What is a marketing plan and why is it important?
What is a marketing plan?
A marketing plan is an outline of a company’s future marketing efforts. It is created to organize and execute and measure the success of a business’s strategy.
Types of marketing plans
Annual: These arrange campaigns according to when they’re expected to launch. They are a useful way to get an overview of the marketing strategy for the year, and to measure success continuously as time passes.
Content: This is more content focused and highlights the specific channels you want to reach. Similar to annual but less concerned about when and more with what and how.
Product: The main goal is to successfully introduce the new product to the market. These include strategies, tactics, and content needed in the buildup to launch itself.
Social media marketing plans: Social media is vital for growth and it is wise to create a separate plan dedicated to creating content on these platforms.
What is the purpose of a marketing plan?
They lay out your strategy for getting new customers and selling more products. This information helps steer ongoing campaigns in the right direction, aligns your marketing with your company’s values. It also ensures that future campaigns are better targeted and more effective. To understand why a plan is important, think about what would happen without one. Your budget would be spent entirely on guessing where your potential customers can be found and what they are looking for. You would have no idea which campaigns worked and which didn’t. You would have no baseline to build off to create more effective campaigns in the future.
How do you create a marketing plan?
Objectives, research, competitors, and content. These should be clearly defined and easy to measure, ideally no more than 3. Driving traffic to your website or increasing Instagram followers would be 2 examples. Set a specific target to monitor. Learn what works and what doesn’t so in future campaigns you can set more accurate goals and hone in on what really works for your company.
The plan should look at what the competitors are doing, as well as look any openings that would allow you to grab market share. This is where SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis come into play, enabling you to shape the marketing plan around its strengths and weaknesses.
The plan should also outline the content of each campaign. Will your pre-roll video content use animation or live actors. Can you offer discount codes to new customers? Will you leverage your mailing list?
Define a marketing plan strategy
The strategy describes which tools you’ll use to hit the targets laid out by the main marketing plan document, and how they’ll be applied. What are you selling? How much are you charging? Where will your customers see it? And how will you promote it to them? Marketing gurus will promise you that if you can answer all of these questions correctly, you’ll be guaranteed boundless success.
How to measure your success
A lot of time and energy goes into monitoring your campaigns. That’s why tracking a marketing plan’s performance alongside more specific KPIs (key performance indicators) is important. Advertising spend and sales figures aren’t linked in a simple or obvious way, so measuring success on a more granular level—such as increasing conversions or returning customers—helps create a much clearer picture of how well your marketing plan is doing.
Final Thoughts
Marketing plans need to be outlined and followed while at the same time should not be set in stone. You should be able to change course if its not working and focus more on the ones that are. Allow some time for things to settle before making any drastic changes.
