Understanding and Writing a Marketing Plan: 8 Tips & Strategies
Understanding and Writing a Marketing Plan: 8 Tips and Strategies
As a small business owner, you’re constantly thinking about ways to attract and engage your audience and promote your products/services. But with so many traditional and digital marketing tactics to choose from, it can be difficult to decide where to focus your marketing efforts and resources.
The good news is that a marketing plan can help. In this guide, we explain what a marketing plan is and how to write one—we also provide a marketing plan template that you can personalize with your local business’ information.
What is a marketing plan?
A marketing plan is a detailed roadmap of the marketing channels your business will use to promote your products or services, your goals for those marketing channels, and how you’ll measure success.
Why should you write a marketing plan?
A marketing plan is crucial to your success—it explains which marketing efforts your business will deploy to help your business achieve its objectives. It streamlines and focuses your marketing efforts so the materials you produce and the campaigns and ads you run move your team closer to their goals.
A marketing plan also clarifies how your marketing efforts will be measured. Lastly, it’s worth prioritizing creating a marketing plan because it creates a competitive advantage for the business.
Here are some more benefits of writing a marketing plan:
1. Understand your business on a deeper level.
A marketing plan requires you to review your business’ mission and goals, market position, competition, and buyer persona profiles. This information gives you and your team a deeper understanding of your business as well as an opportunity to uncover any areas that need updating.
The result of this review is that you now have the necessary level of understanding to identify which marketing activities make the most sense for your business to focus on through your marketing plan. By organizing your marketing tactics around real business insights, your plan will ultimately be much more effective.
2. Gain valuable insights into your audience.
Not every marketing tactic works well for every business. What you should be producing depends on your target audience and customers.
What will grab their attention? Why will they choose your business over others? Which steps can you take to turn them into loyal fans?
Shape your marketing plan around your current customers and buyer personas to improve the likelihood of getting the marketing results you’re hoping for. From here, you can test any hypotheses you have regarding what will work for your audience and iterate in the future based on your learnings.
3. Prioritize your work more effectively.
It’s no secret that there’s a plethora of tactics you can use when trying to scale your local business. But you can’t try all of them—nor should you. Your marketing plan allows you to identify the most promising tactics that you can then prioritize. This ensures you have a realistic number of strategies that your team can stay committed to testing over a period of time.
4. Improve your team’s decision-making process.
With a clear marketing plan that enables comprehensive monitoring and measuring of current and past marketing efforts, you can make informed decisions. And the more detailed the tracking and monitoring, the easier it will be to make decisions about what marketing tactics to continue, iterate upon, or discontinue.
What are the components and sections of a marketing plan?
Effective marketing plans detail marketing goals, strategies, and activities and how they relate to the overarching aims of the business. So when you create your marketing plan, make sure to include these key components. Here’s some more detail:
1. Marketing Objectives
The foundation of any marketing plan is your objectives. What do you want to achieve through your marketing efforts and why? Your marketing objectives help you determine which traditional and digital marketing platforms are used, the content produced, and so on.
For example, maybe your business objective is brand awareness so the marketing objectives listed in your plan focus on top-of-funnel activities that bring audience members to your website or Google Business profile.
2. Current Marketing Strategies
Marketing is often an experimentation process that entails trying different tactics, seeing what impact they have, and using that information to refine and improve the success of your efforts. So outline the marketing strategies that are currently in use. This data is key when thinking about your marketing plan because it helps you determine where to start.
You should also take into consideration the platforms that are currently being used, the type of content being created, organic and inorganic advertising efforts, and the metrics gathered from current and prior campaigns.
3. Market Research
The more you know about your business and your industry, the easier it will be to market yourself to potential customers. How are other companies in your industry leveraging marketing strategies? How does your business compare? What differences do you see between your pricing, features, and services and your competitors? This is when performing a competitive analysis is helpful.
Don’t forget to also analyze your own business—not just your competitors. Perform a SWOT analysis to understand your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
4. Target Market
Your buyer personas and target market tell you exactly where to focus your marketing efforts, which keywords you should prioritize, what marketing trends your business should leverage, and more. So, include a detailed description of your customer base in your marketing plan to keep them at the center of all of your decisions and tactics.
5. Campaigns and Strategies to Implement
With content marketing, email marketing, social media campaigns, search engine optimization, advertising, and more, there are a lot of different marketing and campaign types to choose from. But by filling out the above sections in detail, you can make informed decisions about the marketing campaigns and strategies worth implementing.
Defining what it is you’re trying to achieve, who you are trying to attract, what’s going on in the wider market, and the success of current marketing strategies helps whittle down the marketing efforts you should use.
6. KPIs
Refer to your marketing objectives to identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll want to target. For example, if you’re trying to identify KPIs for the social media tactics used within your marketing plan, center your KPIs on metrics related to the specific platforms you’re using such as Likes, comments, or impressions.
7. Budget
After plotting your marketing activities and associated metrics, calculate the estimated cost of these efforts. For example, paid ad spending, analytic tools for tracking, and freelance budgets are just some examples of costs that you’ll want to account for.
How to Write a Marketing Plan in 8 Steps
Here’s a step-by-step guide for writing a marketing plan that delivers the results your local business is looking for.
