Having a solid marketing plan can help your business soar to new heights. A business marketing plan can take your business goals and turn them into reality as it helps to provide direction, deadlines, and actionable strategies. If you’ve never had a marketing plan before, keep ready as we go through how to write a marketing plan for your business.
Your marketing plan is a roadmap to help you set goals, understand who your audience is, and optimize marketing strategies for better impact. It also offers a clearer view of the what, why, and how of your marketing. A good marketing plan helps you to clearly communicate your marketing strategies and goals to the marketing team. Furthermore, it tracks the success of your campaigns. Ideally, when you write your marketing plan you should include:
A well-written marketing plan can help you further understand your business and where it stands in the market, as well as what strengths and weaknesses your business has. Furthermore, it can help you to better align your marketing goals with your business goals, making sure that you are always working toward the bigger picture. A detailed marketing plan also helps ensure the whole team is on the same page and can help you make better snap decisions.
While there is not just one way to write a marketing plan, here are the most important steps to follow.
This is a short summary or overview of your business and includes the key factors from the entire plan. You can also include future business plans and business achievements. The executive summary should be concise, easy to read, and grab the readers’ attention.
Before launching into details around marketing, revisit your business’s values, vision, and mission. This helps align the marketing plan with the overall business goals.
Your marketing plan should be supported by solid research. Take the time to analyze the current market in your niche, how your competition is performing, and what your business strengths are. Consider utilizing a SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunities, Threats) system to showcase your business position.
Your ideal consumer or target audience helps you to understand where your business sits in the market. Remember, your business may have more than one target audience, which means you will have multiple marketing avenues. Make note of the target demographic, interests, habits, goals, and where they spend their time online.
Specify what you aim to achieve through the marketing strategies. Make sure to use numbers, not vague statements, so you can clearly see if you meet your goals. For example, if you aim to increase website traffic, set a number of weekly or monthly visitors you would like to see.
Here is where you flesh out your marketing plan. Write down which marketing strategies and how to execute them. Include what to do, how to do it, and where to do it for each strategy. If you plan to use a similar strategy for different goals, make sure to detail the strategy for each as it won’t be exactly the same. Consider using a timeline, or flowchart to detail each strategy. You can even go into more detail by including who will be responsible for each step.
Having a marketing budget is crucial to avoid overspending. Make sure that everyone on the team understands the budget and put one person in charge of approving each campaign to avoid overspending due to miscommunication.
Sitting down to write a marketing plan can seem overwhelming, but it doesn’t need to be. Use the steps above to break it down into manageable sections. This way you can focus on your plan, one step at a time.