- HoneyHat

What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is an outline of how businesses define their marketing goals and plan their execution, as well the tracking their marketing strategy.

It provides a comprehensive overview of your marketing efforts, with seven key sections:

Your company’s summary
Your team’s business initiatives
You target audience and your potential customers
You can leverage marketing strategies to your advantage.
Budget and financial considerations
You’ll need to decide which marketing channels you want to target
You will need marketing technology

These, together with the metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), you will need to measure your results, can help you create a marketing plan that is both effective and efficient.

Let’s first explore the differences between a plan and a strategic marketing approach.

Marketing Plan Vs. Marketing Strategy

These two terms can be used interchangeably. They do have some differences.

A Marketing Strategy outlines how a company will try to achieve a specific goal or mission. This includes the channels, campaigns and content used, as well as any software/tools or software/tools that are used to measure success.

A marketing strategy, on the other hand involves specific activities and steps (daily or weekly). The marketing strategy will dictate the specific steps and activities (daily, weekly, etc.).

It is a framework that dictates which marketing strategies should be used. It also helps you connect each strategy with your overall digital marketing operation and goals.

Let’s look at the different types of marketing plans you can use.

Types Of Marketing Plans

You can choose to create a marketing plan for the entire year, or for each channel that you would like to target.

You can create a variety of marketing plans.

Annual Marketing Plan (General):These marketing plans allow you to see everything in a single glance, including the company’s mission and USPs (unique selling points), your SWOT analysis, and your marketing channels.
Content Marketing Plan:This plan explains the various tactics, strategies and campaigns that you can implement to help your company reach its content goals. The plan can include an editorial calendar that your team can use.
Social Media Marketing Plan: This one contains specific tactics for social media, campaigns that you plan to run and ways to establish yourself on other social media platforms.
Paid Marketing Plan (demand Generation):This marketing plan includes your paid marketing strategies, including search ads, social media paid ads, email marketing strategy and more.
Product Launch Marketing Plan: Launching a new product is a planning process. This will help you develop a plan to market your new product.

Let’s now create your marketing strategy.

How to Write a Marketing Plan Step by Step

You need to download our template before we begin. Get it Here. Make a copy. Fill in the details of your company like we did for our fictional company and follow our example.

Here are the elements we will be focusing on. Click on the links below to visit each section individually.

Business summary
Business Initiatives
Target Market
Market Strategy
Budget
Marketing Channels
Marketing Technology

1. Business Summary

A business summary or executive overview is a short company overview. Your business summary introduces your readers to the company’s goals, marketing plans, and achievements.

It is important to make people want to read your plan. It should be brief and straight to the point.

You can include these things in your summary:

Simple marketing goals
Company achievements/milestones
Future Plans
Facts about your brand

It’s not necessary to go into details, as you’re trying to get people interested.

You can find an example below of a software publishing company:

Your summary sets the tone for your entire marketing plan. Consider carefully what tone best suits your brand.

This section also contains your SWOT Analysis. Create your SWOT Grid and list your strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats.

Determine the scope and context for your analysis before you begin. You may be evaluating an entire business, a project, a particular product or marketing strategy.

To create an effective grid, you must first clarify your purpose. You can use this guide to create your SWOT Analysis.

2. Business Initiatives

Next, you’ll need to identify your business goals.

You need to determine the metrics that will be used to evaluate the goals.

Depending on how you structure your marketing plan, business initiatives can either be fully explained or shortened. Here are some steps to help you create your own:

Define your business initiative clearly:write an accurate and concise description, including the objective.
Link your marketing goals.Highlight how these align with your larger marketing objectives in order to establish the strategic context of the initiative.
Add the target audience:add a specific audience or market segment that the initiative is aimed at.
Define your metrics to measure success of the initiative.

Don’t forget to consider the impact of your marketing and business goals. Calculate the expected return on your investment (ROI) in order to prioritize initiatives.

Let’s now see how to finish the section on target markets.

3. Target Market

You can set smarter business goals for your marketing campaign by tailoring your strategies to the needs of each segment in your customer base.

Add your target audience here and add some key characteristics that will help you to identify their needs.

You’ll need to add one more important component below if you want to create a marketing plan that is comprehensive.

Buyer Personas

Buyer personas represent your ideal customer. Most businesses have several different types of customers. You may need to create more than one buyer’s persona.

You can segment your marketing campaigns properly and tailor your materials to appeal to them by defining the buyer personas of your business. Your personas can also influence the messages you use in your marketing materials.

Buyer personas are necessary to understand your ideal client and what they desire. You can add the information into your marketing plan template if you haven’t already defined it.

Included are:

Surveys, questionnaires or interviews are used to conduct in-depth research on the market.
By asking the right questions, you can collect all the information needed.
Understanding how your product/service benefits your audience.
Analysing the data you have collected.

