When was the last time you revisited you marketing plan? Maybe you don’t really have a marketing plan in place and are just sending money to Google, Yelp or Facebook. Having a clear-cut marketing plan is a requirement to run a successful business, and to sustain it, should be updated every year.
Without an annual marketing plan, things can get chaotic — and hinder’s the business from achieving its revenue goals due to a misallocation of resources from not definitively knowing budgets.
To help you create a marketing plan, we’ve put together a list of key components to include in your marketing plan.
First, we’ll talk about how to create a marketing plan and review what a high-level marketing plan contains.
Marketing plans can be granular and specific to reflect the industry you're in — whether you're selling to consumers or other businesses.
These are the components every effective marketing plan needs:
You probably are already aware of what a business summary is, but this is a critical part in building a foundation for every business. The primary aspect of a business summary is the mission statement — knowing this will help determine the best path in growing the business and what marketing strategies will be in alignment with the business.
Things to include:
Business initiatives are direct, executable components that are specific like advertising on social media — not a big-picture initiative.
Mentioned in the business initiatives example, having a clear customer avatar or profile is important. Knowing who your target customer must likely looks like will help determine which marketing channels will be best.
Included in a Customer Avatar:
A SWOT analysis is used to get a complete view of your business, looking at its Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
The importance of a SWOT analysis is in understanding the best path of achieving the business goals and is often done in tandem with market research and competitor analysis.
A very simple concept that includes looking at your target market and the players in that market.
Ket Components to Look at:
Your market strategy includes how you will approach the market you intent to sell a specific product to.
For example, if you are offering tax services to a market, you might approach the market with a solution to clean past bookkeeping mishaps.
Every marketing strategy should include the 7 P’s of marketing:
Understanding the costs that are expected for the marketing initiatives is crucial. First the budget is dictated by the amount of free capital the business has as well as the expect return from the marketing initiatives.
The budget should be dependent on both the ROI and free capital.
Defining the primary marketing channels as well as jotting down key notes on the channels as well as potential success metrics will help guide your marketing efforts.
Key components:
Complete an analysis of the technology needed to pursue the main marketing initiative. For example, when running an email marketing campaign, there are mass e-mailing software that are needed — and there are many companies providing this service and thus would need to be inspected to ensure the best software is procured for your campaign.