The questions that come before the plan

The guide opens with four. What need does your product or service satisfy. Who and where are the customers for that. How do you reach them. Do you plan to export or import.

Write your answers down before you look at any data. They will be guesses, and that is what makes them useful: a written guess can be disproved, which is the purpose of the resources below. An unwritten one becomes an assumption you spend money on. Be specific about who. A market is a group you can describe, find and reach.

Where to check your assumptions

The guide names a set of them. The U.S. Census Bureau offers free training and workshops on how to use its large data sets, which matters because the data is only useful once you can navigate it. The Governor’s Office of Economic Development, the Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance and the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District each run data portals. The Business Services Group at UNR and the Center for Business and Economic Research at UNLV provide business information services. The guide also suggests your local chamber of commerce.

Be clear what this material can do. Data tells you how many people of a given kind live in a given place and how that is changing. It does not tell you any of them will buy from you. Use it to size an opportunity and to rule things out, then go and talk to people.

• U.S. Census Bureau
• Census Academy — free training
• Census surveys and programs
• Census data tools
• Data library, Governor’s Office of Economic Development
• Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance data portal
• Las Vegas-Clark County Library District
• Henderson Libraries
• Nevada Grow
• Business Services Group, UNR
• Center for Business and Economic Research, UNLV

The six things a marketing plan should identify

The guide gives a structure, adapted from information provided by the Las Vegas office of the Nevada Small Business Development Center. Your plan should identify six things: your mission or vision statement, your company objective, your market environment, your target customers, your competition and how they match up to you, and your action plan.

The action plan is about media mix: which media tools best reach your target customers, and what your advertising, public relations and sales strategies are. The guide says research and analysis are critical here, and that your own insight matters too. Ask intelligent questions, be open to facts different from what you expected, and adjust accordingly.

Separately it lists what to keep in focus: your business goal, your customer and audience, your marketing budget, your unique selling proposition, your tools and tactics, and how you will measure outcomes. The last is most often left off, and without it the rest cannot be corrected.

Then it hedges its own structure, in words worth reproducing exactly. The plan is only a guide. Free publicity is as good as paid publicity. Change things that don’t work. And the customer experience is everything. Alongside this material the guide prints a phone number for the Las Vegas SBDC office, 800-240-7094.

• Nevada Small Business Development Center

Positioning, in the guide’s terms

The guide treats positioning as something that comes out of your own understanding of the defining characteristics of what you sell, rather than something invented in a meeting. Its phrase is to transform your passion into a market position. It names five primary elements: pricing, quality, customer service, distribution and packaging. Notice that price sits inside that list. Customers read it as a claim about quality whether you meant it that way or not.

The guide is blunt about skipping this. In its words, you must define your product or service or a competitor will do it for you.

Tools, and why the guide hedges about them

The guide notes that the tools and techniques of marketing are changing, that new technologies and social media are leading many businesses to rethink traditional approaches, and that while traditional methods may still work, other situations require new thinking.

Take that hedge literally rather than as a nudge toward social media. The right channel is wherever your customers already are, which your research answers and a trade article cannot.

• Bain — marketing in the 21st century
• Moz — beginner’s guide to social media
• Moz — beginner’s guide to SEO
• Product-market fit is the only thing that matters
• American Marketing Association
• American Marketing Association — Las Vegas chapter
• American Marketing Association — Reno-Tahoe chapter
• American Advertising Federation
• Public Relations Society of America

If you intend to export or import

Skip this section if you do not. It is a separate discipline with its own agencies and rules, not something to take up casually.

The guide says federal, state and local resources are available to help, and that Nevada is home to two foreign trade zones, two ports of entry and two export assistance centers. Start with the USA.gov page, then move to the specific links depending on what you want to do. We summarize none of the rules here. Nothing on tariffs, licenses, restricted goods, documentation or timescales appears on this page, because a confident paraphrase of a customs rule is what gets a shipment held.

• USA.gov — import and export
• International Trade Administration
• ITA — export solutions, advice and tools
• ITA research center
• ITA — regulations and agreements
• U.S. Commercial Service, Las Vegas
• U.S. Commercial Service, Reno
• Foreign Trade Zone 126, northern Nevada
• Foreign Trade Zone 89, southern Nevada
• Export-Import Bank of the U.S.
• Nevada District Export Council
• U.S. Customs and Border Protection
• Guide for commercial importers
• Nevada ports of entry

What people get wrong

Writing the plan before doing the research, so it becomes a well-organized record of the assumptions nobody tested.

Describing the market as everyone, when the figure that matters is the much smaller one you can reach and serve.

Picking a channel and calling it a strategy. Being on a platform is not a plan for reaching the people on it.

Leaving off how you will measure outcomes, which is on the guide’s own focus list and is what tells you which spending worked.

Treating the plan as fixed, or assuming paid beats free. The guide says the plan is only a guide and that free publicity is as good as paid publicity.

What this page does not tell you

It publishes no marketing budgets, benchmarks, conversion rates or costs, and no statement about what any of the listed organizations charges. The one thing the state guide describes as free is Census Bureau training and workshops, and that is the only free claim made above. Ask everyone else directly.

It contains no export or import rules: nothing on tariffs, licenses, restricted goods, documentation, thresholds or timescales, and no detail on the foreign trade zones or ports of entry beyond the guide’s own links. Those are questions for the agencies listed, and getting one wrong stops a shipment.

The phone number given for the Las Vegas SBDC office is the one printed in the April 2026 guide. Contact details change and we have not verified it independently.

Several of the linked articles are published by commercial media and trade bodies rather than by the state. They appear here because the state guide lists them.

Source: Nevada Business Startup Guide (April 2026), Topic 14 — Nevada Department of Business and Industry. Checked 2026-07-28.