No matter how committed you are to the plan, things will go wrong. As U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”
What is a Marketing Plan?
A marketing plan is the strategy that businesses use to present their products or services to target customers.
How to Create a Realistic Marketing Plan
Writing an Executive Summary
The executive summary is the first page of the marketing plan, summarizing the document you will present. It can be considered like a promotional message summarizing the essential information from the plan, including:
- Business Details: Company name and location. The products or services offered. Include any special features or competitive advantages or customer favorite products that you will rely on for your marketing efforts.
- Mission Statement: What is the overall goal you are trying to achieve with the business? Why does it exist? Summarize it in one sentence, and you will have a mission statement to guide everything you do, including your marketing strategies. For example, YETI’s mission statement is “Build the cooler we use every day if it existed.”
- Marketing Goals: What are you trying to achieve with your marketing plan? Create short- and long-term business goals related to financial metrics such as revenue growth, customer retention, or bringing in new customers.
- Budget and Forecasts: If you plan to spend $40,000 on marketing over the next year, how much revenue will you generate? If you are preparing a marketing plan for a large or public company, this is what shareholders really want to see. Marketing Team: Who is responsible for this marketing plan? Which team members will execute it? What is their experience in marketing?
While the executive summary is the first item on our list, it should actually be the last component you create in the entire marketing plan. This is because the research process for the marketing plan can give you valuable insights to use in the executive summary. You can also copy and summarize some elements of the executive summary from your business plan.
Conducting Market Research
One of the mistakes marketers make when creating a marketing plan is rushing in with assumptions. The end result is a marketing strategy that doesn’t actually lead to revenue.
When it comes to data, every assumption is another uncertainty that you incorporate into your marketing goals. If a great plan has a 40% chance of holding up in real-world scenarios, it can hold up 10% of the time without much rigor and a lot of assumptions. Is that what it’s worth planning for?
Explore the data you already have about your customer base in this section by investigating marketing analytics, social media audience insights, and customer surveys. It tells you who you are trying to reach—and, more importantly, the motivations that will make them buy your product over your competitor’s.
Consult your customer segments and buyer personas to gather as much information as possible about the person buying your products, from demographics (location, age, income level) to the channels they use to discover new products.
Be careful not to confuse this with your target audience. Children will be the target audience for a toy brand; parents are the buyer persona.
Finally, conduct a SWOT analysis to uncover your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats compared to your competitors. Remember your unique selling points. Tailor your marketing plan around the key points you derive from them.
Building a Marketing Strategy
This section of the marketing plan outlines the specific campaigns and tactics you will use to spread the word. You can break the marketing strategy down into four parts: marketing channels, formats, messaging, and budget.
1.
Marketing Channels
Channels are the platforms you will use as part of your marketing plan. Refer back to your market research and discover the online and other channels your target audience uses for shopping, entertainment, or inspiration.
Some of the most popular channels for online businesses include:
- Social media. 6 out of 10 people use social media. Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest help brands reach their target audience.
- Search engines. Half of online shoppers start their research on search engines. By making search engine optimization (SEO) a part of your marketing plan, you can generate new business by reaching people when they are actively searching for your products or services.
- Email and SMS marketing. Email inboxes and text messages are among the most important places for marketing to reach target customers directly, provided they have opted in to receive updates from you.
- Podcasts. Record conversations you have with your team, customers, or industry experts and share them with your audience. By establishing yourself or your brand as a reference in your industry, you will inspire trust, which in turn builds confidence in your products.
- Offline channels. While digital marketing is crucial in today’s world, offline and personal marketing efforts can be equally powerful. Be present in front of people when they are not online, using channels like word-of-mouth referrals, radio advertising, billboards, and television ads.
As part of your marketing plan, determine whether you intend to use each channel organically or amplify it with advertising. Most channels allow businesses to run sponsored content, which ensures access to your target market through online channels and others, such as door-to-door sales, social media, television, billboards, radio, and more.
There is a delicate balance to the number of channels you should include in your marketing plan. If you go overboard and burn resources on channels with poor returns. But if you become overly reliant on a single channel, you are at risk.
The algorithms of most digital marketing channels operate. They are lauded as a kind of technology that provides personalized experiences for users, but any changes to an algorithm can render marketing plans useless overnight.
Take Facebook as an example. Initially, brands invested heavily in increasing their follower count on Facebook. Marketers were assured they would reach their brand followers whenever they posted new content on their business page. But Facebook altered its algorithm to force more brands to pay for ads.
