Marketing.  To be brutally honest, I am a Marketer, so I think Marketing first, it's always on my mind, so this is second nature to me, but for Outfitters and Lodges, it is at best the 10th or 20th thing they thing about that day.  This means you. I know you have much else to do (I used to guide so I have seen it first hand) and each time I spend a few days at an outfitter location, I see the daily routine, and I see very little extra time in it for Marketing. Really, that's the point of a Marketing Schedule, not to force something into a place where it doesn't fit, but to find a place where it does. Perhaps that means you need some additional help to execute your Marketing Plan, to add some expertise to the team to do what you can't or what you don't have time to do. But the Marketing Schedule is also about planning activities to when they are a best fit to your Target Market, to the Marketing Personas that you have developed. Timing your communications to when they are actively looking and booking and when your budget dollars have the most impact.

We suggest a 52 week calendar for your Marketing Schedule, with a detailed description of your Marketing tasks for the week. This should include who is going to do what and what $'s are allocated. If you employ the services of a Marketing Consultant or a Marketing Agency, put the onus on them to produce your Marketing Calendar, but also realize that you have responsibilities as well. For example, the Marketing Calendar may include weekly tasks something like:

* May 26 - 31, 4th week of Spring Bear Hunt, Bob to take images of all trophy bears at the hunt site and at camp and send to Jim for posting on the web site. Jim to post blog article about Week 4 and send email newsletter to all contacts.
* June 2 - 7, 5th week of Spring Bear Hunt, Bob to take images of all trophy bears at the hunt site and at camp and send to Jim for posting on the web site. Jim to post blog article about Week 5 and send email newsletter to all contacts.
* June 9 - 14. Jim to write 2025 Spring Bear Season Wrap Up Blog and send email newsletter to all contacts.

Other listing in the Marketing Calendar may include tasks such as:

* May 2025, $700 Google Ads Campaign to USA Whitetail
* May 2025, $500 Google Ads Campaign to USA Black Bear

The Marketing Schedule is a guide, it is a reminder, and it is a tool to help force your Marketing Activities to occur. The format of the schedule is less important, other than it must have a chronological organization. It can be a simple list, ordered by date.  It can be an electronic online calendar, shared between anyone named in the calendar. It can be a Google Sheets spreadsheet shared to all.  The format should be whatever is most likely to get used what is understood by all.  The key criteria is that it exists and someone is riding herd on the schedule to remind all what tasks are due and what comes next.

Netnotic is Here to Help

We have been doing this for 30+ years, more than 10 of that specifically within the hunting outfitter and fishing lodge industry. Beyond our direct experience building successful digital marketing programs for outfitters and lodges, we also ran the marketing departments for several ABEX award winning companies in Saskatchewan and now we are concentrating our efforts where our own passions lie, in the hunting and fishing industry. So if you are looking for advice, for help in enrolling in the Tourism Saskatchewan MEPP program to help fund your marketing, or just want to talk hunting and fishing marketing, we are glad to offer our time.


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