What Is a Marketing Plan?
A marketing plan is a roadmap that businesses use to organize, execute, and track their marketing strategy over a given period.
What Your Marketing Plan Should Include:
SWOT Analysis: Your marketing plan’s business summary should include a SWOT analysis. This summarizes your business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT).
Creating a SWOT analysis is an important strategic exercise. It gives everyone involved a clear picture of the environment your business is working in and how it is doing within it.
It’s like a quick therapy or wellness check-up for business. You see where you’re at and perhaps even get to vent a bit before taking steps to improve things.
Business Initiatives: What is your marketing team working on? What do you want to work on?
Document them in your marketing plan under business initiatives. This section sets the tone for the rest of the document and its strategies.
Be careful not to get bogged down by big-picture company initiatives (i.e., opening a new location in X city or recruiting new talent via the Y platform), which you’d normally find in a business plan.
This section should outline the projects specific to marketing. You‘ll also describe those projects’ goals, which will be measured.
Target Market: Next, consider your target market, or the audience you are trying to reach with your marketing messages. This includes your industries and buyer personas.
Competitive Analysis: Your buyer persona has choices regarding solving their problems, the types of solutions they consider, and the providers that can administer those solutions.
A competitive analysis will detail the companies or brands you’re up against, which should be considered in your marketing strategies.
Consider who your competition is, what they do well, and where the gaps are that you can fill.
Market Strategy: I know what you’re thinking, isn’t this whole plan our marketing strategy? And you’re right to a degree, but this section focuses more on outlining what a brand needs established to go to market.
The market strategy in your marketing plan is where all the pieces come together. Your market strategy describes how your company should present itself in the market, keeping in mind its SWOT, competitors, consumers, and goals.
Budget: When I created my first marketing plan, I confused the marketing budget section with my product’s price and other financials.
This section describes how much money the business has allotted for the marketing team to pursue the initiatives and goals outlined in the elements above.
Marketing Channels: Your marketing plan should also include a list of your marketing channels.
While your company might sell the product using certain ad space, your marketing channels are where you’ll publish the content. This content educates your buyers, generates leads, and spreads brand awareness.
A marketing plan is crucial to your greater marketing results, but don’t let this importance intimidate you.
Whether you’re a seasoned professional or just getting started, with all of the marketing plan templates, examples, and advice shared, you have everything you need to set your marketing planning process up for success.
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