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Free Planning Tools
Business Growth Planning
Business growth planning can be daunting for many small business owners. There are several tools that can help
you make sure your business growth strategy is realistic and appropriate for your industry. Each of these tools will
help you in key areas as you research how to grow your business and create your strategic plan.
1. Google Analytics
 Every business, regardless of size or stage of growth, should enable and use Google Analytics.
 It’s easy to implement, and it offers all kinds of insights into how your customers are interacting with
your website.
 Google Analytics shows you the current state of affairs and you can also use it as a tool for planning
business growth strategy by setting up goals and seeing what works and what doesn’t.
 Experimenting with the tool will reveal all kinds of information about the buying cycle and your
customer base.
- Where are you losing people?
- Which of your ads are most effective?
 Use this insight to create or alter your current business growth plan.
2. SCORE Templates and Tools
 Offers mentoring services as well as templates and tools that are helpful to anyone creating a
business growth plan.
 The business planning templates are separated into categories based on the stage of growth your
business is in, and the free financial projections template is an easy-to-use Microsoft Excel
workbook. It’s hard enough to plan a business growth strategy without having to worry about Excel
formulas. These business growth tools do the heavy lifting for you.
3. SizeUp
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One of the most challenging parts of writing a business growth plan is determining where you
stand in the industry.
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Compares your business to local competitors, so you can make realistic projections about where
your company will be in the next five or ten years.
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It also displays geographical areas with many potential customers but little competition, so you
can decide where to target your marketing and expansion efforts. It’s easy to use and provides
useful information that can be difficult to collect otherwise.
www.CBMBusinessConsulting.com (804) 467-1179[email protected]
© 2016, CBM Business Consulting, LLC
Marketing Planning Tools
1. Freemind -free mind-mapping software. It’s great for sparking inspiration and brainstorming; use it to
record all your great marketing ideas. Freemind can offer a bird’s eye view of your marketing strategy and
also help you identify opportunities or marketing gaps you need to fill.
2. B2B Marketing Budget Planning Tool assists with marketing automation, this free B2B Marketing
Budget Planning Tool incorporates key planning statistics from Forrester top performer B2B budget
allocation and Marketing Sherpa benchmarks to help you manage your marketing budget – a major
component of your marketing plan.
3. Free Marketing Budget Templates - HubSpot offers a set of eight free marketing budget templates you
can use to develop your marketing budget. The templates take into account multiple marketing budget
considerations, including:
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events
branding and creative
content
paid advertising
product marketing
public relations
website redesign
4. Marketing Plan Now - is a full-featured site that lets you create a complete marketing plan for free. Not
only does the site let you make your marketing plan, it provides free training resources to help you
develop an intelligent, insightful, and accurate marketing plan. Once you’ve created your marketing plan,
you can keep it to yourself or you can share it with the MarketingPlanNow community.
5. One Page Marketing Plans - Not everyone wants or needs comprehensive, hundred-page marketing
plans. That’s the premise behind two one page marketing plans offered by Small Business Trends.
www.CBMBusinessConsulting.com (804) 467-1179[email protected]
© 2016, CBM Business Consulting, LLC