7 tips for creating a business marketing plan
- A marketing plan identifies your target audience, the most effective channels to engage with them, and the analytical insights that guide future strategy.
- Businesses need a comprehensive marketing plan to coordinate their marketing campaigns and properly measure their impact.
- Marketing is a cumulative effort, and a unified plan maximizes the value of each campaign toward a cohesive strategy.
- This article is for small business owners looking to craft an effective marketing plan that will drive higher engagement and drive business growth.
There are few documents that rival the importance of a business plan, which outlines the path to success for your business. An essential part of this plan is your marketing strategy, one of many small sketches that come together to form the whole vision.
Because this strategy is just one piece of a larger puzzle and requires a heavier investment for less immediate results, you may not be giving marketing the attention it deserves. However, a well-thought-out marketing strategy can reveal opportunities through new audience segments, changes in pricing strategy, or by differentiating your brand from the competition.
Don’t miss out on profits – here’s how to create an effective marketing plan.
How to Develop a Business Marketing Plan
A targeted marketing plan sets two goals: maintaining the engagement and loyalty of your current customers, and gaining market share within a specific audience segment of your target audience.
Your marketing plan outlines the strategies you will use to achieve the specific goals and actions your marketing team will use, such as specific awareness campaigns, the channels they will occur on, the marketing budget required, and data-driven projections. .
Marketing is a science-based engagement that typically requires months of data to refine campaigns, and an interconnected marketing plan keeps a business committed to its long-term goals.
All marketing guidelines will come down to the four Ps – product, price, place, promotion. The following tips are starting points that will ingrain the habit of continually coming back to the four Ps.
1. Create an executive summary.
Marketing campaigns should not be viewed as individual functions. Marketing is the story of your brand as told to customers; like any story, its tone and characters must remain consistent. An executive summary details your marketing goals for the next year and helps tie them together. These goals should work together to achieve internal and external harmony, telling a cohesive story that informs customers of your exact message while building on its previous chapters.
2. Identify your target market.
Before writing a marketing plan, you need to find and understand your niche. Ask yourself what specific demographic group you are targeting. For example, if your business sells 30-minute meals, people in traditional 9-to-5 jobs are likely in your market. Study this group of individuals to understand their pain points and find out how your company can solve the problem.
3. Find out why a new customer would use your business.
Determine the basic need that your product or service will meet. Is it to help your customers get through the day more easily? Do their jobs more efficiently? Your offering should solve customer problems or meet customer needs better than the competition. Create buyer personas for your ideal customers to better understand their needs and guide communication with that audience.
4. Differentiate your brand with inbound marketing.
Inbound marketing uses internal tools such as content marketing, social media activity, or search engine optimization (SEO) to grab a customer’s attention primarily through online communication . Content marketing can include informative blog posts, interviews and podcasts with relevant industry figures, or additional guides on how best to use your product. For example, if you sell kitchen tools, consider posting several fun recipes over the holidays that your tools can help make.
Each of these strategies reinforces the others in a loop to gain greater customer attention. A strong content offering can improve your search engine rankings, which brings more people to your website and social pages. You can then share these developed pieces of content with this larger audience, which will again improve your search engine rankings. All of this can be done without the expense of a celebrity endorser or commercial advertising campaign.
5. Identify competitors who are also targeting your customers.
No matter how unique your product or service is, there is always competition for your target customer’s money. Small businesses rarely take the time to thoroughly research their competitors or determine competition that may be outside their industry but is equally capable of attracting customers. Knowing who they are, their key competitive advantages, and how they might respond to your offer (price cuts, increased communication, etc.) helps you develop strategies to combat those losses.
6. Indicate the position of your brand with your target customers.
Ultimately, your brand, and what it symbolizes to customers, is your greatest competitive advantage. You should be able to write a simple declarative sentence about how you are going to meet customer needs and beat the competition. The best positioning statements are those that are purposeful and focused on solving a problem for the customer in a way that drives the best value.
7. Audit if all else fails.
Don’t panic if your initial marketing strategy isn’t giving you the results you expect. Auditing your business, which you can perform with the help of a third-party contractor, can help you recover.
Understand what products or services you offer, then identify who you help and how you help them. Then, check all your marketing platforms to make sure they reflect this message. If you perceive your brand message differently than your audience, that disconnect needs to be addressed.
Takeaway key: When developing your marketing plan, know why a customer would use your product, differentiate your brand from your competition, and audit your product offering and messaging to ensure consistency.
Types of channels included in your marketing plan
Once you know the elements of the plan, the next step is to develop a plan detailing how you will reach the target customers. Besides traditional print and broadcast media, here are three digital marketing channels that many business owners use.
Social Media
Social media is an essential part of business marketing plans because every type of customer is on one type of platform, like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Small business owners may feel overwhelmed by the possibilities, but should focus on the sites that can benefit them the most.
Brett Farmiloe, founder of internet marketing firm Markitors, advised businesses new to social media to know their customers and the platforms they use.
“Identify where your customers spend their time and settle on those platforms,” Farmiloe told Business News Daily. “Develop an executable content strategy internally, [and then] execute your strategy by publishing branded content on your selected platforms.”
Although email marketing is not as new as social media marketing, it is an effective and popular choice for small business owners. Businesses can implement email marketing techniques in several ways, including newsletters, promotional campaigns, and transactional emails. For example, Mailchimp and Constant Contact help businesses manage their email drip campaigns.
Farmiloe noted that businesses can differentiate their email marketing efforts by segmenting their markets.
“Not all subscribers want to receive the same blast,” he said. “Smart email marketers take the time to segment subscribers initially and then continue to segment based on subscriber activity. Through segmentation, companies reduce unsubscribes, increase rates opening times and, most importantly, increase the number of actions taken by an email send.”
Mobile
The popularity of smartphones and tablets has changed the way companies target consumers. Since people have these devices with them almost all the time, companies are looking to implement strategies that reach customers on their gadgets.
“Mobile marketing is disruptive,” Farmiloe said. “It is because of this power that a marketer must let the consumer determine how and when to receive marketing materials. This is why almost all apps offer the ability to turn notifications on or off. The consumer must hold the power with mobile marketing.”
Takeaway key: Use digital marketing channels such as social media, email and mobile to reach customers; however, study each channel in depth to develop a strategy to effectively capture their interest.
Results tracking
Creating well-defined budgets, goals, and action items, with the appropriate staff assigned to each, can make your marketing plan a reality. Think about how much you’re willing to spend, the results you expect, and the tasks needed to achieve those results.
Analytics tools that track customer behavior and engagement rates can serve as a helpful guide to your marketing strategy. Unlike billboards or advertisements, the prevalence of digital channels allows you to assess every step of the customer journey and gain insight into individual prospect patterns and intentions. Intent can quickly turn into prediction, allowing a marketing team to develop campaigns that consistently reach target audiences at the right time.
You can find more tips for measuring your marketing ROI here.
Takeaway key: Invest in tools to measure the impact of your marketing campaigns.
Additional reporting by Jordan Beier, Katherine Arline and Marci Martin. Some interviews were conducted for an earlier version of this article.
