How to Create a Marketing Plan

What is the purpose of a marketing plan? How can it help you grow your business? A marketing plan is a business document outlining your marketing strategy for your business. It is focused over a specific period of time and includes your business your marketing goals, current position, a timeline of when you want to achieve your goals, target market, and costs. By having a marketing plan in place, it will allow you to easily understand how your business is going to meet its objectives, gives you clarity about who your market is, helps you create compelling content that will generate results and provide focus and direction. It should be checked regularly to ensure your business stays on track.   

How to create a marketing plan… 

• Summary of Business 
• Target Market 
• Marketing Goals 
• Marketing Strategy 
• Cost 
• Evaluation 

Summary of Business 

At the start of your marketing plan, you want to give an outline of your business. What is your product or service? What’s working well and what challenges are you facing? How are you generating leads? What are you currently doing for your marketing? It’s important to ensure you cover all of these points to get a thorough and well-descripted plan in place. 

In addition to this, you want to clearly state how your business is performing now. In order to measure the effectiveness of your marketing plan in the future, you want to know exactly how your business was beforehand. Put together a marketing audit as you will be able to analyse data, and build a stronger strategy.  

Target Market 

Understanding your target market is a crucial element that shouldn’t be overlooked. You want to clearly know who your audience is, and how to find them. Creating a buyer persona will allow you and your team members to know your ideal customer. Determining your target market allows you to focus your marketing efforts in the most effective way possible. Understanding the needs of consumers is essential. The majority of businesses will have a few types of customers, therefore it’s important to create a buyer persona for each and you will be able to better segment your marketing campaigns and set separate goals. When putting together your buyer persona, take into consideration demographics such as age, gender, location, etc. – as this will give you a better understanding.  

Marketing Goals  

This is one of the most important parts of your marketing plans. You want to make sure your goals are as clear and detailed as possible. Setting vague goals will lead to vague results. By having specific goals, you will be able to measure the effectiveness of your marketing plan. When writing your goals, consider website traffic, conversions and customer success. Outline figures, percentages and timelines you want to hit them as this will make your goals even more thorough and measurable. 

Marketing Strategy 

In this part of the process, you will be outlining exactly how you aim to achieve your goals. What marketing strategies are you going to utilise to reach your objectives? What tools are you going to use? Going through each goal, outline which marketing strategy you are going to use to achieve this. Use your target market to help you identify what strategies to use. Where can you find your market? For example, if you’re targeting young people, social media marketing on Instagram would be a great way to attract potential customers. 

Cost 

Understanding your financial information and coming up with a budget is crucial. You want to ensure you can afford to undertake all your chosen marketing strategies. So, in this section put together a budget for your marketing so you clearly know how much you can spend. 

Evaluation 

Lastly, you want to close your marketing plan by putting together an explanation of how you plan on tracking and measuring your results. Take into consideration what you plan to track, how you plan to track your results, and how often. It’s important to regularly track your results so you can measure your marketing effectiveness and improve your strategy if need be. 

Let’s wrap this up… 

Putting together a marketing plan is a lengthy process. There are many things that need to be taken into consideration. It’s vital that you ensure your plan is as detailed and clear as possible as you will be continuously looking through it to make sure your business is staying in line with it. If you need a hand with a marketing plan, get in touch with a team member today.