A Step by Step Guide to Write a Great Marketing Plan (+Examples)
Table of Content
A marketing plan is important yet many small businesses avoid creating one. A good marketing plan can become a roadmap for your success. A marketing plan identifies your target audience, goals, mission, and creates your marketing strategy. You will be keen to know what a marketing plan is and how it is able to do all that. In this blog, we will discuss how to write a marketing plan and discuss examples of a good marketing plan. Let us first discuss what a marketing plan is.
What is a marketing plan?
A marketing plan is used by businesses to introduce, organize, track, and deliver their products & services to potential clients. A marketing plan outlines your marketing strategy for a specific financial year or quarter. It explains your plans & strategies in detail.
Let us discuss some important tips for making the plan:
- Know your niche
- Have a unique selling proposition for your brand
- Get an insight of your potential client
- Have a strategic plan
- Have clear objectives
- Have clear goals
- Look at a bigger picture
Types of Marketing Plans
There are various kinds of marketing plans & strategies. A typical marketing strategy revolves around: business marketing, a description of a business marketing position, a timeline when the tasks will be completed, key performance indicators, and a description of your target market. A market plan can be of any of the four types:
- Annual Marketing Plan
- Paid Marketing Plan
- Social Media Marketing Plan
- Content Marketing Plan
An annual marketing plan helps businesses keep track of goals and objectives for the year. It helps you outline your business objectives and marketing strategies with specific goals.
Paid marketing if used wisely, can get you instant results for all your efforts. It involves paying organization to market your products.
Social Media Marketing Plans can go a long way, but you need to invest time, energy and resources into social media. To get into details you can read our blog, What Role can Social Media play in Promoting Your Business?
Content marketing is the strategic approach for creating valuable content to attract the right customers. The 4 Proven Ways to Leverage the Potential of Content will help you understand content marketing.
How to Write a Marketing Plan?
After you have understood the different types of market plans you need to understand how to write one. Marketing plans vary depending on the type of business you are in or the type of product you sell, however, certain important elements are a part of every marketing plan. A good marketing plan includes several elements. Here is a synopsis of what steps you need to take into consideration to create a good marketing plan:
- Table of Contents
- Executive Summary
- Opportunity Analysis
- Goals and Objectives
- Mission statement
- Target audience
- Marketing strategy
- Buyer Personas
- Budget
- Distribution Strategy
- Promotion Strategy
- Timeline
A table of content consists of a list of the titles included in your marketing plan. It can be referred to as the content page of your document and it includes titles and subheadings of your chapters along with their page numbers.
An executive summary is the overview of a business plan. It summarizes the key points of your marketing plan. If you want you can read in details on how to write an executive summary.
Opportunity analysis emphasizes on discovering future opportunities, threats, and a detailed evaluation of the market. Many companies go for a SWOT analysis to summarize their strengths and weaknesses.
This section of the marketing plan should talk about what you plan to set as your goals. You need to define your goals, track them, be realistic and chalk out a plan on how you will reach your goals.
Mission statement is important for you and your team. Your mission statement should explain your marketing activities. The mission statement should answer questions like what you plan to do, why do it, and who are you planning to do it for?
Target audience is the most basic, but important aspect of marketing. You need to identify your clients. You need to get specific about your target audience and segmenting them further into smaller groups which will help more.
Marketing strategy is a long term approach which helps a business to sustain completion and achieve your marketing goals. An effective marketing strategy combines the 4 Ps of the marketing mix – Product, Price, Place, and Promotion.
Now that your target audience has been defined you need to figure out your buyer persona. Buyer’s persona involves studying the people functioning in your target markets and analyzing the ones that represent your customer base.
Budget indicates the resources allotted for a specific task in an organization. You must plan what you can spend on your marketing activities. Calculating the budget for your marketing campaign can be intimidating initially, as it involves a lot of work and planning however, over time you will be able to put together a smart budget to keep things on track.
Distribution is how you plan to deliver your product or service to the client. You need to check that if your product be delivered through a website? You need to be sure that your distribution channel is aligned with your product or services.
After the distribution strategy, the promotional aspect is the next step to take care of. It is a detailed strategy that helps you expand your business. It helps to optimize the utilization of marketing tools and generate demand. A simple example would be using some useful Facebook tools to understand and cater to your audience’s needs on Facebook.
Creating a timeline determines how much time you will take and also when your task will be completed. The timeline is usually based on your goals and objectives. These days there are project management software to help you with your timeline.
The best marketing plan examples
After getting to know how to write a marketing plan let us look at the best examples of marketing strategy templates:
Buffer
Buffer’s is one of the best content marketing examples, due to its content marketing strategy.
Forbes
An effective marketing plan has a clear structure. Forbes has a highly effective marketing plan.
Conclusion
No book can provide you with a set of foolproof tricks for your marketing plan, nonetheless after reading this blog you clearly understand what goes into a successful plan and how to write it. A good marketing plan is the foundation for your business which helps a business grow and evolve over time. Every step you take will have a great impact on your business. Spend a good amount of time creating the best marketing plan with the help of the steps discussed above to benefit you in the near future. You can even go through Appy Pie’s Offline Marketing Strategies To Promote A Business 2020 Course and learn how to promote your business and reach your target audience.
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