How To Write A Marketing Plan

If you have never planned this before, it is understandable that you are a bit confused about a lot of things. Like what to do, where to start, which sections to include and how to write a marketing plan.

Before diving into how to write a marketing plan;

What is a marketing plan?

Marketing plan is a document that shows the advertising strategy to sell company’s products and services. It also shows how the company is planning to utilize advertising and excel in the target market.

Marketing plan helps you to determine your target market, how to satisfy them, the price to offer them, and how to calculate your own efforts. In marketing plan, all the strategies are written down in an organized manner. It helps you to stay on track and calculate your efforts.

You can compile marketing plans on quarterly and annually basis, for content marketing and social media marketing, and for current product and new product.

How To Write A Marketing Plan

To write a marketing plan, here are some points to keep in mind;

1. Define your mission

Your first step in writing a marketing plan is to define your business mission. This mission should is for specifically marketing department but it should be aligned with company’s overall mission.

This mission statement should clearly define your nature of business, products or service offerings, and target market. It is usually short and specific. You have whole marketing plan to discuss your ideas about marketing, customers, and how you will complete the mission.

After defining your mission, you should also describe how you will track the progress in against this mission. For this purpose, you need to develop some key performance indicators (KPIs).

KPIs are the measurement of performance against the set objectives. KPIs will help you in setting short term goals, and identify your progress.

2. Identify your target market and offerings

In this section of marketing plan, identify and define your target audience. Afterwards, you will be able to identify different segments and buyer persona.

A buyer persona is a segment that you want to attract. This can be done on the basis of gender, age, location, family size, family status, job title, income, etc. You can define and create your buyer persona, but it should clearly define your current and potential customers.

You should also determine what the market gaps are. How you are going to fill that gap through your products or services. This will tell about the value your product and service is going to deliver. How it is going to solve the problem in customer’s life.

3. Describe your content and marketing strategies

In this section, you will include your content and marketing strategy. There is a huge list of content types and a huge number of channels are available. You must choose channel wisely and clearly explain your content you will use.

The important point in marketing is that what makes a customer buy a product or service and what type of marketing he responds to. For this you have to understand needs, problems, trends, and keywords.
The content strategy should tell;

• The type of content you will make, like YouTube videos, Facebook, Instagram posts.
• How much of it you will make, like you will use it daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly.
• Goals behind it, like to generate traffic, enhance sales, customer engagement.
• KPIs you will use to track it, like organic traffic,
• The channels you will use, like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube or any other.

4. Identify your competitors

In this section, you have to identify who you are marketing against. Identify your major competitors, and each competitor will come up with different challenges for you. You must identify your competitor and their strategies, and how you position yourself against them.

Identify both direct and indirect competitors, and determine what benefits you are offering to your customers in comparison to them. You can compete with them on the basis of price, product, services, value, marketing campaigns or something like that.

You must advertise and market your unique offerings to let customers know how you are better than your competitors.

Read more: How To Do Competitive Analysis

5. Set marketing goals

Set marketing goals that can include, setting number of customers you want to engage and acquire, the number of customers you want to reach, or the amount of sales you want to generate. Be specific, realistic and practical in setting your goals.

You must know the knowledge and skills your company has to achieve your goal in marketing plan. Keep in mind, set your goals according to your budget.

Read more: How To Set SMART Goals

6. Estimate your marketing budget

In this section of marketing plan, estimate the amount of budget your business if going to allocate for promotion and advertisements of its products or services. They are developed on quarterly and annual basis.

It should include all the expenses and costs related to print advertisements, promotions, public relations, social media, demonstrations, exhibitions and fairs, free sampling and giveaways.

You should develop a marketing budget. Also, write down each and every expense that your company might have to bear.

7. Examine your results

When you are done with planning, clearly define the roles of everyone involved. Know that who is in charge of content, channels, goals and KPIs.

Monitor results, so that you can determine which of your strategy is working out and which is not. Note down those steps and strategies which are generating sales and leads. Track and evaluate each and every response from the customer.

You can conduct a detail research like survey, interviews and getting feedbacks from the loyal customers. Purpose behind it is to get more ideas and suggestions that how can you improve your products or services, and overall customer experience.

Conclusion

Here we conclude How to write a marketing plan. Keep in mind that you need to focus on your customers who do repeated purchases. Understand your customer by asking for feedbacks and surveys and creating their profiles and focusing on your target market.

Understand your target audience, focus on them, and apply directed marketing efforts toward them. Be consistent in your marketing efforts because marketing efforts and projects are done repeatedly before permanent changes are achieved.