Your business needs a marketing plan. No matter what your business does, that’s a statement we can safely make. Without a plan, whether you’re just starting out, scaling up, or looking to sell your business, you risk failing to achieve your goals. This article explores what you need to do to develop a great marketing plan.
What is a marketing plan?
A marketing plan is a research, planning, and strategy document that states your goals and discusses the factors involved in reaching them. Writing a marketing plan forces you to decide on tactics, develop a budget, and establish how you will measure your success.
It’s also important to recognize there is a distinction between marketing strategy and the marketing plan. The strategy is your overarching thinking about marketing. The plan is the nuts and bolts of how you’re going to achieve your strategy.
Why a marketing plan is important
Whether you’re just starting your business, are looking to expand into a new product area, or want to keep your dominant market position, marketing is going to play a big role in connecting customers to your brand.
A well-thought-out marketing plan can provide your business with a foundation for connecting with your customer and building lasting, revenue-generating relationships. The marketing plan can help you to keep everyone moving in the same direction when it comes to promoting your products or services.
Without a marketing plan, you risk
- Spending budget in the wrong areas
- Targeting the wrong audience for your product or service
- Failing to communicate your objectives to your team
- Inconsistent marketing efforts
- Pursuing projects that don’t align with your business goals
A great marketing plan can also help you to attract more investors or keep the ones you have happy. This document demonstrates your business has a strategic direction and is being proactive in achieving its objectives.
What goes in your marketing plan
Your actual marketing plan will be distinct to your business to help you promote your unique value to your customer. Still, there are several common elements that should be in your marketing plan, whether your business is bath bombs, backyard fences, or building accessible office spaces. Our discussion will focus on the core components of any marketing plan:
- SWOT analysis
- Audience research
- SMART objectives
- Marketing mix
- Marketing tactics
- Budget
- Metrics
SWOT analysis
A SWOT analysis gets you thinking about strengths (the “S”), weaknesses (“W”), opportunities (“O”), and threats (“T”). The idea is to see what your business does well now and what’s holding you back, You’ll also uncover areas where you can make changes and identify potential risks. It’s quite common to do a SWOT analysis for your business overall, but you can also gain from filling out the matrix for specific areas.
Here’s how we might do a SWOT analysis for fast food chain Chick-fil-a:
| Strengths | Opportunities |
| – Brand recognition within region – Customer satisfaction – Product quality | – Create new menu offerings – Expand national presence – Leverage customer loyalty |
| Weaknesses | Threats |
| – Lacks national awareness – High prices – Fast food stigma | – Tough competition – Labor shortage – Public concern about politics of owners |
Audience research
You can’t market successfully if you don’t know the buyer you are targeting. Your product or service is unlikely to be right for everyone. Don’t worry, that’s a good thing. This is what will help you target your marketing efforts and identify customers to avoid.
You can learn about your audience by taking stock of your industry, observing who your competitors are targeting, conducting surveys and informational interviews, and creating buyer personas.
In a buyer persona, you’ll consider a particular customer group’s demographics, location, interests, purchase intent, and more. Typically you will have more than one buyer persona to work with as each one will be an amalgamation that helps you understand a segment of your target audience.
Personalization is a major marketing trend right now with 71% of consumers expecting it, according to McKinsey & Company. 76% of consumers are frustrated when it doesn’t happen. The more fully you can describe your buyer, the more targeted your marketing to them can be.
SMART objectives
Your business plan and vision should inform all your decisions, including marketing ones. In setting your marketing objectives it’s often a good idea to follow the SMART framework:
- Specific: Requires you to set clearly defined individual objectives.
- Measurable: Sets objectives that you can benchmark and measure with metrics (which we’ll discuss in more detail below).
- Achievable: You’ll also see this as attainable or actionable. However you label it, this part of the framework focuses on setting objectives that you can realistically achieve in the timeframe, with your resources.
- Relevant: Ensures that the objective aligns with your overall business direction.
- Time-based: Puts an end date on the objective against which you can measure success. You might also set short-term goals within an objective.
Setting SMART objectives for marketing helps you prioritize tasks, decide where to put your resources, and get everyone working cohesively to increase revenue by improving customer relationships. Examples of SMART marketing objectives include:
- Receive a URL ranking of five or higher on target web pages by the end of the fiscal year.
- Expand social media follower base by 20% in a year.
- Create a sales funnel to increase purchasing rates by 10% in two months.
- Drive client referrals up 11% in the next fiscal year.
- Receive 20 online reviews on secondary seller sites in three months.
- Increase revenue from X product line by 4% in the next year.
Marketing mix
Taking a marketing mix approach takes your team beyond a simple product or service focus. You have to consider the different levers that can impact your marketing efforts. Often they are intertwined.
For example, If you’re selling products, the marketing mix is typically viewed as the 4Ps: product, price, place, and promotion. A method around since the 1960s, this approach has you
- Product: What is your product and what does it do? How is it different from the competition? What is the need it fulfills?
- Price: How much are you selling the item for and how much are customers willing to pay?
- Place: Where is your product available? Where does your target audience shop?
- Promotion: What marketing channels are best for communicating your message and at what frequency? When is a good time to reach your target audience?
If yours is a service-oriented business, E-commerce giant Shopify recommends defining the 8Ps of marketing: “product, price, place, promotion, people, process, physical evidence, and performance.”
Marketing tactics
Once you understand your marketing mix, you’ll be able to decide your marketing tactics. There are three main marketing areas available to you:
- Traditional includes radio, TV, and print ads, direct mail, events, and networking
- Digital refers to your website, social media, paid search, and email marketing
- Content marketing can overlap with digital but is more focused on blogging, articles, e-books, newsletters, and multimedia content creation (e.g., video, slideshows, infographics, etc.)
With so many tactics available, you’ll need to refer back to your SWOT analysis, audience research, and SMART objectives to develop your specific strategy. You can use many different marketing channels, but your tactics should fit your brand. For example, if you’re aiming to promote your sneaker store to young adults an e-book on the shoe industry is not likely to be your best option. Meanwhile, a tax consultancy could provide value to its audience with a helpful downloadable guide about new tax rules for contracted labor.
Budget
It can be challenging to allocate your marketing resources in advance, especially when you are just starting your business. Still, you’ll need to set up a detailed marketing plan that not only says how much you have to spend but also what you plan to spend it on and why.
Additionally, you’ll take into consideration your operational costs. These might include your team member’s salaries, fees paid for website hosting or WordPress themes, and subscriptions to SEO or content marketing tools.
There are various estimates of a typical marketing budget for small businesses in the United States. You’re not going to have the billions available that Disney or Apple spends marketing. In a 2019 Manifest survey of small businesses, 37% spent less than $10,000 a year. Another 20% spent between $10,001 to $50,000 and just 7% spent more than $1 million annually on advertising.
Setting a goal-driven marketing budget can help you prove the value of your efforts in the future, justify spending in certain areas, hire contractors, and calculate your return on investment.
You might get started by downloading Hubspot’s free marketing budget template which helps plan and track spending for product marketing, content, paid advertising, public relations, branding and creative, events, and more.
Metrics
You don’t want to just throw money at marketing without the ability to measure the effectiveness of your plan. In this digital age, it’s much easier to measure and collect data. Now that you have your SMART objectives and budget, you can set weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly goals to help you monitor what is working and where you might want to make changes.
Any variable in your marketing efforts that you can quantify with data to track outcomes is a metric. There are many metrics available to marketers, which fall into four main categories: people, reach, engagement, and conversion.
You’ll also want to identify key performance indicators (KPIs) related to your SMART marketing objectives. KPIs are targeted metrics to quantify progress toward your goals.
For instance, when it comes to important SEO metrics for your website, common metrics include the number of new or returning users.
But when you start to think of these metrics in terms of KPIs, the perspective changes, Instead of simply looking at the numbers to say “oh, we had 15 returning users this month,” you’d have a target in mind. For example, “we’re targeting 20 returning users this month that convert.”
Marketing plan examples
You can find many marketing plan templates online. We like Hubspot’s or Evernote’s downloads or the fillable pdf from Smartsheet.
Before filling yours in, you might also want to review some actual marketing plan examples. Check out this one from the Baton Rouge, Louisiana visitor’s office. Or this textbook version.
Making your marketing plan great
Developing your marketing plan takes work. Yet it can pay off for your business in focused spending, a motivated marketing team, improved customer relationships, and greater revenues. SRSR wants to see you succeed. Check out our resource library for more informative articles for business owners to execute their ideas efficiently and effectively.