Do you take a good, hard look at your business or brand’s marketing plan every year?
You should. A yearly marketing plan helps you set your marketing on the right course to make your company’s business goals a reality. Oftentimes, brands depend on Facebook and word of mouth for their marketing. Brands have no clear strategy or plan so instead of driving the business forward they hinder it. In today’s day and age having a proper strategy is crucial. Think of it as a high-level plan that guides the direction of your brand’s campaigns, goals, and growth.
Without one, things can get messy — and it’s nearly impossible to put a number on the budget you’ll need to secure for the projects, hiring, and outsourcing you’ll encounter over the course of a year if you don’t have a plan.
Keep in mind there are variations to the marketing plan you need, depending on your industry and the goals of your specific business. To make creating an effective marketing plan easier, we’ve put together a list of what to include in your plan and also a template where you can easily fill in the blanks.
To jump-start your strategy, let’s dive into how to create a marketing plan and then take a look at what a high-level marketing plan has inside.
In this article, we’re going to discuss:
- How to Create a Marketing Plan
- What a High-Level Marketing Plan Includes
- Marketing Plan Template You Can Use
Strategic Marketing Plan in 2021 How to Create a Marketing Plan
- Conduct a situation analysis.
- Define your target audience.
- Write SMART goals.
- Analyze your tactics.
- Set your budget.
Conduct a situation analysis.
Before you can get started with your marketing plan, you have to know your current situation. What are your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats? Doing a simple SWOT analysis is the first step to creating an effective marketing plan.
Additionally, you should also have an understanding of the market. How do you compare to your competitors? Doing a market analysis should help you with this step.
Think about how other products or services are better than yours. Plus, consider the gaps in a competitor’s approach. What are they missing? What can you offer that’ll give you a competitive advantage? Think about what sets you apart. Answering questions like this should help you figure out what your customer wants, which brings us to step number two.
Define your target audience.
Once you have a better understanding of the market and your company’s situation, make sure you know who your target audience is. If your company already has buyer personas, this step might just mean you have to refine your current personas. If you don’t have a buyer persona, you should create one. To do this, you might have to do some market research.
Your buyer persona should include demographic information such as age, gender, and income. It will also include psychographic information such as pain points and goals. What drives your audience? What problems do they have that you provide the solution to?
Once you have this information written out, it’ll help you define what your goals are, which brings us to step number three.
Write SMART goals.
After you’ve figured out your current situation and know your audience, you can begin to define your SMART goals. SMART goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. This means that all your goals should be specific and include a time frame for which you want to complete it. For example, your goal could be to increase your followers on a particular platform by 25% in six months. Depending on your overall marketing goals, this should be quite attainable. Furthermore, this goal is specific, measurable, and time-bound.
Before you start any kind of implementation, you should write out your goals. Then, you can begin to analyze which strategy will help you achieve that goal. That brings us to step number four.
Analyze Marketing Plan your tactics.
At this step, we assume that you’ve written down your goals based on your target audience and current situation. Now, you have to figure out what strategies will help you achieve your goals. Plus, what are the right channels and tactics to focus on? For example, if your goal is to increase your Facebook likes by 35% in three months, your tactics might include hosting a giveaway, responding to every comment, and posting eight times on Facebook per week.
Once you know your goals, brainstorming several tactics to achieve those goals should be easy. However, while you’re writing your strategies, you have to keep your budget in mind, which brings us to step number five.
Set your Marketing Plan budget.
Before you can begin implementing any of your ideas that you’ve come up with in the steps above, you have to know your budget. For example, your tactics might be to created PPC ads on social media. However, if you don’t have the budget for that, then you might not be able to achieve your goals.
While you’re writing out your strategies, be sure to note an estimated budget. You can include the time it’ll take to complete each tactic in addition to the assets you might need to purchase, such as ad space.
Strategic Marketing Plan in 2021 Marketing Plan Outline
Now that you know the steps for creating your marketing plan, let’s dive into the elements that a high-level marketing plan should include.
Marketing plans can get quite granular to reflect the industry you’re in, whether you’re selling to consumers (B2C) or other businesses (B2B), and how big your digital presence is. Nonetheless, here are the elements every effective marketing plan includes:
Business Summary
In a marketing plan, your Business Summary is exactly what it sounds like: a summary of the organization. This includes:
- The company name.
- Where it’s headquartered.
- A mission statement.
Business Initiatives
The Business Initiatives element of a marketing plan helps you segment the various goals of your department. Be careful not to include big-picture company initiatives, which you’d normally find in a business plan. This section of your marketing plan should outline the projects that are specific to marketing. You’ll also describe the goals of those projects and how those goals will be measured.
Customer Analysis
Here’s where you’ll conduct some basic market research. If your company has already done a thorough market research study, this section of your marketing plan might be easier to put together.
Ultimately, this element of your marketing plan will help you describe the industry you’re selling to and your buyer persona. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional description of your ideal customer, focusing on traits like:
- Age
- Location
- Title
- Goals
- Personal challenges
- Pains
- Triggering events
Competitor Analysis
Your buyer persona has choices when it comes to solving their problems, choices in both the types of solutions they consider and the providers that can administer those solutions. In your market research, you should consider your competition, what they do well, and where the gaps are that you can potentially fill. This can include:
- Positioning
- Market share
- Offerings
- Pricing
SWOT Analysis
Your marketing plan’s Business Summary also includes a SWOT analysis, which stands for the business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Be patient with your business’s SWOT analysis; you’ll write most of it based on your market research from the sections above and your strategy below.
Market Strategy
Your Market Strategy uses the information included in the above sections to describe how your company should approach the market. What will your business offer your buyer personas that your competitors aren’t already offering them?
In a full-length marketing plan, this section can contain the “seven Ps of marketing”:
- Product
- Price
- Place
- Promotion
- People
- Process
- Physical Evidence
(You’ll learn more about these seven sub-components inside our free marketing plan template, which you can download below.)
Marketing Plan Budget
Don’t mistake the Budget element of your marketing plan with your product’s price or other company financials. Your budget describes how much money the business has allotted the marketing team to pursue the initiatives and goals outlined in the elements above.
Depending on how many individual expenses you have, you should consider itemizing this budget by what specifically you’ll spend your budget on. Example marketing expenses include:
- Outsourcing costs to a marketing agency and/or other providers
- Marketing software
- Paid promotions
- Events (those you’ll host and/or attend)
Marketing Plan Marketing Channels
Lastly, your marketing plan will include a list of your marketing channels. While your company might promote the product, itself using certain ad space, your marketing channels are where you’ll publish the content that educates your buyers, generates leads, and spreads awareness of your brand.
If you publish (or intend to publish) on social media, this is the place to talk about it. Use the Marketing Channels section of your marketing plan to lay out which social networks you want to launch a business page on, what you’ll use this social network for, and how you’ll measure your success on this network. Part of this section’s purpose is to prove to your superiors, both inside and outside the marketing department, that these channels will serve to grow the business.
Businesses with extensive social media presence might even consider elaborating on their social strategy in a separate social media plan template.
Financial Projections
Knowing the budget and doing analysis on the marketing channels you want to invest in, you should be able to come up with a plan for how much budget to invest in which tactics based on expected ROI. From there, you’ll be able to come up with financial projections for the year. These won’t be 100% accurate but can help with executive planning.
Free Marketing Plan Template [Word]
Now that you know what to include in your plan, it’s time to grab your template and see how best to organize the six elements explained above. The following marketing plan template opens directly in Microsoft Word, so you can edit each section as you see fit: