How a detailed marketing plan can skyrocket your performance
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Running a business is great, but it can also be a minefield ready to weed out those who are unsuspecting or unprepared. There’s so much to think about that you might end up running out of time or resources to generate profit with your business. From organizing the legal aspect, like commercial insurance coverage, to HR, marketing and manufacturing, you have a lot to do and need to prioritize where to spend resources of time and money. This is where a detailed marketing plan helps.
Marketing is a necessary element for success, but businesses often ignore marketing or undervalue it amidst conflicting demands on time and money. This is bad because marketing is probably the most critical revenue stream that determines the success of your business. Granted, financing brings in money, but at a high cost (interest or equity) while marketing contributions bring in money without any negative aspects. Recognizing the importance of marketing to ultimate success, new operational strategies such as lean and agile suggest starting your marketing efforts before you write the first line of code or develop the first prototype.
Importance of marketing
Marketing goes far beyond just posting a few social media posts or sending out an occasional newsletter. In fact, both involve only one element of marketing – promotion. Meanwhile, considering the other 3 elements, product, price, and place, makes your marketing efforts complete and allows you to explode your performance.
To achieve everything you can as a business, you need a plan. A marketing plan is essentially a blueprint that guides marketing performance based on internal factors (those mentioned above) as well as external forces acting on the business that impact success including the economy, tastes and consumer preferences, legal issues, technology opportunities and, most importantly, your competitors and their plans for the period ahead.
Implementing your planned marketing strategy also has a serious impact on success. Thus, both of you should develop a marketing plan based on a thorough assessment of your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT analysis). If you want tips on building a detailed marketing plan, check out other articles on this site.
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Instead of covering how to build a detailed marketing plan in this article, which we’ve done in previous articles, we focus on the why to encourage you through the effort it takes to build a detailed marketing plan.
Here are 5 ways a detailed marketing plan helps your profits explode.
Why a Detailed Marketing Plan Helps Explode Your Profits
A marketing plan allows you to focus
Clear direction is imperative to implementing a functional and successful marketing strategy, and a detailed marketing plan provides direction that helps everyone within the company integrate their strategies to achieve the overall goals set out in the plan. Budgeting in the marketing plan ensures that managers know all the costs involved in generating the proposed revenue so that other areas of the business know their own budgets.
Market planning ensures that all required activities take place, identifies necessary resources such as money and people, anticipates the results of specific activities, and establishes a schedule that ensures the plan is put in place when needed. . We call these action plans because they are very specific details around a certain element of the overall plan.
For example, part of the overall detailed marketing plan may involve a product demonstration. The action plan details the date and all activities required for the event, such as a location, physical items such as tables, chairs and products to be demonstrated, people needed before, during and after the event. event, and the costs of each item required to pull off the event. A good action plan contains enough detail for an employee handing over the action plan to implement it as planned.
A detailed marketing plan facilitates evaluation and informs decisions
A marketing plan allows you to allocate your marketing budget, see where money and other resources are being spent, and analyze whether specific components of the plan are worth redoing in the future by determining what action to take. .
Your marketing plan and individual action plans project the anticipated ROI (return on investment) upon implementation, providing a way to gauge performance. By understanding which actions generated benefits and quantifying the benefits produced, managers have the tools to make accurate decisions about future plans.
For example, you created evergreen content designed as a lead magnet. Tracking content performance as leads move from awareness to purchase, and beyond to study CLV (customer lifetime value for the length of time a customer remains a customer) and AOV (average order value for each order), you determine the ROI of this content. to determine whether to repeat this strategy and, if not, how you could improve performance in the next period with tactics that provide better performance.
Or, you can use information from sources such as Google Analytics to determine which channels are generating the highest ROI or, as in this chart, plotting the orders with the highest average value. From where. spending more money on email marketing (mail.google.com) and Facebook makes perfect sense to attract customers who spend more per purchase.
Information is power, so plan to use the information from this period’s plan implementation to further improve the next period’s plan.
A detailed marketing plan indicates where you need market research
A marketing plan requires you to conduct market research to fill in the gaps detected as you build your strategy. For example, if you don’t know how the economy is doing today, in real terms, you can’t anticipate the impact the economy might have on performance. If the economy is down, you need strategies to adapt to how consumers spend in a poor economy. A detailed marketing plan involves both research and modeling to predict changes over the coming period.
By performing an environmental scan, collecting internal data and plans, and modeling future performance, you get insights and statistics about your target audience, current consumer needs, and where your business in today’s market. Learning about internal and external environments forces you to think about how you stack up against your competition.
Conclusion
These are just a few of the reasons why a detailed marketing plan is vital for your business and helps it stand out against the competition. With a clear and direct plan, you quickly discover other areas where your business benefits from better planning and execution, which explodes your performance in the market. In unprecedented times like with this global pandemic, it has never been more important to ensure you have a solid marketing strategy and a way to engage with your customers.
