Kristine
Imagine for a moment that you’re determined to run a marathon. Whether you’re a total newbie or an experienced athlete, you’d immediately start making adjustments to help you reach your goal. You might commit to running a specific distance each day, for instance, or focus on improving your pace.
Over time, these strategies will build your endurance. If you stay committed and give yourself enough time, you’ll most likely reach your goal. However, if you only try these tactics for a week before switching to a completely unrelated activity, such as binge-watching Netflix, it’s safe to assume you won’t see any progress.
When you want to accomplish something, it seems obvious to make a plan instead of trying several random tactics in the hopes that something eventually sticks. And yet, this is the way many business owners approach their marketing strategies.
Marketing Plan Template
There are countless ways to market your business, but not every tactic will benefit your company. If you’ve tried several different platforms or marketing strategies to no avail, it’s in your best interest to take the time to create a marketing plan.
For small businesses, a great marketing plan can usually be summed up in 15 pages or fewer.
Darren Dahl, a contributing editor at Inc. magazine, explains, “It’s best to think of a marketing plan as a way to tell a concise story that covers all the key points of your strategy going forward.” Most plans are organized in the following sequence:
- Executive summary. This is a concise breakdown of your findings, goals, and budget. Although this will be at the beginning of your marketing plan, you won’t write it until the full analysis is complete.
- Mission statement. This should succinctly define your brand’s values and how they relate to your long-term goals.
- Target audiences. In this section, you’ll explain the demographics, psychographics, and behavioral tendencies of your customers.
- Marketing channels. Determine the best channels to focus your efforts on. Explain where your audience is most likely to view your ads or content and interact with your brand.
- Competitive analysis. Also referred to as a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Obstacles, and Threats) analysis, this section should honestly assess your main competitors’ businesses, as well as your own.
- Unique Selling Proposition (USP). Here, you’ll define how your company stands out from the competition.
- Objectives. Here’s where you’ll explain your SMART goals (more on that later!).
- Marketing budget. While plenty of digital marketing strategies are free, you still need to factor in the time it will take to create content for your audience.
- Action plan. The final section of your plan involves delegating responsibilities, setting up timelines, creating contingency plans in case of unexpected obstacles, and making sure your team fully understands the mission.
Now, we’ll break each aspect down into manageable steps. After following this guide, you’ll have enough information to begin writing your plan with confidence. Let’s get started!
Step 1: Define your mission statement.
Ask yourself what overall goal you’re trying to accomplish and why it’s important that you succeed. This statement will become the foundation of your entire marketing plan, helping you refocus if you start to get off-track or overwhelmed. As you further define your marketing objectives, you’ll continue to come back to the mission statement to make sure your actions align with your ultimate goal.
Step 2: Understand your target markets.
Unfortunately, you can’t just post to every social media channel and immediately attract customers. Before you can market to the right people, you need to truly know who these people are! “There’s so much noise on the internet [that] you need to find a way to break through and get your marketing strategy efforts to the right people,” explains marketing whiz, Neil Patel.
Patel goes on to emphasize the importance of creating specific buyer personas for your audience after researching 3 key elements: demographics, psychographics, and content preferences.
- Demographics include statistics or values that can describe a certain group of people. Some common demographics include age, location, gender, income, ethnicity, marital status, and educational level.
- Psychographics are more difficult to quantify, as they refer to a group’s values, thoughts, and attitudes. To gauge an audience’s psychographics, you might ask questions like:
- Why are they interested in learning more about your business or products?
- Is your industry niche important to them, either as part of their profession or as a side hobby?
- What are some common questions they have about your industry?
- How knowledgeable are they about your services or specific niche?
- Content preferences refer to the platforms your audience likes to use, what type of content they engage with, what time they use specific channels, and how frequently they consume content.
After you’ve gone through each of these research processes, you can create a buyer persona that summarizes your key findings. Turn your notes and lists into sentences, as if you’re describing your audience’s current situation and mindset. Now that you have a good idea of who you need to market towards, you can start tailoring your content to maximize engagement!
Step 3: Choose the right channels.
After doing customer research, you should already have a pretty good idea of which channels and platforms to target in your marketing plan. For instance, if your target audience regularly uses Instagram, you shouldn’t base your entire plan around Twitter.
Before you decide which channels to use, make sure that you think outside the box to uncover potential marketing opportunities. Sales channels may include your own website and your Amazon page, but you can also promote your business through:
- Guest blog posts
- Text messages
- Social media
- Email campaigns
- Print ads (magazines, brochures, direct mail, etc.)
- Broadcast (TV or radio)
- Press releases
- Trade shows or marketing events
Step 4: Research the competition.
In order to beat your competitors, you need to know what you’re up against. For this part of the marketing plan, you’ll conduct a SWOT analysis and identify your USP.
SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. For each of your main business rivals, do an honest analysis of these 4 components. Then, conduct a SWOT analysis of your own business to figure out your unique selling proposition (USP.)
Your USP is the feature, service, or value that only your company offers. It’s what sets your business apart from others within your industry niche. Iconic brands, such as Coca-Cola and Apple, are experts at drawing attention to what makes them new, different, and exciting. Try to keep this in mind if you have trouble identifying your USP!
Step 5: Decide on SMART goals.
Before you put everything together into an organized action plan, make sure each of your goals are SMART:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
If your goals are too vague or too broad, such as “gain more Facebook followers,” it’s difficult to measure progress. Without defined, measurable goals, you won’t really know which strategies are working and which tactics are ineffective. We could change a goal into a SMART one by adding more specific details, like “increase Facebook followers by 25% in 6 months.” This gives you a target to shoot for and a deadline to determine whether or not you succeed.
For each SMART goal, you should define the specific steps you’ll take to work towards that objective. Think of it as breaking up a big goal into small mini-goals throughout the timeline of your marketing plan.
Step 6: Establish a marketing budget.
Here, you’ll have to crunch some numbers. It’s important to be realistic about what your marketing plan will cost, as well as your expected ROI (Return On Investment). Depending on your business, you might also want to consider additional financial projections for:
- The cost of implementation
- The cost of producing items or services
- Expected cash flow
- Projected sales
- Realistic profit margins for projected sales
If you already have an annual marketing budget, you can divide this up into monthly amounts to test different strategies and determine which marketing activities are the most profitable.
Step 7: Write your action plan.
During this phase, it’s all about communication. You’ll need to delegate tasks to your employees, recruit extra help if needed, set up timelines for short-term and long-term goals, and create contingency plans in case something goes awry. Everyone you work with should have the opportunity to suggest additional ideas or objectives and ask questions before you officially put the plan into motion. You want to make sure that your entire team is on the same page and fully understands the overall mission, as well as their individual responsibilities.
Step 8: Write an executive summary for your Marketing Plan.
Now that you’ve done all the heavy lifting, simply summarize the key takeaways of your plan into a 1-page document. The goal of your summary is to give the reader a good understanding of your plan, even if they just read a single page. When you’re done with the executive summary, put it in the front of your marketing plan document, and then take a well-deserved nap. Your plan is completely finished!
If you need some extra help ironing out the details of your marketing strategy, don’t hesitate to reach out to the team at Content Cucumber. We’ll connect you with one of our expert writers who can offer ideas, assist with research, and (of course) write an amazing marketing plan.
To give you an idea of how much our services can help your business, book a demo today!
