A marketing plan serves as a way to manage, document, and optimize a business’s digital marketing strategy. Moreover, it is also needed to produce any business growth shortly.
According to CoSchedule’s reports, highly successful businesses plan their marketing strategy proactively. It is shown that those businesses that plan in advance are succeeding at a 331% rate.
If you are a marketer that wonders what it takes to create an outstanding marketing plan, worry not.
We bring you five exact steps you should follow to succeed with your marketing growth.
Steps to Create the Perfect Marketing Plan
1. Use a Situation Analysis
Before creating any marketing plan, you have to be aware of your current situation.
With a SWOT analysis, you’ll determine where your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats lie. Strengths and weaknesses are a part of internal things you can change such as team members, business location, etc.
On top of that, you can use opportunities to protect from threats you cannot change, such as competitors and price changes.
Furthermore, consider doing a competitive analysis. You can analyze competitors’ products to see why are they better than yours. Think about how can you improve over it.
2. What Is Your Target Audience?
Now that you understand your business‘s situation in the current market, it is time to understand your target audience.
Start by creating a buyer persona for your company. Conducting market research is one way to do this. Add demographic statistics such as age, gender, and recurring income into your buying personas.
Define your goals by writing out what drives your potential audience to buy your products or services. What your products can offer them that your competitor’s products don’t have?
After you have gathered all the necessary info, it is time to go to step number three.
3. SMART Goals
By completing the previous two steps, it is time to define your SMART goals. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Simply put, all your goals should be specific and within a set time frame.
For example, maybe you want to convert 20% of your visitors to customers in 2 months. This goal is specific, measurable, and set in a fixed time frame.
4. Tactics to Achieve Goals
The fourth step to creating an outstanding marketing plan is to devise tactics you can use to achieve your goals.
In a previous example, you want to convert 20% of your monthly visitors to recurring buyers. Your tactic may be to give discounts or coupons when they sign-up on your website.
5. Budget Control
Keep in mind your budget. It is tempting to start giving various coupons or discounts but without proper budget control, it is doomed to fail.
With every tactic you write, include a budget limit corresponding to that tactic. You can include the time it will be needed to achieve a certain goal and an estimated cost you are willing to spend.
To Sum Up
To create a successful marketing plan, firstly you need to be aware of the position your business is in. After that, you should define your target audience and write SMART goals.
On top of that, to properly achieve those goals, define your tactics, each coupled with an estimated budget and a time frame.