Creating a good marketing plan is necessary if you want to experience business success. People need to know about and connect with your product or service, or you’ll be doomed to obscurity. However, creating a solid marketing plan is easier said than done. There are so many factors to consider, but if you check out our guide on creating an exceptional marketing plan, you’ll be well-prepared for the journey ahead.
Having a marketing plan is essential to the success of your business. How can your business succeed when you don’t know anything about your customers or how to garner their attention, converting them to paying customers? Not having a marketing plan is the equivalent of groping around in the dark. You’ll have no clue who your customers are, how your competitors behave, or even industry standards. It requires much research, but it’s very rewarding. Learn more about the various steps to creating a great marketing plan below.
Your executive summary will be the foundation of your marketing plan and it’ll guide your strategy from a high level. It’s a summary of what your organization is about, and how you’ll make an impact in your industry.
We would be remiss if we didn’t note that a summary can change over time as your goals pivot. Always refer to this summary before making big decisions, to determine if it’s in alignment with your present vision.
Executive summaries should have a market analysis section to give you a snapshot of the industry, and a section on target audience, competition, and investment portfolios. These sections will help guide your relevant research.
When you’re lost in the woods, the first thing you should do is pull out your compass. Performing a situational analysis is your compass in the marketing landscape. Your situational analysis should tell you the state of the industry and consumer patterns, which you can easily pull from various marketing reports and case studies. It’ll also tell you about your biggest competitors, their market share, and business strategies.
The more you know about your competitors the better off you’ll be. Who’s the top dog in your industry? What are some of the ways they engage with their customers that work that you can then adopt? You should answer these questions and more in your situational analysis report.
After taking a hard look at your industry and competitors, you should do a deep dive into the kind of customers you want to target. Creating a buyer’s persona is a great first step to doing this. You essentially create a fake “customer” from demographic information that you’ve gleaned from your situational analysis.
For instance, if you’re a diaper company, it’s a strong possibility that you’ll focus one of your product lines on newborns. Because of this, you’ll need to determine what the parents of these newborns are looking for in a diaper product and design your product around that. Your analysis could indicate that they want a diaper that doesn’t leak, that’s environmentally friendly, and hypoallergenic for their child’s sensitive skin.
You need to take their likes and dislikes and take how they communicate, as well as tonality into account, such as casual or formal, so that you can craft content that will resonate with them.
A content map is a content plan that follows the customer no matter where they are in a customer lifecycle. You might have content for different mediums, including blog posts, newsletters, videos, podcasts, or even interactive quizzes.
When you create your strategy map, you’ll take those buyer personas you created, and organize them into a buyer’s journey map. The buyer’s journey is where a customer is in the process of buying your product. The buyer’s journey can be divided into this flow: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Service, and Retention.
Each stage has content that’s best associated with it. You might use social media ads as a way to expose the customers to your brand, making them aware of it. That might trigger them to do deeper research. This ad might take them to an interactive quiz where they can consider their options. After they know for a fact that they need this product, while they’re on your website, they might read a few blog posts you have in place to inform them about the nuances. After that, they may decide to go with your company, possibly because you put a call to action at the end of your blog post. If they buy your product, you can offer them a protection plan at checkout to help service them should they need it. After that, get their email address at checkout and send them updates on new products in the future through a newsletter so you can retain them as a future customer.
If you look closely, you’ll notice content was involved in the entire customer experience with your company, from the ad that initially caught their attention, to the email newsletter encouraging them to become a repeat customer. Make sure your content strategy is logical and seamless, with no hiccups in the process.
After doing all of the above, you should create a marketing mix for your product or service line. The Marketing Mix consists of 4 aspects:
By sketching out these 4 P’s, you’ll better understand the details of how your product fits into the overarching ecosystem of the industry. What product or service will you offer? How will you promote it? Social media? Commercials? YouTube ads? What place will you sell it? Will it be brick-and-mortar, online, or both? Figuring out these 4 P’s will help you iron out the details of your products or services during their lifecycle.
If you’re interested in learning more about marketing strategy and want to know how to get your small business off the ground, work with us here at Fusion Tech Media. We’ll help you craft a masterful marketing strategy that will help your business grow and succeed.
Our versatility and depth of knowledge about various Internet Marketing strategies allows FusionTech Media to apply best practices across multiple industries. FusionTech Media combines in-depth marketing research with creativity. We can create professional branding, a visually appealing website and an original web app specifically for your industry needs!
