Whether you’re a new business owner or had been in the industry for a while, it’s always important to have a strong marketing plan. If you’re introducing a new product to your market or simply improving your existing one, you need a marketing plan to launch it successfully.
However, many business owners find themselves falling in the wrong direction when creating a marketing plan. Generally, marketing is one of the most significant expenses in a company, and having poor marketing strategies could get you into big financial troubles.
Successful advertising campaigns and promotions wouldn’t be possible without a clear marketing plan. Companies are also at significant risk of losing resources and cash capital if they don’t strategize their marketing goals correctly.
If you want to know how to make a marketing plan, then you’re in the right place. In this blog, we’ll tell you what a well-defined marketing plan is, what its benefits are, and how it can help you get that big leap towards success.
What is a Marketing Plan?
Before we dive deeper into the specifics of marketing solutions, you may be asking, what is a marketing plan?
Image taken from Unsplash
A marketing plan is like a blueprint on where all your marketing decisions are based on. It serves as your company’s roadmap to help you define your marketing objectives, understand your audience’s buying behavior, and measure your marketing campaign’s effectiveness.
While that may all sound very simple and straightforward, a marketing plan requires constant brainstorming and may even be subject to gradual change depending on current market trends. Markets are naturally volatile, so what worked for you in the past may not be as effective in the present.
Your marketing plan should tell you what your marketing strategies are, how they translated into actions, the people involved, and associated costs. Simply put, a well-defined marketing plan is as insightful as possible and easy to comprehend.
A marketing plan should outline your marketing strategies for the year, the month, or the week, depending on your company’s objectives. It should also include the following sections:
- Long-term and short-term marketing objectives
- Overview of marketing goals
- A description of the target audience
- A timeline of marketing activities
- Key performance indicators or KPIs that you need to measure
A great marketing plan should reflect in all facets of your company, including the website. In this digital age, some of the most powerful marketing campaigns are launched online.
Image taken from Strikingly user website
Take this website, for example. DMC is a creatives services company that caters to clients that need compelling visuals for their marketing campaigns. They offer project shooting, designing, and motion-based promotional materials.
Using website-builder Strikingly, DMC was able to market their services to their website. On their homepage, visitors are greeted with a video background that heightens the user experience.
As you can also see in the image above, they added global brand giants that they’ve worked with within the past. This strategy gives the impressions of authority, credibility, and trust.
Looking at the webpage alone, it’s easy to tell their goals for launching a marketing campaign - they want more clients. If you’re interested in skyrocketing your company’s success, just read on!
Benefits of a Marketing Plan
Now that you know what a marketing plan is, you should also understand how beneficial it is before making one.
- Align marketing objectives with business goals. A marketing plan provides you with a clear sense of direction. Whether you have a big company or a simple home business, it’s vital to align marketing objectives with business goals.
- Team Involvement. If you’re working with a lot of people, a marketing plan ensures that you’re all on the same page. It also guides everyone in their roles and their deadlines, if there are any.
- Focusing on important needs. A marketing plan ensures that you don’t spend your money on the wrong investments. It stops you from focusing on activities that wouldn’t be beneficial to your company.
- Make sound marketing decisions. Informed decisions are crucial when you’re launching a new marketing campaign. A marketing plan gives you an overview of your company’s marketing priorities, so it influences your judgment when making marketing-related decisions.
How to Make a Marketing Plan
You have different options when creating a marketing plan. You can download a marketing campaign template on the web where the design and layout are already built for you on the web. All you have to do is change the text and add all necessary information.
On the other hand, making your own gives you more freedom and control over your marketing plan. Here’s how to make a marketing plan:
- Conduct SWOT analysis
If you’re in the practice of business, SWOT is already a very familiar term for you. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats.
A good marketing plan example involves conducting SWOT analysis, even in the early stage of building your company. SWOT analysis must answer these vital questions: what is your edge over the competition? What are the gaps in your marketing strategies? What new opportunities can you tap into? What threats do you need to anticipate?
- Define Target Audience
Demographic profiling is one of the most common ways to understand your audience and predict their buying behavior. This involves categorizing your market based on age, sex, location, income, or any other identifier.
This would also include psychographic information such as pain points. Pain points are specific problems that your audience face. You need to find how to serve these problems with your marketing plan.
As a marketing plan example, this website created with Strikingly understood the audience’s pain points and delivered them into the campaign.
Image taken from Strikingly user website
The company’s target audience is women who need a boost in self-confidence. On their website, they introduce consultations that combine psychology and technology. That is their approach to solve their audience’s problems.
- Establish SMART Objectives
SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. This is the basic rule of thumb when creating your marketing goals.
If you want to set specific goals, you can try something like getting 500 likes on your Facebook post or gaming 10% more social engagements in a week.
Your goals must also be bounded by time. You can’t create an objective without defining the correct timeframe. Make sure that there is ample time to achieve your set goals.
Once you’ve set all your goals, you need to brainstorm strategies to make your goals possible. Goals are just ideas, and ideas need concrete and tangible actions to make the implementation possible. Analyze which marketing tactics you need, whether it should be online or in print.
- Set Up Your Budget
As we mentioned earlier, marketing is one of the most significant expenses in a company, and poor marketing strategies could lose you vast amounts of money.
Budgeting allows you to break down which areas in your marketing campaign need more resources and which ones need less. Setting up a budget also gives a view of how much work you need to put in to achieve your goals.
For example, if you want to get more followers on your Facebook page, you may want to invest in paid advertising. These are just some techniques that could tremendously boost your advertising campaigns.
Outline of Marketing Plan
To summarize, here’s a quick look at what your marketing plan needs to have:
- Business Summary
- Business Initiatives
- Market Analysis
- Competitor Analysis
- SWOT Analysis
- Market Strategy
- Budget
- Marketing Channels
- Financial Projections
Applying Your Marketing Plan to Your Campaigns
After learning what a marketing plan is, its benefits, and steps on how to make one, you may be wondering what does a marketing plan looks like when translated into a marketing campaign.
Web-based marketing campaigns are very popular today, considering the level of their scale and content distribution. If you have a company website, marketing campaigns are much easier to deliver. You can even develop a separate website for your marketing campaigns alone!
Image taken from Strikingly product
With Strikingly, you can integrate your marketing campaigns into a full-functioning website that your customers can access. Don’t fret about not having technical knowledge in website development because Strikingly’s user-friendly interface makes it easy to learn.
Strikingly offers different types of website templates that have different styles and layouts. Each one has its functions built into the template, which you can change depending on what you need.
Strikingly also offers a set of tools that allows you to change the style of your website. You can go for any type of visual look you want and add more sections as necessary.
With Strikingly, you can make marketing campaigns that would work across multiple devices. This is possible because all the websites you create with Strikingly are automatically responsive for both mobile and desktop users.
Having a great marketing plan is necessary to jump towards consistent success. Once you know all that there is in making a marketing plan, you can head on to Strikingly, create your account, and make a website where your campaigns are delivered effectively.
