Improve Your Business's Trajectory in 9 Steps
How to Develop a Marketing Plan that Will Raise Your Bottom Line
Marketing is one of the best things you can do for your business. Not only will you attract new customers with a bit of concerted effort, but you’ll be able to retain existing customers and maybe even cause higher sales.
The key to this is to create a detailed marketing plan. A marketing plan will help you outline your goals, plan your efforts and provide you with a timeline to keep yourself on track!
In no time, you’ll know what makes your business unique, what customers you want to attract and how you’ll do it. Plus, you’ll know how to tell if your plan is working and how you can improve it.
What to Include in Your Marketing Plan
- Executive Summary
- Market Analysis
- Marketing Goals and Objectives
- Marketing Strategies
- Tactical Plan
- Budget
- Implementation Timeline
- Monitoring and Evaluation
- Conclusion
This standard marketing plan includes the basics to get started with marketing. As you get more comfortable with it, you’ll be able to adjust things, adding or removing details that will help your business better serve your customers.
1. Executive Summary
An executive summary describes the primary goals and highlights of your marketing plan. This portion of your marketing plan boils your plan down to one simple page, telling you the most important things.
2. Market Analysis
The market analysis section combines several different things to get a clear idea of your industry. A thorough market analysis will include:
- Industry Overview
- Competitive Analysis
- Target Audience
The industry overview will provide a snapshot of your industry, pointing out the current trends and expectations on where it will go. The competitive analysis looks into more details within your industry, focusing on your top competitors as well as your own strengths and weaknesses. A SWOT analysis is often included here, compiling those strengths and weaknesses as well as opportunities and threats you expect from the industry.
Additionally, your target audience should be identified here. This should include a complete and detailed profile of your ideal customer, including their basic demographics as well as their psychographics and buying behaviors.
3. Marketing Goals and Objectives
Here you will identify several specific goals you aim to achieve with this marketing plan. These should be measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.
Goals can include anything from a specific return on your investment, an increase to website traffic, an improved conversion rate or anything else that applies to your goals.
At this step, you will also want to determine your key performance indicators, the metrics you will use to measure your success and evaluate your marketing plan.
4. Marketing Strategies
This section focuses on the “4 P’s”. This encompasses your product, pricing, distribution (or place) and promotion strategies.
Product Strategy: Details how your product/service meets the needs of your identified target market.
Pricing Strategy: Outlines your pricing model and how it compares to your competitors.
Distribution Strategy: Describes how and where your product/service will be available.
Promotion Strategy: Plan your promotional activities, such as advertising methods, social media activities, and aspects of your website.
5. Tactical Plan
This portion will expand on your promotional strategy, adding specifics to the channels you will use to market your products or services, the schedule you will use for posting your marketing content and the campaigns you will be using.
6. Budget
This important portion is where you will note your budget and how it will be spent across your various activities and channels. Additionally, you will want to discuss your resource allocation, identifying the resources needed to execute the plan, including human and technological resources.
7. Implementation Timeline
This step helps make your marketing plan seem achievable. It’s important to break down your plan into actionable steps arranged in a timeline, which will help you understand why different aspects of the strategy need to be completed.
8. Monitoring and Evaluation
This portion is just as important as your initial promotional strategy. It describes how and when you will measure the success of your marketing plan. It will also include an outline of how and when you will adjust your plan based on the performance data you collect.
9. Conclusion
The conclusion serves to summarize the main points of your marketing plan and conclude with a call to action, encouraging readers to start planning and implementing the plan.
Make Your Marketing Plan Meet Your Needs
Not all marketing plans are the same and require the same steps. While this is a thorough marketing plan that offers both insight and a plan to your business, it might be ideal to tailor it to your specific needs.
Things You Can Add
Most of the above sections can be completed in as much detail as you would like. The more thorough you are, the better your strategy will be and the easier it will be to implement.
Elaborate Promotional Plans – the more detailed you are, the stronger the activities will be when you create and launch them
Formal Customer Feedback – incorporate customer feedback to adjust products, services, and marketing tactics. Additionally, this can help shape the messages you want to use to have the most success
Adapting to External Factors – be prepared to adjust your plan based on economic conditions, technological advances and regulatory changes
Things You Can Remove
- Executive Summary
- Thorough Competitive Analysis
- Detailed Performance Metrics
- Aspects of Your Marketing Strategies
- Extensive Implementation Timeline
- Conclusion
These things should be included in some form, but the level of detail you put into them can vary. It’s good to have an idea of who your competitors are, but it isn’t necessary to complete an extensive analysis. The same applies to your performance metrics and the implementation timeline.
Start Creating Your Marketing Plan
Don’t wait another minute to get started improving your company and attracting new customers by creating a marketing plan. Take a couple hours to start drafting your plan, and reach out to the professionals (like the team at ThreeSixty) to start enacting your vision – or to help you improve it.
For more help with designing your plan, check out our blog full of strategic tips to help improve your business.
