Marketing plans are essential tools that inform a business’s practices and priorities. They help the company generate revenue by effectively promoting the products and services offered. Businesses will lose potential sales without an effective marketing strategy.
Your marketing plan should identify a number of strategies designed to help your company fulfill its goals and objectives. Following these three steps will ensure that you are prepared to put an outstanding marketing plan into action.
1. Current Status Assessment
You need to have a clear understanding of your company’s philosophy in order to develop an effective marketing plan. The core values of your business will inform your operations and, ultimately, your promotional strategy. For example, in the spring of 2020 protesters in the United States demanded racial equality and an end to police brutality. One company’s CEO made an offensive tweet about the man whose death prompted the protests. Other companies withdrew from partnerships with that businesses and some businesses made donations to support racial equality. This illustrates how company philosophies shape company actions. An effective marketing plan will reflect your company’s core beliefs and values.
Clarify your business goals. For example, if your company primarily has male clients, you may be focused on reaching female customers. Your marketing plan should be compatible with your business’s goals to ensure that your entire company is working together to achieve the same objectives.
Evaluate your current marketing strengths and weaknesses. Have a clear understanding of what has and has not worked effectively in the past. Also, note marketing opportunities and potential threats. For example, you may be able to sponsor a local event and raise your company’s profile. However, if a competitor is already sponsoring you may need a strategy to counter that threat to your business’s profile.
Identify resources your company can use to prepare a marketing assessment and plan. Search Atlas is a free search engine optimization (SEO) tool designed to help your company evaluate your business website’s SEO status and determine how to increase website traffic. Reviewing your website’s SEO with Search Atlas can help you identify keywords that should be incorporated into your content and customize your information to ensure browsers give your site a strong search engine ranking number. This company has several years of experience with SEO optimization.
Other resources may include human resources, social media platforms, and other marketing tools.
2. Identify Target Audiences and Appropriate Strategies
Marketing plans must effectively reach consumers who would be interested in the goods and services you provide. In order to do this, marketing strategies must include an evaluation of the types of people who may be interested in your products.
Create personas who represent different consumers you plan to target. Note demographic data about these personas and identifying characteristics, such as their background and education level. Establish a persona for each ideal consumer you are attempting to target.
You can prepare marketing strategies once you have a clear understanding of who you are trying to reach. For example, a campaign targeting youth may prioritize social media marketing strategies.
Your marketing budget will not enable you to prioritize all available forms of marketing, but with a clear understanding of the consumers you are targeting, you can prioritize the most effective marketing channels to pursue. For example, if reaching new clients from outside your geographic location is a priority, you may focus on advertisements that appear online and in conventional advertising channels. If you are focused on retaining clients you may emphasize customer appreciation and rewards for returning clients.
3. Set Goals and Budget
You need to have clear, measurable goals for your marketing campaign. While it is fair to say that you want to have a strong marketing campaign, that is not a measurable goal. If you intend to increase sales to individuals aged 18 to 29 by 10%, you can review sales data to determine if you achieved that goal.
You should prioritize a finite number of goals. Identify up to five primary objectives at a time to ensure your marketing plan focuses on your promotional priorities. Once you have established your goals you can prepare a realistic budget. Your budget will be affected by the marketing methods you prioritize to achieve your goals.
With a clear understanding of your company’s philosophy and objectives, you can establish compatible marketing goals that support your business targets. Once marketing goals and a promotional budget are in place you will be ready to implement an outstanding marketing plan to promote your business.
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