You can use your customer personas to create a marketing plan that includes their demographics, goals and pain points as well as the key features of your product/service.

Competitive Analysis

In order to create a solid marketing strategy, you must conduct thorough competitor research.

This section allows you to analyze the current market, study and identify your competitors and dig deeper into your firm’s strengths and weakness.

If you want to start or own a blog, it is important that you conduct competitor research. You can use the following to analyze your competitors:

What their leadership team consists of
What is their marketing team?
What is their marketing strategy?
Social media is a part of their strategy
What type of advertising are they running?
The SEO marketing strategy
The top performing content
Their annual growth (using a Marketing tool Ahrefs).
Number of customers
Market share

If you want to grow your small business the right way, you should do thorough research.

You can include all the information that you have gathered about your competitors. Focus on their products/services, and strengths and weaknesses.

We are now ready to begin working on the section of your marketing strategy.

4. Market Strategy

You need to take into account the industry trends, the audience and the competitive landscape when creating your strategy.

Be sure to:

You should have defined your goals, and then conducted a SWOT Analysis to determine what you could leverage and improve.
Understanding your target market will help you to customize your strategy and choose the right segments for your new customers.
Analyze the competitive landscape to identify their strengths and weaknesses
Develop your unique value proposition to highlight your product or services.

You can now create your marketing strategy. You can then optimize your market strategy based on the feedback you receive from both your team and clients.

Let’s look at how to complete our template using 6Ps marketing starting with pricing and product.

Product & Pricing

You can use the template to guide you. You need to include the following in the product section:

Product/Service description: briefly describe your product or service
Highlight your product’s key features
Value proposition: clearly express the value that your product/service provides to the target market

You will need to provide the following information:

Price model: Describe your pricing structure
How your pricing compares with competitors
Value Based Pricing:Explain your pricing in terms of the value you provide.

Promotion & People

You will need to include the following two sections: the tactics that you plan to use to market your product/service, and the team who is responsible for making everything run smoothly.

For the Promotion table, you should include:

Marketing channels – List the channels that you will use to reach out to your audience
Content Strategy: How you plan to create valuable content and distribute it
Advertisement and Promotion:Outline any paid advertisements or promotional campaigns

Include the following in your People and Team section:

List key team members, their roles and responsibilities
Skill Sets:describe your team’s skills and expertise
Training & Development:How you’ll make sure your team is ready to execute the strategy

Process & Place

Last but not least, add the distribution methods and your processes.

You can include the following in the Process section:

Timeline : Outline the timeline to execute the strategy, highlighting short-term (0-6 month), mid-term (six-12 months), or long-term (1+ year) goals.
Project Management: Explain how you will manage the execution process
Feedback & adaptation:how to gather feedback and adapt

You can include the following in your distribution:

Distribution channels : describe how your product/service is going to be distributed to clients
Sales Strategy:Explain your sales strategy (e.g. direct sales, partnerships).
Customer Relationship Management: How you’ll maintain relationships between customers

After you have completed your section on market strategy, we will move to another equally important component of your marketing plan.

5. Budget

Your marketing plan should also include a description of your budget.

There will be hidden costs that a marketing team must account for, even if they are using many channels and platforms free.

You can track your spending, create a budget, and monitor your progress using budgeting software for businesses.

Determining your budget will also help you to not lose sight of the financial aspects of your project during implementation and execution.

Here are some examples of the content that can be included in this section:

Freelance fees
Sponsorships
New marketing hires, full-time or on a part-time basis
Cost of collaborations

If you do not have an exact price, then add all the items in the Budget section.

6. Marketing Channels

The right marketing channel for your business is a strategic decision that takes into account your marketing goals, your budget and your product or service.

You need to know the following:

Identifying and understanding your ideal customer is essential. Consider their demographics and psychographics. Also, consider their online behavior, their preferences, where they spend most of their time, as well as their lifestyle.
Determine your available budget for marketing activities. Certain channels are more expensive than other channels.
You should research different marketing channels and their strengths, weaknesses and suitability to your business. Email marketing, SEO and social media are some of the most popular marketing channels.
Consider the nature and purpose of your product or services. Visual products might perform better on Instagram while B2B services may benefit from LinkedIn.

Here are some essential factors to consider when choosing the best marketing channels for your company. The wrong tool for the job can affect your business operations and budget. Do the research necessary before adding them to your marketing plans and committing.

You can list the channels that you plan to use and provide a brief description of the purpose, goal, and metrics you will be using to measure their success.

7. Marketing Technology

Choosing the best marketing tools is becoming more complex as technology advances.

You can’t just buy the first thing that looks good to you. Try a variety of alternatives until you find the right tool for your team and business.

It will take time to switch tools frequently, as each member of your team needs to learn the new tool. To avoid making rookie mistakes, it is best to take some time to look for cost-effective tools that are useful.

