A Marketing Plan should be a “MUST” in every business. Even if it is for a small company. The main reason it is so important is because you become organizational towards your business growth. It works as the best guide where to lead all your efforts. And growth can happen in different scenarios as: sales, community, type of public interaction, in quality of products and services and others. That’s why is really good idea to work a marketing plan every year.

How to Create a Marketing Plan?

    1. Define your Business Goals
    2. Conduct a Situation Analysis.
    3. Define Your Target Personas.
    4. Develop Your Marketing Goals
    5. Create Your Campaigns & Build Your Activity Plan

Step 1: Define Your Business Goals

Before starting tactics and execution, your marketing team should ask the leadership team to determine business goals for the next 1-3 years. Your goal can be external attention, internal attention or both. When setting goals (whether at the business level or in other areas), write the goals in SMART format to ensure accountability. SMART stands for “specific”, “measurable”, “achievable”, “realistic” and “time limit” and represents as the following examples:

  • Increase product line revenue by 20% in the next 12 months to reach US$50K
  • Double the revenue through distributors in the next two years
  • Increase the profit margin from 20% to 30% by the end of the year

Step 2: Conduct a Situation Analysis.

Ultimately, we want marketing to provide a consistent flow of high-quality prospects to help drive new sales opportunities and drive growth. You want your technical target audience and customers to be happy. And usually, budget is limited and bandwidth is tight.

The way to achieve all these goals is to use an intelligent marketing method that will establish a marketing strategy and execution plan that is aligned with your business goals, starting with the following:

  • SWOT- competitive advantage, target market, target audience, current positioning/message, product maturity, channel partners, etc. of your current marketing plan’s advantages, disadvantages, opportunities and threats.
SWOT ANALYSIS
SWOT ANALYSIS EXAMPLE

 

Step 3:  Define Your Target Personas.

You probably know the profile of the most valuable prospects and the sales process that the company uses to convert them from prospects to customer opportunities. However, as the company grows, you will not know the unique situation of each potential customer, and a message will not work for everyone. You need to customize marketing methods by creating buyer personas.

Buyer personas are fictitious representations of ideal customers based on demographic data, online behavior, and your educated guesses about personal history, motivation and concerns.

You can read more details about buyer personas in our blog about How to define your buyer personas.

Step 4: Develop Your Marketing Goals

Armed with your business strategy, areas of greatest opportunity and clear people, you are now ready to set marketing goals. Goal setting is essential for adjusting your marketing organization, narrowing the focus and setting the overall marketing strategy

Recording your goals ensures that your team is aligned around your primary marketing focus and the goals that can be achieved through marketing efforts. Your goal can be external attention, internal attention or both.

Write goals in a SMART format that helps ensure accountability. SMART representative:

    • Specific
    • Measurable
    • Achievable
    • Reality
    • Time limit

For example, SMART’s marketing goal may be: “By the fourth quarter of 2021, the number of qualified potential customers delivered to the elderly market will increase by 10%.” Develop at least three no more than five SMART marketing goals.

Step 5: Create Your Campaigns & Build Your Activity Plan

Now that you have set your marketing goals and have a budget, you can plan your activities next. The most effective way to transform a marketing strategy into an execution plan is to use a campaign structure. You can think of a campaign as a series of activities on a common theme or goal.

With limited time and budget, you can use marketing campaigns to make panoramas without problems. You can create new videos you want to make, white papers to write and promote.

Campaigns can run within scope. They cover everything from major product launches to building thought leadership in specific market segments, to increasing network traffic and potential customers. Here are two examples of marketing activities and their stated goals and KPIs:

Advertising campaign-lead generation and conversion

Description-Through content and partner joint marketing, attract high-quality potential customers who can be turned into opportunities KPI

1-Increase sales leads by 35% to 210 per month KPI

2- Increase the conversion rate of potential business opportunities from 6% to 8%

Advertising campaign-partner marketing

Description-Develop and implement channel joint marketing plan KPI

1-Publish at least one potential co-branded content every quarter KPI

2-Generate 100 net new leads through joint marketing activities

Strategy is an evolution, and it takes a lot of time to develop. However, having a clear strategic direction will ensure a cohesive marketing plan that can be mapped to your role through the campaign and subject to time constraints and budget constraints.

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