For any business, planning matters a lot. If you do not have a plan to follow, it can backfire and your efforts may not get you the results you want. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that 65% of businesses fail within their first 10 years. With efficient planning, you can avoid failure and set your business on the path to success. A marketing plan is a document that covers your company’s marketing strategy, current standings, business goals, required efforts, and KPIs to monitor. In other words, it is a master plan for marketing that a company makes to follow for a set duration.
Marketing is a dynamic process that requires understanding where new opportunities are and what efforts you need to put in. It is not a one-time thing like installing a residential internet connection and making timely payments as you do with Cox pay bill. Therefore, making a marketing plan and setting the KPIs to monitor is more advisable. In this article, you can see the instructions on how to make a marketing plan for your company.
Things to Consider Before Making a Marketing Plan
Before starting with the process of actually making a marketing plan, there are some things you should understand beforehand. For starters, you should know if the plan you are making is for the entire marketing efforts or a singular channel like SEO. Knowing your current standings like monthly organic traffic and conversion rate is an essential part of making a future strategy. Also, it is better to have metrics like your cost per conversion and the value of an average conversion. You can add other values like the revenues you are targeting to generate. Again, considering such factors depends on what you want to cover in your marketing plan.
Step-By-Step Guide to Make a Marketing Plan
You can make a decent marketing plan by ensuring it has all the following elements:
An Executive Summary
An executive summary is the first thing you need to write in your marketing plan. Remember, your executive summary should be concise and not too lengthy. You can include an introduction to your company, where it is standing, and future goals. Generally, marketing plans start with this sort of summary. This introductory summary is also helpful in introducing your business if you are onboarding a marketing agency.
Setting Goals
Right after your executive summary, add the next section of the business goals you want to achieve. The goals you set should be definite and data-driven instead of generic goals like more email signups. An exact value or percentage is better to include. The values mentioned in the “Things to Consider Before Making a Marketing Plan” section of this article can help you with setting goals.
Target Audience
Knowing who your audience and potential buyers are is generally important. It is because you would not want your efforts to go to waste marketing to the wrong audience. You should understand what type of person or organization would be interested in buying your products or services. List the general characteristics of that usual buyer. Besides identifying the ideal customers for your business, you also need to set the target location. For example, if you are not operating outside the US, you may not be able to convert leads from Canada. Therefore, it is better to add a section of your target audience to the marketing plan.
Competitive Research
In your marketing plan, you should include the businesses you consider your competitors. Do not just add the names but also understand their marketing strategy. For example, you can check their organic traffic and paid promotions on search engines using different tools. In addition to the data from tools, you can view their content strategy and frequency of sharing content on blogs and social media handles. State their standings in the competitive research section.
By checking their stats and strategy, you can find the flaws and missing links in their strategy. With this data, you can improve your own marketing strategy. So, adding this section to your marketing plan can get you many benefits.
Document Your Current Standings
You cannot improve what you don’t measure. So, you should add a section on current standings. In this section, you can add metrics like revenues, organic traffic, conversions from paid promotions, and other such metrics. These numbers can help you forecast the results you will get against the efforts you put into marketing.
The Marketing Strategy
By this point, you have introduced your company, set goals, identified your target audience, and displayed where you and your competitors are standing. Now, it is time to include a marketing strategy that sets you on the path to achieving your business objectives. You may add different channels like SEO, social media, paid ads, and email marketing with separate working plans in this strategy.
KPIs to Monitor
To see how well your company is adhering to the marketing strategy, you need to set appropriate KPIs. Such KPIs may be anything you want to monitor like the number of organic clicks, newsletter signups, and the actual conversion rate.
This is a general model you can follow to make your own marketing plan that covers the major sections. After grasping this general structure, it is up to you if you want to follow it as is or get into the nitty-gritty.
