The adage “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail” is particularly relevant to a company’s marketing efforts. A well-crafted marketing plan is the cornerstone of achieving any marketing goal. It provides direction, ensures resources are efficiently allocated and helps track progress. Without a solid plan, your marketing efforts can become scattered and ineffective, hindering your business’s growth and success. Let’s delve into why a marketing plan is essential and how to create one that drives results.
What is a Marketing Plan?
A marketing plan is a strategic roadmap that businesses use to organise, execute, and track their marketing strategy over a given period. Marketing plans can include different marketing strategies for various marketing teams across the company, all working toward the same business goals.
The purpose of a marketing plan is to write down strategies in an organised manner. This will help keep you on track and measure the success of your campaigns. Writing a marketing plan will help you think of each campaign‘s mission, buyer personas, budget, tactics, and deliverables. With all this information in one place, you’ll have an easier time staying on track with a campaign. You’ll also discover what works and what doesn’t, thus measuring the success of your strategy.
How to Write a Marketing Plan
1. State Your Business’s Mission
Your first step in writing a marketing plan is to state your mission. Although this mission is specific to your marketing department, it should serve your business‘s main mission statement. For example, if your business’s mission is “to make booking travel a delightful experience,” your marketing mission might be “to attract an audience of travellers, educate them on the tourism industry, and convert them into users of our bookings platform.”
2. Determine the KPIs for This Mission
Every good marketing plan describes how the department will track its mission‘s progress. To do so, you need to decide on your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). KPIs are individual metrics that measure the various elements of a marketing campaign. These units help you establish short-term goals within your mission and communicate your progress to business leaders.
For example, if part of our mission is “to attract an audience of travellers,” we might track website visits using organic page views. In this case, “organic page views” is one KPI, and we can see our number of page views grow over time.
3. Identify Your Buyer Personas
A buyer persona is a description of who you want to attract. This can include age, sex, location, family size, and job title. Each buyer persona should directly reflect your business’s current and potential customers. So, all business leaders must agree on your buyer personas.
4. Describe Your Content Initiatives and Strategies
Here’s where you’ll include the main points of your marketing and content strategy. Because there’s a laundry list of content types and channels available to you today, you must choose wisely and explain how you’ll use your content and channels in this section of your marketing plan.
When writing this section, stipulate:
- Types of content you’ll create: Blog posts, YouTube videos, infographics, and ebooks.
- Content volume: Daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly intervals depending on your workflow and goals.
- Goals and KPIs: Organic traffic, social media traffic, email traffic, and referral traffic. Specify which pages you want to drive that traffic to, such as product pages, blog pages, or landing pages.
- Distribution channels: Popular channels include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram.
- Paid advertising: Detail any paid advertising that will take place on these channels.
5. Define Your Marketing Budget
Make sure you know the costs to develop a marketing budget and outline each expense in this section of your marketing plan.
6. Identify Your Competition
Research the key players in your industry and consider profiling each one. Not every competitor will pose the same challenges to your business. For example, one competitor might be ranking highly on search engines for keywords you want your website to rank for, while another competitor might have a heavy footprint on a social network where you plan to launch an account.
7. Outline Your Plan’s Contributors and Their Responsibilities
With your marketing plan fully fleshed out, it’s time to explain who’s doing what. While not delving too deeply into day-to-day projects, specify which teams and team leaders are in charge of specific content types, channels, KPIs, and more.
Types of Marketing Plans
Depending on the company you work with, you might want to create various marketing plans. Here are different samples to suit your needs:
1. Quarterly or Annual Marketing Plans
These plans highlight the strategies or campaigns you’ll take on in a certain period.
2. Social Media Marketing Plan
This plan highlights the channels, tactics, and campaigns you intend to accomplish specifically on social media.
3. Content Marketing Plan
This plan could highlight different strategies, tactics, and campaigns in which you’ll use content to promote your business or product.
4. New Product Launch Marketing Plan / Go-To-Market Strategy
This will be a roadmap for the strategies and tactics you‘ll implement to promote a new product.
5. Growth Marketing Plan
Growth marketing plans use experimentation and data to drive results.
Crafting a marketing plan might seem daunting, but with a structured approach, it becomes manageable and rewarding. Start by stating your mission, defining your KPIs, and identifying your buyer personas. Clearly outline your content initiatives, budget, and competition, and ensure each team member knows their responsibilities.
If you’re looking for someone to create your marketing plan, you’re in the right place. Ignite Search is a full-service marketing agency specialising in SEO, Website Development, Branding and Design, Digital Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing and Chinese Marketing. For more guidance, or to ask questions about creating a marketing plan for your own company, check out our blog or contact us for a free consultation.