1. Define your business’s mission and objectives.
Every business has an overarching goal or goals—the reason the business exists in the first place and what it’s working towards. Write down what this means for your business in your marketing plan—it’ll serve as a guiding light when making all decisions related to your marketing efforts.
2. State realistic goals.
Those overarching goals can then be broken down into specific marketing goals. What are you looking to achieve through marketing campaigns?
There are two traps that businesses are at risk of falling into at this point. Either setting goals that are too ambitious or not ambitious enough.
If the goals are too ambitious, it’s unlikely they will be met and the team is being set up to fail. On the other hand, if the goals aren’t ambitious enough, the marketing team won’t fulfill their full potential because they aren’t being pushed to achieve more. Find a balance that makes sense for your local business.
3. Determine the best KPIs.
Now it’s time to create relevant key performance indicators that will guide your marketing team toward success. For example, each digital marketing channel has its own metrics that usually relate to outreach, engagement, and conversion. Decide which metrics will be monitored for each platform to measure your success.
4. Identify your ideal customer and buyer persona.
Once your business goals and KPIs have been outlined, create a picture of your ideal customer by creating buyer persona profiles that represent each of your main customer segments. Include relevant demographic information, buying behaviors, challenges, reasons for converting, and any other relevant information.
5. Detail and diversify your strategies.
Now, decisions can be made about the strategies that you’ll leverage. Detail the marketing campaigns and activities you’ll use. Remember not to put all your eggs in one basket. A diverse marketing plan is a more reliable one. Utilizing a range of marketing channels will help you attract your ideal customer, meet your targets, and learn as much as possible about your audience.
6. Create a clear budget.
Your marketing budget is a deciding factor in the potential marketing efforts that can be implemented. A clear budget puts clear parameters on marketing activity, particularly the balance between organic campaigns and advertising campaigns.
Organic efforts like SEO and content marketing tend to take more time to garner results. Although, when done well over time, they may see better results than paid campaigns. They’re also largely free. Meanwhile, paid ads may see quicker results but require consistent use of your budget.
7. Look at your competitors.
Differentiating your marketing tactics from others in your market is critical. That’s why it’s essential to know what your competitors are doing so you can fill the gaps. This may entail working to establish a new marketing channel or targeting keywords a competitor’s website isn’t ranking for. It may also mean building your marketing message around a feature, benefit, or audience segment that differs from that of your competitors.
8. Define what you won’t be doing and why.
Your marketing plan is your roadmap for the marketing tactics the business will utilize. Define your reasoning for moving forward with certain marketing tactics as well as your reasoning for not using others. Explain how your chosen marketing tactics support the business’ mission and goals. By justifying what you are and aren’t doing, and providing data-backed reasoning, you can more easily get company buy-in.
Types of Marketing Plans
Next, let’s take a look at some commonly-used types of marketing plans.
1. Growth Marketing Plan
If you own a local business that just opened, your marketing plan is going to be focused on growth. A new business focused on accelerating its growth is more likely to experiment with different marketing tactics and take risks when working to attract more prospects and leads, and ultimately expand the base of customers.
2. Social Media Marketing Plan
By working through the process of detailing your business’s mission and objectives, marketing goals, market research, and customer personas, you may find that social media is where you want to invest the majority of your marketing efforts. This may entail an organic and paid strategy on social media across a couple or several platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
3. New Product Launch Marketing Plan
Marketing plans can guide your business for a quarter, half, or full year. The key is knowing when to use short, medium, or long-term marketing plans. For example, short-term marketing plans are especially beneficial for new product launches, where the focus is on introducing a new product to the customer base instead of the usual promotion of the whole offer suite. Marketing strategies may then vary throughout the different stages of the product launch to build anticipation for the release date.
4 Inspiring Marketing Plan Examples
If the idea of creating a marketing plan is completely new to you, don’t panic. We’ve compiled some examples of what they look like to inspire the creation of yours.
1. Social Media Marketing Plan Example
This social media marketing plan outlines the platforms that will be used, the activities involved in marketing on these platforms, the budget for the paid campaigns, and the benefits that may result from marketing on each platform. It makes expectations clear for the marketing team in both execution and monitoring.
2. Hospitality Marketing Plan Example
Enhancing digital marketing strategy doesn’t just improve online sales but it can drive in-person traffic too. So here’s an example of what a hospitality business’ marketing plan could look like with the main goal of increasing cafe sales within a certain time period. It includes ways to get a brand message across including social media, email marketing, and print marketing. This gives the campaign a greater chance of success. The chosen measurements are also effective in ensuring prospects who are being attracted are quality leads.
3. Retail Marketing Plan Example
If you own a retail business, a marketing plan can increase the volume of sales you close each month. This example surfaces business documents and data that should be referenced when creating a retail marketing plan. It acknowledges unique aspects of running a retail store such as referencing product demand performance.
4. Healthcare Marketing Plan Example
This healthcare marketing plan maps the process of developing, executing, and reviewing the marketing plan. It sets dates and milestones to ensure no steps are forgotten.
5. Content Marketing Plan Example
In this content marketing plan example, you can tailor your marketing to different segments, adapting the content produced, the channel it’s posted on, and the metrics monitored to that specific buyer persona. This makes your marketing efforts more effective because you’re targeting one type of customer at a time instead of attempting to appeal to every customer at once.
Marketing Plan Template
Start writing your marketing plan with our template to help your local business achieve its goals and improve online reputation and customer communication.
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