You need a Marketing Plan
Imagine you’re a business owner with a new product or service. You know you need to get the
word out there, but where do you start? This is where a marketing plan comes in. It is a detailed,
all-encompassing document laying out your company’s marketing strategy and tactics to
achieve your business objectives. Think of it as a roadmap that guides your marketing efforts
and provides a systematic approach to promoting your products or services to your target
audience. From identifying your target market and determining your unique selling proposition
to deciding on the best channels to reach your audience and setting a budget, a marketing plan
covers all the bases. It’s a crucial tool that helps you stay focused, organized, and on track toward achieving your marketing goals.
What makes a Strategic Marketing Plan?
The art of strategy is a core aspect of an effective marketing plan. Advocate Digital, a major
Digital Marketing Agency in Stevenage, proposes that what makes for an effective strategy is the
implementation of real data acquired from an understanding of your business coupled with
creative approaches and critical thinking.
A strategic marketing plan is a comprehensive roadmap that outlines how a business aims to
achieve its marketing goals and objectives. This plan considers the overall business strategy to
ensure that marketing efforts align with the larger goals of the organization. It’s not just about
the tactical details of how marketing campaigns will be executed, but it also involves critical
thinking, creativity, and data analysis to create an all-encompassing marketing approach.
In summary, a strategic marketing plan helps businesses to optimize their marketing efforts by
providing an efficient, effective, and aligned approach to achieve their goals. Let’s dive deep into
what it takes to build a Strategic Marketing Plan.
Step-by-step ideas for a strategic Marketing Plan
- Market Research: One of the first and critical things to get out of the way in building
your marketing plan is Market Research. This helps you to understand how the costumer,
the costumers needs and the market interact with each other and with you. In doing this,
you want to:
a. Conduct thorough market research to understand industry trends, customer
needs, and market dynamics.
b. Analyse data related to market size, growth potential, and key drivers influencing
the industry.
c. Identify opportunities and potential challenges in the market. - Competitor Analysis: Find out what products/services are already offered & what your
competition is doing. This can help you properly align your unique value proposition.
Your Unique Value Proposition (UVP) is what sets you, your product and your service
apart from others. To analyse competitors, you will need to:
a. Identify and analyse key competitors in your industry.
b. Evaluate competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT
analysis).
c. Assess competitors’ marketing strategies, messaging, and market positioning. - Identify Target Audience: Understanding Customer behaviour alone is not enough. You
must dive deeper to know exactly who you are selling to. To do this, you can:
a. Clearly define the characteristics of your ideal customers, considering
demographics, psychographics, and behaviours.
b. Use market segmentation to identify specific target segments within the broader
market.
c. Develop detailed buyer personas to humanize and understand your target
audience better. - Set your objectives: To ensure the efficiency and effectiveness of your strategy, it is
important to set clear and measurable objectives and goals. Without these, a plan is
merely a wish. These objectives must be SMART, meaning they are specific, measurable,
achievable, relevant, and time bound. Tracking and monitoring your progress towards
these objectives will help you stay on track and achieve success. - Define Strategies: Write down exactly what marketing strategies you’re going to use.
a. Create comprehensive marketing plans that aim to tackle the market challenges
and capitalize on the identified opportunities.
b. It is important to make sure that the strategies being developed are in line with
the interests and needs of the target audience, and that they are effectively
reached and engaged in the process.
c. How do the four marketing mix elements (product, price, place, and promotion)
support the overall strategy? You have to factor these to define a wholesome
strategy. - Define Success: It is crucial to establish a framework to evaluate the performance and
progress of each objective. You need to define a method to measure the success of your
marketing campaign, either by identifying key performance indicators (KPIs) that will
gauge the effectiveness of your marketing efforts or by creating benchmarks or targets
for success based on industry standards or past performance.
Once you have thoroughly addressed these, remember to revisit and update these steps
regularly to adapt to changes in the market, industry, or internal factors. A strategic marketing
plan is a dynamic document that should evolve based on ongoing analysis and feedback.
Whilst these steps may not be entirely holistic in terms of process, these steps highlighted
contain the fundamental overview of what it takes to build a strong Strategic Marketing Plan.
Need a free strategy session?
For deeper Insights & Strategy, our experts at Advocate Digital Marketing Agency, we are ready
to help curate a Marketing strategy just for you. Reach out to us now for your free session