Whether you’re managing a small business or a big company, a marketing plan is vital for all industries. This strategy guides your organization in meeting its marketing goals and objectives. Without this high-level guide, your company’s marketing strategy will be in a costly shamble.
Contents
What is a Good Marketing Plan?
A good business marketing plan is a document that outlines the company’s strategies for the month, quarter, or year. It includes the following elements:
- Business Summary: This executive summary features the company’s name, its headquarters, and its mission statement. It should also include an analysis of the organization’s strengths and weaknesses.
- Business Initiatives: This should include marketing-specific projects, their goals, and how you plan on measuring their effectiveness or success.
- Target Audience: This part requires market research to determine the buyers who will buy your products and services.
- Market Strategy: This includes information on how you plan on approaching your customers. It should include the 7 Ps of marketing – product, price, place, promotion, people, process, and physical evidence.
- Budget: This sets a financial cap on how much you are willing to spend on marketing strategies.
- Marketing Channels: This is where you identify the channels that can help bring your marketing plan to fruition. It could range from renting ad spaces to running campaigns on social media channels, such as Facebook or Instagram.
How Do You Write a Good Marketing Plan?
Ready to create your marketing plan? Here’s a quick 5-step guide to get you started:
Step 1: Analyze the Situation
Before you create a marketing plan, you need to be aware of the business situation. This can be done with a SWOT analysis, which details your organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Another thing you need to do is competitor analysis. This can help you understand the present market and how your company performs compared to another business. This will also help you determine the products or services that could help you infiltrate the market.
When you do this part, always think about the product or service that is far more superior than yours. At the same time, you should analyze your competitor’s shortcomings and how you can take advantage of this.
Knowing what sets your business apart will help you create a viable strategy.
Step 2: Determine Your Target Market
Now that you have evaluated your company and your competition, it’s time to identify your potential customers.
You can do this by discovering buyer personas through market research. With this, you can create a customer profile according to gender, age, and income.
Apart from identifying these demographics, it’s important to include your clients’ pain points and goals in your marketing plan. Knowing such concerns will help you introduce the best product and service available.
Step 3: List Down Your Goals
A marketing plan is useless if it doesn’t have a list of goals. They shouldn’t be haphazardly written, too.
To succeed, your goals need to be SMART – specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
- Specific: refers to the tasks you wish to accomplish and the actions you need to take to meet them.
- Measurable: it’s all about answering the questions, “how much?” and “how well?”
- Achievable: ensures that you have the necessary skills and resources to accomplish the task.
- Relevant: makes sure that the objectives are aligned with the company’s broader goals.
- Time-bound: includes the time frame you need to follow to achieve your goals.
Step 4: Take a Look at Your Tactics
Now that you have your target market and goals listed, you need to work on the tactics that will help you accomplish such objectives. You need to keep in mind the appropriate channels and the things you need to do to meet such goals.
For example, if you aim to improve your social media marketing metrics, you need to outline the specific tasks to help you achieve this. With Instagram and Facebook, you can reach your goals by responding timely to comments, posting regularly, and hosting a giveaway promo.
Step 5: Set a Budget
While it’s easy to formulate tactics, you need to be mindful of your budget.
So, while you outline your marketing activities, you have to designate a budget for each. Apart from that, it’s also important to determine how much time you plan on allotting for these tactics.
How much budget should you include in your marketing plan? This depends on the nature of your company.
As a rule of thumb, B2B companies should allocate about 2-5% of their revenues, while B2C companies should spend more at 5-10%. These are mere recommendations, though, so the final allocation is still up to you.
True enough, writing spectacular marketing plans is essential for any business. Just like the many successful conglomerates before you, you can plan your marketing well simply by following the tips above.
Shirley is a content writer at KitelyTech, who has written on a technology, from Jewellery to SEO Software. In her free time, she enjoys dancing, sketching, cooking, and shopping.
