A marketing plan is essentially a roadmap that outlines how a business will organise, execute and track its marketing strategy over time. It’s a way to track and measure the success of various campaigns and ensure you are spending your budget on marketing activity that will move the dial.
For small to medium businesses with limited resources, a marketing plan will help identify the most effective channels and where time and resources are best focused. This article will outline four helpful tips to help you create an effective marketing plan for your business.
The bottom line is that a great marketing plan stems from a rock-solid marketing strategy. If you have developed an effective marketing strategy, you have already identified the best way for your business to succeed.
Before you even begin writing your marketing plan, you should understand your customer, brand and what your business aims to achieve. From here, your marketing plan will be able to outline the steps required to achieve your business goals.
Check out our previous post here for more information on creating an effective marketing strategy.
Consumers today expect brands to know them as well as their closest friends. By analysing data that demonstrates online behaviours and personas of your target audience segments, you can tailor campaigns and marketing activity based on what will make them more likely to purchase.
A few examples of intent-based audience data include users who have visited your website, searched keywords related to your business, engaged with your content, or shared their contact details. Ultimately, you want to be able to market to individuals whose behaviour dictates that they are more likely to take a specific action or make a particular purchase.
Check out our previous post: 'Targeted marketing - finding your ideal customer'.
When developing an effective marketing plan, it’s essential to drill down to the small details – this includes the who, what and when:
Think of your marketing plan as a roadmap to success. The more organised, clear and defined your plan is, the easier it will be for everyone on the marketing team to work collectively towards smashing your marketing goals.
Improving and optimising your marketing plan is critical to the success of your marketing campaigns. Making smart, data-driven decisions will enable you to craft an efficient and powerful marketing plan.
A marketing plan is never stagnant. You should continually test, analyse and research ways to help you achieve your business goals. Carefully track each marketing channel your business utilises and adjust based on actual results.
Creating a marketing plan shouldn’t be an arduous task. When you write your plan, you should already have clearly defined marketing goals – it’s just about creating a detailed plan for achieving them.
Do you need help pulling together an effective marketing plan for your business? Get in touch and we'll be happy to help get you started.
About Poignand Consulting
Poignand Consulting is a strategic marketing and sales enablement consultancy that exists to unlock customer value for your business. We do this by helping enrich the customer experience at every point of contact – from the first seed of awareness to enquiry, purchase, and the post-sale relationship.
It pays to step back and assess this from time to time. Help is available. If you would like to review your current marketing effectiveness, we would happily arrange an obligation-free chat.