How to Write an Effective Marketing Plan
A marketing plan is the core component of any business’s advertising efforts. It sets out the necessary steps that are needed to market a specific product or service successfully and attract more customers.
Marketing plans essentially lay out a strategic roadmap for a business to follow in order to organize a game plan, execute it, and then track its performance over a given period.
How a company devises its marketing plan would depend on its goals. Different marketing teams across the same organization may have different marketing plans. However, they all have a unified sense of business goals which they work towards achieving.
What is the Purpose of a Marketing Plan?
The primary purpose of a marketing plan is to design and write down your marketing tactics and strategies in one place in an organized fashion.
This is done to ensure that it is easier for your business to keep track of your marketing campaigns and keep track of the results those campaigns are producing.
With the help of a marketing plan, all important information is organized in one place. This makes the job of marketing teams easier and helps them achieve greater productivity by staying on top of each and every development throughout the entire action plan.
It also makes it easier for them to figure out what works and what doesn’t, and how to proceed with future marketing campaigns.
Aligning Your Marketing Plan with Your Audience’s Needs
Aligning one’s marketing plan with their audience’s needs and goals is a crucial part of any brand’s overall success strategy.
Before you start building your marketing plan, you need to realize the importance of your product or service speaking to your customer and their needs. Your marketing content should be focused on how you can make people's lives better, how you can help them overcome a struggle, and how you can solve a problem for them.
According to research, 81% of B2C (Business-to-Consumer) marketers agree that their organization concentrates on producing content that speaks to customers and builds loyalty with them.
Therefore, at the end of the day, your marketing plan should be built on the foundation of connecting your brand with their personal goals.
Key Elements of an Effective Marketing Plan
1. Work Out Your “Why”
For a long time now, a company's purpose or its "why" has been considered the most important differentiator in its success or failure. Companies with a strong sense of purpose are able to connect with their customers on a deeper level which drives business and fuels their bottom line.
Moreover, if you don’t have a concrete purpose behind your business, your employees won’t be satisfied with working for you as well because they won’t know what they are working towards.
2. Prepare Your Mission Statement
A mission statement clearly and concisely defines the nature of the business, the services it offers, and the ideal audience it aims to serve. Where your “why” defines your purpose, your mission statement consists of a combination of your purpose and goals. It is your vision for the business going forward, providing your employees, customers, and stakeholders with a direction for the future.
3. Devise Strategies to Deal with Negative Publicity
An important part of an effective marketing plan is how a business reacts to any and all negative press that it suffers from.
The way a company deals with bad press is going to tell their potential customers and investors a lot about their business values and morals.
When dealing with a bad customer review or negative publicity, here are a few questions to ask yourself:
Is your business responding as a unified team? Is everyone on the same page in terms of facts and figures?
How can I stop the bleeding? Do I own up to the error – if it’s warranted - and publicly lay out a correction plan?
Am I being transparent in my response?
Am I being authentic? Or is my response tailored solely to what people want to hear?
Am I being comprehensive in my response? What are the underlying issues here that I need to address apart from just trying to stop the bleeding and playing defense?
4. Anticipate Customer Objections
A big part of creating an effective marketing plan is identifying your most vulnerable spots and anticipating customer objections.
Recognize where your brand may be acting in a way that is counter to your customers' struggles or even to the company's own values. This would help you in avoiding future customer complaints, to begin with.
When customer objections do come in, they are a great indicator of the fact that you have not made a strong value proposition to your buyer. For many businesses, the first instinct is to react defensively. However, instead of reacting too quickly, you should:
Take the time to listen to your customer and understand the objection fully.
Train yourself to ignore any negative emotions that may arise as a result of criticism.
Stay focused on what the buyer wants and how you can help solve their problem.
Eliminate any bias that may arise while listening to the buyer.
5. Spell Out Your Marketing and Promotional Plan
The key to a successful marketing plan is understanding what makes someone want to use your offerings and the type of marketing strategy they respond to.
Some key steps you can take to get up to speed with your audience’s needs and design a business promotional plan include:
Networking, either in-person or electronically.
Marketing directly. For example, sending out sales letters, promotional offers, or flyers.
Advertising in print media or online, offering a specific benefit of an immediate response.
Writing content for local media or professional newsletters, describing the benefits of your offerings.
Sending out press releases, either through local newspapers or radio and television networks.
6. Find Ways to Convert Traffic into Leads and Sales
A great digital marketing plan can drive significant traffic to your online platforms. However, more traffic does not always translate into more money if that traffic is not converting into leads and customers.
Once people are on your website, you need to ensure that they leave after making a purchase. Here are a few ways to do that:
Build an email list
Put conversion tracking in place
Create gated content
Consider your bounce rate and how you can minimize it
Perform A/B testing
Create content that customers can relate to
Build a strong sales funnel
7. Monitor the Results and Effectiveness of Your Digital Marketing Campaigns
As you put your marketing plan into action, you will have to recognize any leaky holes it may have so that you can better optimize it for the future. You would need to know what marketing strategies are working and what is simply costing you money.
This involves:
Tracking and evaluating customer responses
Surveying regular customers
Identify marketing campaign measurement metrics, such as ROIs, cost per sale, cost per lead, conversion rate, etc.
Use marketing measurements tools such as Google Analytics and HubSpot CRM
Track performance indicators or KPIs.
Use a questionnaire.
8. Consult a Professional
An experienced professional can help you develop a marketing plan that sets the right tone with your target audience and helps your business generate revenue.
Good consultants enable managers to allocate their marketing resources in the right place and find the most efficient means of attracting customers. Consulting an experienced professional can help you find the direction your business needs to take to execute your marketing strategies effectively.