What is a marketing plan?
A marketing plan is a strategic document detailing how you intend to market a business. A marketing plan is a critical planning document in any business. Failing to plan, is planning to fail.
The purpose of the plan is 2 fold:
- First, helps you think strategically about your marketing and business
- Second, it gives you a road map to track and measure results
Many businesses create a plan but never go back and review results. It is important to have an action list of items to be done and monitored.
What is included in a marketing plan?
A marketing plan is a business document. It typically covers the following key areas:
- Who is your ideal client? It defines key market segments
- Details your products and services
- Action plan for the next 12 months
- Goals, milestones and related costs
- Responsibilities; who will responsible for what?
What are the steps to create a marketing plan?
The marketing fits in with a business plan. These two planning documents go hand-in-hand. For this reason it is important to have a business plan first, then create a marketing plan. A section in most business plans covers the marketing plan.
It is extremely important to know where the business currently is. The marketing plan for a start-up vs a well established business is vastly different. The strategies and tactics are very different. A start-up business will focus on reaching out to the market and getting their first customers. An established business will focus on generating more customers, expanding its current customer base and increasing spend per customer.
Here are 10 quick steps to create your marketing plan:
- Define your ideal customer
- Detail what makes your business different
- Your products and services
- What is your lead generation plan
- What is your lead conversion plan
- What is your customer service plan
- Detail your most important numbers
- Your marketing process
- Your marketing action plan
- Review and monitor results
What are the benefits of a marketing plan?
Here are a couple key benefits of investing in a marketing plan:
- Gives you clarity. You have invested time in thinking about your business, marketing, ideal clients (market), messages, competition, etc.
- Helps you define and become clear on your USP (unique selling proposition) and message for the market
- Decide on key marketing channels and allocate budget accordingly
- Create measurements to track success; it becomes measurable
Interested in more? We can help with a marketing strategy.
You can also get a set of business journals. This includes a 90 day goal planner, business ideas journal, marketing ideas journal and more!