Your marketing plan is the document that verifies all your marketing efforts are contributing to the overall goals. Many companies, however, don’t start with a marketing plan, leading to a mess of individual campaigns that don’t support a single objective. So, it’s extremely important to create an effective marketing plan! Though every plan’s specifics will be different, here are key components to keep in mind.
1. Executive Summary
-
Overview: Do a quick summary of the purpose of the marketing plan, including your goals, objectives, forecasted outcomes and strategies.
-
Highlights: This is for your stakeholders. Point out what is important for them to know about your marketing plan.
2. Market Research
-
Industry Analysis: Market trends change all the time. Review your industry and identify key changes, challenges and potential for growth.
-
Competitive Analysis: It helps to understand what your competitors are doing. Do intensive competitive analysis to understand how they’re positioning themselves in the market, what they’re doing right, what they’re doing wrong and what you can learn from them.
-
Target Audience: Every marketing effort should directly address the key audience you’re trying to reach. Write down everything, including your target’s demographics, psychographics, buying behavior and pain points.
3. SWOT Analysis
-
Strengths: Identify your organization’s internal strengths and how these can be used for your marketing efforts.
-
Weaknesses: Every company has weaknesses. Understanding these before launching your campaigns can minimize risk and reduce the chances of embarrassing issues.
-
Opportunities: Your potential marketing opportunities should come out during the market research.
-
Threats: Identify threats that could derail your marketing efforts – and even potentially harm your business.
4. Marketing Objectives
-
SMART Goals: This is a quick acronym meaning: Set Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound (SMART) marketing goals.
-
KPIs: Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are what you will use to determine whether your efforts are successful. These could be sales, form downloads, website traffic, etc.
5. Target Audience
-
Segmentation: As mentioned, your target audience are the main people you’re trying to reach. But you can’t just mass group your audience. Instead, break them out based on their pain points, wants, needs, locations, etc.
-
Buyer Personas: Buyer personas are more focused versions of your target audience information. You typically create three or four of these, and it lays out detailed information about a “representative” person of your target audience.
6. Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
-
Value Proposition: This requires some thought. What differentiates your product or service from the rest in the market? How will these address your target audience’s wants, needs and pain points?
7. Marketing Strategies
-
Product Strategy: You need to understand your products to market them. Clearly lay out what your product does, including market differentiators, offerings, features, benefits and selling points.
-
Price Strategy: What is your pricing strategy? Will you be offering product bundles or discounts? Are you considering special promotions at certain times of year?
-
Place Strategy: This lays out your distribution strategy. What channels will you use? How will customers get products?
-
Promotion Strategy: Plan your promotional activities, including advertising, PR, content marketing, social media and sales promotions.
8. Marketing Channels
-
Online Channels: Your marketing channels need to be narrowly defined based on the target audience. Online channels include paid search, SEO, social media, etc. For example, selling B2B healthcare products on Facebook might not be the best strategy. Instead, you may want to look at LinkedIn or similar channels.
-
Offline Channels: Traditional marketing – or offline – channels can include everything from direct mail to trade shows to print advertising.
9. Content Plan
-
Content Types: What type of content best resonates with your audience? Is it video, blogs, eBooks, infographics, etc.? If you’re unsure, look at what your competitors are doing or test a few different pieces of content.
-
Content Calendar: Laying out the type of content you’re creating, the audience, distribution channel and timeline will help keep you on track.
-
SEO Strategy: Search engine optimization (SEO) ensures that your website is organically found online. Creating an optimization plan with target keywords should be done early in the marketing timeline.
10. Budget
-
Allocations: Your overall marketing budget needs to be broken out by category. These can include online advertising, content creation, trade show, internal staff and needed tools.
-
ROI Analysis: Determine how you will measure the return on investment (ROI) for every individual marketing activity.
11. Implementation Plan
-
Action Steps: What actions do you need to take to make your marketing strategies a reality?
-
Timeline: Lay out the timeline for each step of your plan. Each action should support the overall business goals and objectives.
-
Responsibility: Every member of your team should have a responsibility that they need to accomplish by a predetermined time.
12. Monitoring and Evaluation
-
Tracking: You need to track your KPIs. Leveraging custom-made or third-party tools can assist with this.
-
Reporting: Determine your reporting schedule. You should be constantly monitoring your marketing efforts effectiveness and pivoting as needed.
Building a comprehensive marketing plan can ensure that your marketing activities help your company achieve their business goals.
