Marketing is best defined as a combination of seven elements: product, process, price, physical evidence, promotion, people, and place. A marketing plan serves as navigation for the marketing team as it highlights milestones, tasks, budgets, and deadlines. This can be a quarterly, annual, social media, content, product launch, or paid marketing plan.
Mind you, a marketing plan is very different from a marketing strategy — while the latter describes how the goal is to be achieved, the former contains a bunch of strategies to help the business accomplish multiple goals simultaneously.
But the question of the hour is, how do you make a good marketing plan?
It Starts with a Mission
Firstly, begin by writing a mission statement. Next, you want to set key performance indicators for this mission. The marketing plan should consist of elements you can track, such as the number of users, leads, follows, views, inquires, calls, or posts. To track the usefulness of your campaign, you need to include several objectives, measurable numbers or KPIs. These units can also easily be communicated to stakeholders as a shred of evidence for short-term success.
A marketing plan must be explained extensively to the marketing team to allow them to focus on what’s important and what’s not.
Identifying the Buyer’s Persona
No matter how great of a product or service you are selling, if you fail to market it to the correct target audience, you’re sure to be headed toward failure. Your marketing plan must clearly define who you are looking to attract; this is best described in terms of age, gender, geographical location, or ethnicity. The buyer’s persona is meant to reflect your current and potential customers — this makes it critical for all business leaders to agree upon the persona.
A good trick is to sneak peek into all that your competitors are targeting; after all, part of marketing is being aware of who you are marketing against.
The Initiatives and Strategies of Marketing
There are ample options available in terms of channels for the distribution of the content, but not every channel is going to be the ideal pick for your business. Start by deciding the type of content you’re looking to create and how frequently you intend on publishing it. Using the KPIs defined above, you should be able to track the traffic on each platform, making it easier to determine which channel you should rely on in the future.
Remember that each channel can only be utilized when paid for it, so you must also set aside a marketing budget.
A Marketing Plan Builder
ADEPT Business Plans Inc. is run by Kapil Munjal, a business plan writer with roots firmly established in Vancouver, Canada. Business plan writing services offered at ADEPT Business Plans include professional business plans, Provincial Nominee Program (PNP) immigration business plans, marketing plans, and financial plans. Contact Adept Business Plans today to draft a marketing plan for your business that doesn’t fail your system! Each marketing strategy is customized as per the needs of the business to sell its products or services to the target market through multiple distribution channels.