Before you commit:

Integrate your capabilities
Scalability is important as your business grows
Evaluate user-friendliness
Plan your training and onboarding
Ensure data security

You can then add the tools to your marketing plan, and describe briefly what each tool will do for your business.

You have now successfully created a marketing plan.

This section provides tips on how to create a comprehensive plan that is effective for your business.

Tips to polish your marketing plan

Before you start planning, here are some things to consider.

1. Your business mission statement and values

You should start by stating your company’s mission and values. This can be done at the start of your marketing plan to provide more information to your reader about your business.

You can answer the question “why” you are doing something.

Your mission may be specific to your department of marketing, but it must align with your brand’s main mission. You should be as clear and specific as possible without overstating.

If your mission as a business is to “provide affordable sporting goods”, then your marketing goal could be to reach out to users with a certain level of income, teach them how to get the same results using competitive products, and convince them to buy them.

Note: The information in this article is vital for anyone who reads it, as you can inform them of the main goal of your business. This will help them understand your future plans and marketing goals.

2. Establish your KPIs

Marketing plans that are successful clearly outline how the department will track the progress made in achieving its goals. You’ll also need to determine the key-performance indicators (KPIs), which measure and track your different marketing campaigns.

These indicators can help you communicate with business leaders about your progress and determine whether or not your marketing efforts are achieving the desired results.

These KPIs are usually accompanied by specific timelines and numbers. You may choose to set KPIs such as:

Get X new leads
Reduce bounce rate by X%
Writing X more articles per week/month
Reach X organic Page Views
Increase retention by X% every year
Get 100 new Twitter/Facebook followers every month.

It is important to establish your KPIs before creating your plan, as you will need them in certain sections.

3. What is your strategic plan?

You will need to include the main points of your marketing strategy in multiple sections. You will need to describe how you plan to use each element in order to reach your marketing goals and objectives.

If content marketing is a part of your strategy, you should include all necessary information in the section dedicated to it, for example:

Types of content include blog posts, webinars on YouTube, infographics and ebooks.
Define your content volume in daily, weekly and monthly intervals. This will depend on your workflow, and any goals that you may have.
You can choose from Facebook, Twitter Instagram LinkedIn YouTube or Pinterest. Are you going to focus on just one channel?
You plan to place paid ads on these channels/platforms
These KPIs will be used to gauge your success. These indicators may include organic traffic, emails, social media traffic and referral traffic. You might even include traffic to specific landing pages, product pages, blogs, and blog posts.

Your marketing plan does not need to be lengthy. It should be informative and interesting enough to make your readers want to read on.

4. Clarify the omissions in your plan

The marketing plan should explain the focus of your marketing team. It should also explain what your marketing team won’t be focusing on.

Include this section if, for example, there are aspects of your business to which this plan is not suited.

These omissions will help you to justify your content strategy, buyer personas and KPIs.

Each marketing campaign has a purpose and, as such, cannot please everyone.

You can add any omissions to an extra section if you wish. You can also add notes to the end of each section if desired. This will help the reader understand the content.

A good plan is concise and clear. To avoid forgetting anything, make sure you include everything in your outline of a marketing plan.

Creating A Comprehensive Marketing Plan

Operating without a plan of marketing can lead to a reduced ROI, campaigns which fail to achieve their goals, and a waste in your marketing budget.

A solid marketing plan will help you align your marketing goals with your business’s overall goals.

You must measure the success of different strategies and ideas to optimize your strategy. Your strategy should include optimization, as it can help improve all aspects of your business.

Use this step-by-step guide and our free marketing plan to get started.

Why not give Moosend a go? If it works for you, then you’ll have another tool on your marketing tech list.

FAQs

Answers to frequently asked questions

1. What are the seven elements of a good marketing plan?

A comprehensive marketing strategy should contain seven elements: an executive summary, a target market, a market strategy, a budget, marketing channels and marketing technology. If you want to, you can add more sections to your marketing plan. But it is essential that the 7 elements listed above are included.

2. How to write a marketing strategy?

You need to follow some simple steps in order to create a marketing strategy. Included in these steps are:

Mission and values of your business
How to write an executive summary
Establishing your KPIs
Outlining your buyer personas
You can identify your competitors by identifying their names.
Describe your marketing strategy and initiatives
Clarify the omissions in your plan
Setting your marketing budget
Identifying your plan’s contributors, their roles and responsibilities

You can simplify the process by using a marketing plan template, such as Moosend’s.

3. What are the three Ps of a Marketing Plan?

A marketing plan should include the six P’s, which are product, price, promotion, people and process (distribution). The 6 P’s can be used to develop your marketing strategy.

The post Create a Marketing Plan for 2024 [+Free template] first appeared on Email marketing automation platform for Thriving businesses.

Author: John Desyllas

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