Marketing is what drives sales; without sales, you don’t make the money required to stay in business long-term. As important as marketing plans are, many business leaders don’t devote enough time and resources to them. Great leaders take the time to continually develop marketing strategies and plan to build a company with a purpose.
Business leaders should ask two key questions when starting to develop a marketing plan: What problem do I solve for my customers? What makes me different to everyone else on the market?
Marketing plans and strategies are important because they make sales easier for any business owner. When you target your ideal customer in a smarter way, you reduce the costs of marketing and increase your chances of converting leads into sales. Asking what problem, you solve and why customers should choose you helps you identify the specific issues of someone ready to buy.
Strategic marketing planning describes how a company will adapt to take advantage of opportunities in its constantly changing environment and protect itself from potential threats.
Step 1
Situation Analysis
Situation analysis is defined as an analysis of the internal and external factors of a business. It clearly identifies a business’s capabilities, customers, potential customers and business environment, and their impact on the company. This first section of your plan defines your company and the products / services you offer. It’s a snapshot of your current situation and clarifies how the products and services you offer set you apart from the competition. The situational analysis is also called the SWOT analysis standing for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.
It is vital that before you start planning any marketing activities you must understand the market you are operating in and your audience. With current digital platforms targeting has become extremely specialised and segmented, without understanding your target audience you will not be able to position your products or services in a competitive manor. You must have a clear understanding of what your competitors are offering and be able to show how your product or service will better service their needs.
Strengths and weaknesses are internal to your business while opportunities and threats relate to outside factors. The objectives are to try and turn your weaknesses into strengths and your Threats into Opportunities. For example, and external Threat would be the high street struggling during these Covid-19 times. Develop a website and expand your business online!
Step 2
Define your target audience
Developing a profile of your prospective customer is an important next step. You can describe prospects in terms of demographics — age, sex, family composition, earnings, and geographic location — as well as lifestyle. This is often referred to as a Persona. You may have several audiences you are targeting, each with a different persona. For example, a florist may target their bouquets to brides and also to corporate offices. These Personas will be completely different and therefore will need to be reached and spoken to in completely different ways.
Step 3
Establish Clear marketing objectives
Setting goals sounds easy but it’s quite often a challenge for marketers. It’s important to stay focused when setting objectives, there is no point posting 5 social media posts a day if they do not achieve a specific marketing goal. Therefore, your objectives must be SMART. SMART goals are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time bound.
- Specific
When setting objectives, you need to make it clear what you wish to achieve. Target a specific area for improvement and include real numbers and deadlines such as growing website traffic
- Measurable
Makes sure you can track your objectives and measure the success.
- Attainable
Your objectives should be challenging but still possible to achieve. You don’t want to set your team up for failure. Look at previous performance and make and educated estimate of what is achievable.
- Realistic
Be honest with yourself and make sure your objectives are realistic for you and your team. Keep in mind any obstacles you may need to overcome to reach your goals.
- Time-bound
Give yourself a deadline as to when you want to achieve your goals. This will help you plan your tasks and allow you to see whether you’re on target for hitting your goal.
Using the example of growing website traffic your SMART objective would be:
Increase website traffic by 25% by June 2021
Step 4
Research Marketing Tactics
This section is the heart and soul of your marketing plan. In the previous sections, you outlined what your marketing must accomplish and identified your best prospects; now it’s time to detail the tactics you’ll use to reach these prospects and accomplish your goals.
There are so many different marketing platforms to use and this section of your plan can be the most complicated.
If you have the budget it is wise to invest in speaking with an expert who has experience in a large range of tactics to save you wasting time and budget on trialing them yourself.
The best marketing plans will plot the customer journey and talk to them along the way to generate prospective leads, to nurturing these leads through remarketing, email campaigns or other suitable methods.
Step 5
Set your marketing budget
You’ll need to devote a percentage of projected gross sales to your annual marketing budget. Of course, when starting a business, this may mean borrowing or self-financing. But remember marketing is essential for sales. You could have the best product offering on the planet but if nobody knows you are there you will have no customers and therefore no sales.
When starting out it is vital to review all your activity, don’t jump in and try lots of things all at once as it will prove harder to understand what is and what isn’t working.
Keep marketing and keep evaluating, it may take a while to get the perfect marketing mix, but it is an investment in your business’s long term growth and sustainability.