If you rely on search engine optimization, any algorithm updates could reduce your income for months before you recover. If you depend on paid advertising, any changes in privacy policies might cut your revenues. If you rely on email marketing, any changes in ESP policies can lower your income. Diversifying your acquisition is crucial in the fast-paced world of digital marketing.
Shoe brand Hippy Feet is one online brand that failed to diversify its channels. Sam Harper, co-founder and CEO of Hippy Feet, says, “The original marketing plan was to drive traffic to our Shopify store through ads – heavily relying on paid traffic from Facebook and Instagram.” “While this is still a key part of our marketing strategy, the declining effectiveness of these ads forced us to expand our marketing efforts.
Considered
Marketing strategy diversification is crucial for helping online businesses survive in this highly dynamic market. By driving traffic through search engine optimization, email, and media coverage, we become more resilient and less affected by changes in a single technological platform’s algorithm that can be harmful to us.
2. Formats
For each channel, identify the formats you will use to capture attention and drive traffic to your website. These can include:
- Audio. Reach podcast and radio listeners with audio content.
- Images. Attract visual learners and shoppers on image-dominated social media platforms with infographics, GIFs, and memes.
- Video. Get listed on YouTube, the second-largest search engine in the world, with tutorial videos and product showcases. Most social media platforms – including Instagram and TikTok – are also evolving to focus on video content.
- Written content. Most search engine results retrieve links to optimized written content, such as blogs, copy, or landing pages.
Content marketing is a beast that requires continuous feeding. Customers want fresh, exciting, and engaging content regularly. This is highly demanding for small businesses to keep up with.
If this seems unsustainable, leverage a content marketing strategy that incorporates user-generated content (UGC) from current customers. The more they share their experiences with others, the more content you have to reuse across every channel. It’s an effective way to expand your marketing plan and extend the editorial calendar if your marketing department has limited resources.
Do you have enough time to invest in promoting the content you create? Partner with well-known influencers in your industry – those whose loyal audience overlaps with your target market. Ask them to distribute the content on your behalf. Your marketing campaigns will not only reach their loyal audience, but their recommendation from someone your ideal customer trusts will go a long way in building brand awareness and credibility.
3. Messaging
No matter the channels and formats listed in your marketing plan, you must be consistent across all of them. Mixed messages about what you sell and what your brand stands for will only confuse potential customers.
A simple way to improve your messaging is to become more of something than anyone else. For example, Costco is cheaper than its competitors. Harper Wilde products are comfier than any other bra vendor. Look for the marketing channels each vendor uses, and you’ll see messaging that revolves around their descriptive quality.
If you’re unsure what descriptive quality your value proposition should be, consult your customers. Research is the bulk of any copywriting process. Poll people who have already bought from you, conduct an Instagram survey to find out why people follow your brand, and refer back to your SWOT analysis to see your competitors’ weaknesses. Look for qualities that emerge frequently throughout the process.
You may have the best mattress in the world – made of 100 springs and cotton stitching, rigorously tested by sleep experts. But you will struggle to market it if you lean heavily on detailed product features. Customers care more about getting a good night’s sleep than the specific specifications of the product.
“Every great marketing plan needs one thing first: a product ten times better than the others,” says Nick Saltarelli, co-founder of Mid-Day Squares. “Once you have that, marketing is about deep human connections.”
Nick: “It was clear there was a sensitive point between them: the people who want to follow the developments and the true perspective of building a massive chocolate trading operation from scratch.”
As a result, Mid-Day Squares’ marketing plan does not prioritize promoting the product. Instead, “we focus on making people fall in love with us, the founders, to expand the human connection,” says Nick. “We use all available social media channels to depict and share small reality-like segments daily of all the obstacles, successes, and developments we’re experiencing as a company. We focus less on the product and more on telling interesting stories about how Mid-Day Squares is built.”
4. Budget
The marketing budget is the amount of cash you expect to spend executing your marketing plan. If you are working with a limited budget, you can run a budget-friendly marketing plan.
Terry Anne Thornton, founder of The Tur-Shirt Company, says, “I apply for any competitions, media opportunities, or awards to make my small company known at any available opportunity.”
The strategy has been successful: The Tur-Shirt Company won the Junior Design Award for Best Newcomer in Fashion and received praise from media mogul Steven Bartlett after participating in the #DeserveToBeFound competition with Facebook.
Terry Anne says, “I focus on those known to your target market to build credibility.” “Additionally, most awards I apply for are free or low-cost; they just require some investment of time and creativity to participate. My USP for its target market – that my children’s clothing products are unique – proves itself without investing thousands of dollars in advertising.”
While you can run a strategy with minimal or no budget, this section of the marketing plan should include more than any planned advertising expenditure. Time is a resource that needs to be managed and accounted for. Be sure to detail how much time you intend to spend executing your marketing strategy.
Setting Goals and Measuring Performance
Regarding investment, the final stage of the marketing plan is detailing how to measure success. Most often, we measure it using return on investment (ROI) – the revenue you expect to achieve after spending your marketing budget.
It’s every marketer’s dream to generate $100,000 in sales from $1,000 in marketing spend. While this isn’t the most realistic expectation, knowing your targeted ROI will prevent you from overspending. If your ROI exceeds your expectations, you can better direct that budget for implementation elsewhere.
But there is more to measuring marketing than the monetary return. Revenue is not always the ultimate goal. Brand awareness, website traffic, and social media followers are short-term marketing goals aimed at bringing new people into your marketing channel. If you succeed in this early on, you’ll set your business up for success later.
Let’s look at some key performance indicators (KPIs) to consider while creating a marketing plan based on the stage of the channel you’re targeting. Top of the funnel (TOFU)
People at the top of your marketing funnel don’t understand who you are or what you sell. Social media, podcasts, and video content play a big role here. Each of these channels is used by potential customers who are looking to learn or find inspiration.
For this stage, rely on metrics that give insight into how people are engaging with top-of-the-funnel content, such as:
- Number of page views
- Number of video views
- Website clicks
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Cost
- Click-through rate (CPC)
Middle of the Funnel (MOFU)
People reach the middle of the funnel when they know they have a problem that needs solving. Given the channels and formats you use to target these individuals, they are mostly search engines and targeted ads.
Google Analytics is your best bet here. While the dashboard can seem overwhelming to many, especially with its shift to Google Analytics 4 (GA4), you don’t need to look at every report in it. Use the following metrics to see how people are interacting with your middle funnel content:
- Bounce rate
- Pages per session
- Users by traffic source
- Email subscriber conversion rate
To track the data above, especially for ad campaigns, add the Meta pixel to all pages of your store.
Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU)
Are you trying to persuade your audience to make a purchase? For marketing messages that have the sole purpose of converting your audience into paying customers, look to the backend of your e-commerce store. It’s where you’ll find sales and product data to help you understand if your marketing plan is working, such as:
- Cart conversion rate
- Average order value (AOV)
- Number of orders
- Sales conversion rate
After the Funnel
Are you planning to build a steady stream of paying customers based on your marketing plan? It’s easy to assume that revenue growth comes from audience growth. But often, the easiest way to increase your revenue is to focus on the people we tend to forget: existing customers.
Avoid vanity by focusing on shiny performance indicators like social media followers and YouTube subscribers. Instead, engage existing customers in your marketing plan. Use them as a source of testimonials and word-of-mouth referrals.
Chris Campbell, a partner at The Charming Bench Company, says, “We asked for more reviews from satisfied customers.” “We’ve been able to make them more vocal about their experiences rather than focusing on promotional content or paid ads as our top investment priorities.”
According to Chris, “Happy customers were incredibly powerful in spreading the word about our brand, and we had a steady stream of five-star reviews on websites and social media, which we share on our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram pages. It’s a great alternative to pushing loud sales messages that don’t always work.”
Marketing Plan Templates to Help Get Started
Creating your own marketing plan is no small feat. You’ll spend hours researching competitors, audience demographics, and the channels most likely to have the biggest impact on your marketing goals. You can check out marketing plan examples, but when it comes to crafting your own, you can save time by using a template.
Eliminate the daunting blank screen by creating a marketing plan within a free marketing plan template such as the following templates.
- Marketing Plan Template from the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA)
- Marketing Plan Template from G2
- Marketing Plan Template from Monday.com
No matter which template you use, remember that not every online business needs a long, complex marketing plan. A lifestyle business founder may need an executive summary about the team involved in turning the plan into action. Similarly, a publicly listed company will need to expand its goals and measurement section to gain approval from thousands of shareholders. Customize any free marketing plan template based on the sections you need or don’t need.
Tips
To create your marketing plan
Keep the
Source: https://shopify.com/blog/marketing-plan
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