As a business owner, you need a marketing strategy to acquire new customers for your business. Besides serving as a strategy for the future marketing goals of your company, your marketing plan can also give you significant analytics to help you track your business success.
Remember that even though all marketing plans have similar essential elements, your business characteristics and audiences require that you tailor them accordingly.
Types of Marketing Plans
There are several marketing plans, some more representative of some businesses than others. These are the most common:
- Time-Based Marketing Plans: These are usually annual or quarterly marketing plans based on campaigns you are about to launch. You might not include the content of the campaigns, but the plan should provide a good overview of your upcoming marketing strategy and its analytics.
- Content Marketing Plans: In this type of marketing plan, you focus on the content of your marketing strategy, the specific channels you plan to use, and the audiences you want to reach. Content marketing plans often have similarities to time-based marketing plans, but they focus less on the “when” and more on the “what” and “how” of your marketing strategy.
- Product Launch Plans: When launching a new service or product, your marketing plan must be more specific to ensure it has a successful marketplace placement. You must include your strategy, tactics, and content for implementing the product launch.
- Social media marketing plans: If social media channels are vital to your company’s marketing goals, then you need a social media marketing plan. On it, you need to highlight the channels, tactics, and campaigns required for each platform.
- Paid Marketing Plan: Sometimes, you need a plan for your paid marketing strategies. You must include your pay-per-click, paid social media promotions, and native advertising plans on this plan.
Let us Help you Revise your Marketing Strategies to Grow your Business
Reach out to Bold Solutionz to revise your marketing strategies to engage with your potential customers. Get in touch with our team of experts now!
What is the Purpose of Your Marketing Plan?
When you start your marketing efforts, you need to ensure they remain aligned with your business strategy, which is why you need a marketing plan. As you allocate a marketing budget, you want to ensure that it’s spent in such a way that it will help acquire new customers. You also want to know which campaigns brought in the most sales figures, giving you a baseline for future strategies.
Therefore, a marketing plan has a specific purpose – it lays out your strategy for acquiring customers, selling more, and analyzing your marketing efforts.
What is a Marketing Strategy? How does it differ from a Marketing Plan?
In a marketing strategy, you describe how your business plans to accomplish a particular goal. The outline of a marketing strategy includes campaigns, content, channels, and the marketing software required to implement the effort and measure its success.
Therefore, you may consider your Facebook campaign an individual marketing strategy for a smaller business.
On the other hand, your marketing plan contains one or several marketing strategies. You use this framework to help you connect the strategy to complete the whole marketing operation as it aligns with your business goals.
Therefore, you develop a marketing plan for the whole strategy of launching a new product with all your efforts across several channels.
How to Create a Marketing Plan?
1. Determine Your Objectives and KPIs
The first step of your marketing plan is to determine your objectives based on research, your competitors, and your content. Once you have defined the goals, for example, driving more traffic to your website, you need to set a target to help you monitor the campaign’s performance.
The plan must define how you’ll track progress with the correct key performance metrics (KPIs). Depending on your objectives, you will want to measure the right ones, so you might want to follow the number of leads, website traffic to website lead ratio, etc. Depending on the KPIs you want to follow, they ensure you meet the short-term goals of your marketing plan.
2. Categorize Your Buyer Personas
The people you want to attract with your marketing campaign are called the buyer personas. You must know their age, sex, location, family situation, and job. The buyer persona must reflect your business’s potential customers.
3. Define Your Content
Your content strategy must stipulate every type of content you intend to use. Therefore, include videos, blogs, infographics, etc., and how often you will create them. Also, define which KPIs you’ll use to track your various content types, for example, social media traffic, organic traffic, email traffic, and referral traffic. Also, include the pages to which you want to drive traffic when setting your goals. These could be landing pages, product pages, or blog pages.
Finally, include the channels you’ll use to distribute your content and if you want to use paid advertising.
4. Outline Your Marketing Budget
Even when using free marketing channels, some of your content strategies will require money for content, someone to do the marketing, or sponsorships. So it’s vital to include these in the expenses section of your marketing plan.
5. Recognize Your Competition
What kind of campaigns are your competitors running? Again, research is the only tool to help you prepare to meet the challenges you’ll face from the competition. These may include a heavy presence on your main chosen social media marketing platform or high-ranking keywords on search engines that you’ll need to compete against.
6. Outline Responsibilities
Your marketing plan is complete when you know who is responsible for undertaking the projects and metrics that will ensure your campaign’s success.
Bold Solutionz Assistannce With Your Marketing Plan
Working on a marketing plan while growing a business may require some serious juggling on your part. In addition, its successful execution requires frequent reviews and revisions to ensure your strategies remain on track.
An impartial view of your marketing plan and strategy can help to keep it on the path of maintaining your objectives while also ensuring that you stay within your marketing budget. At Bold Solutionz, we have the experience to help you meet your marketing targets with a resilient marketing plan that moves your business in the right direction. So spend a little now and ensure you achieve those marketing goals as quickly as you have outlined in your marketing strategy.
Book your Free Consultation with Our Team of Experts Today!
We help you build and grow your business today with our range of digital marketing services led by industry experts. Take advantage of services and achieve your marketing goals