Marketing Plan: 10 Steps to Stragetize a Full-Proof Marketing Coup

The advancement of technology has brought forward colossal marketing opportunities for businesses. But there are things beyond technology that enable you to build a strategic marketing plan for your business. This article will familiarize you with tips that can help you develop the best marketing strategies.

1. Figure Out Your Target Audience

Determining the target audience is a crucial aspect of your marketing strategy. It is one of the fundamental principles for marketers to adhere to while shaping a successful strategy. After determining the target audience, you need to figure out their expectations for new marketing strategies.
You can also create buyer personas according to your target market. Even though buyer personas are undervalued, they can serve as the root of all your marketing decisions. Buyer personas are also useful for analyzing potential opportunities and focusing on relevant marketing efforts.

2. Define Business Goals

Before you start strategizing your marketing plan, you need to have a clear vision of your business goals. Your business goals include where you desire to take your company. It also includes your company values because that’s how your customers perceive your brand.
You also need to ensure that your goals are SMART, which means Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound. Suppose you wish to increase your sales by 10% by the end of the next quarter. It shows that you have a specific, measurable, and time-bound. It can also be attainable and realistic according to your efforts and other factors.

3. Understand Market Trends and Your Competitors

Knowing what your competitors are doing is empowering, and it will have a huge impact on your marketing efforts. Directing all your marketing strategies toward LinkedIn won’t be of much help if all your competitors find success from Instagram. When you know what others are doing, you will have a fair idea of where to start.
You also need to acquaint yourself with the trends in the current market because what’s trending today might not be in the news the next day. Awareness of the latest trends ensures that you are able to stay on par with your competitors or even overtake them. Market awareness will also ensure that you are able to develop a more detailed understanding of your customers.

4. Add a Unique Selling Point

Describe your products in a way that makes them more appealing to your customers. You need to highlight what benefits your customers will be getting from using your products or services. Customers love products or services that can solve some of their pain points.
You always need to be mindful of the competition while formulating your marketing strategy. Remember that several other companies are selling products or services similar to yours. Customers will be looking for specific reasons to choose your brand over your competitors.
This is where the USP of your products comes into play. The USP will make your products and services special and make the audience choose them. Perform extensive competitor analysis to determine what you offer and what your competitors don’t.

5. Create Content for Buyers at Different Stages of Their Journey

Planning content is also a part of your marketing efforts. You need to determine what type of content you will post and where.
You can experiment with different types of content, like photos, videos, blogs, how-to guides, long-form educational content, and more. You can also post on different platforms, including social media, guest blogs, and company blogs.
You need to go deeper in finding out the type of content you wish to post on different platforms. Always remember to plan your content calendar well in advance, including topics, piece outline, and publishing domain. Every piece of content needs to target customers in different segments of the buying cycle.

ALSO READ: How to Integrate Content Marketing and SEO

6. Fix a Budget

Remember that fixing a marketing budget is crucial for every business, irrespective of its size. When you sit down to set a proper budget, you can understand how much you can afford to spend on your marketing efforts.

Several forms of content don’t require capital investments. For instance, writing for the company blog only requires your time and no money. But you can use the marketing budget for paid tools, paid search, and paid social to increase your reach.

7. Determine Evaluation Metrics

Having a marketing plan isn’t enough because you need to monitor it constantly. A strategic marketing plan will focus on key performance metrics and the ways to measure them. You can set KPIs for your marketing strategies according to the goals you wish to achieve. If you have distinct marketing objectives, you won’t find it challenging to convert them into measurable metrics. For instance, you might wish to increase your social media follower base by 20% in the next two months.

If you want to achieve this goal, you will have to improve the quality of your content and promote them well. You will have to constantly track your social media followers for the next two months to see if you have achieved the goal.
Remember that every KPI also needs to be accompanied by a measurement method. You can track bounce rates, website traffic, email subscribers, and more.

8. Focus on a Distribution Plan

Strategizing your marketing plan also involves determining how to distribute your marketing messages. You have several methods of distributing your marketing messages, but not all of them are suitable for your business.

You can choose email marketing and create a list of qualified leads who might be interested in your products or services. Several businesses trust social media as a reliable method for distributing marketing messages. However, with so many social media platforms, businesses choose the ones that are mostly dominated by their target audience.

9. Outsource Resources

Sometimes, you might not have all the resources to properly execute your marketing efforts. In that case, you can always outsource marketing resources. You can also look for software that can help you manage different aspects of your marketing plan, including maintaining communication at different levels of the organization.

10. Draft an Executive Summary

The executive summary is usually the first document that you need in your marketing plan. But it’s prudent to wait till the end to draft it. Once you figure out every aspect of your marketing plan, you will be able to develop a distinct and actionable executive summary. The document should include the following information:

• Product or service descriptions
• Overview of business objectives
• Marketing purposes
• Chosen marketing methods
• Steps to fulfill business goals

Wrapping up

Once you are done strategizing your marketing plan, you need to focus on implementing it as soon as possible. Remember that the enthusiasm to execute your marketing plan is crucial for its success. To learn about the concepts of marketing, explore Sales and Marketing Courses from the world’s best universities on Emeritus.