What is a Marketing Plan & How to Write One

What is a marketing plan?
Businesses use a marketing plan as a strategic road map to plan, carry out, and monitor their marketing strategy over a specific time frame. Different marketing strategies for various marketing teams across the organization working toward the same business goals can be included in marketing plans.
Writing down strategies in an organized manner is the goal of a marketing plan. This will aid in keeping you on course and evaluating the efficacy of your campaigns. It will be easier for you to think of each campaign’s mission, buyer personas, budget, tactics, and deliverables if you write a marketing plan.
You’ll find it simpler to manage a campaign if you have all of this information in one location. You’ll learn what works and what doesn’t as well. Thus, evaluating the outcome of your strategy.
Remember that a marketing strategy is different from a marketing plan.

Marketing Strategy vs. Marketing Plan

A marketing strategy outlines how a company will carry out a specific objective or mission. They will use the following to carry out that mission and evaluate its success: campaigns, content, channels, and marketing software.
For instance, you might view your work on Facebook as an individual marketing strategy, even though a larger plan or department may handle social media marketing.
A marketing strategy or strategies are included in a marketing plan. It serves as the foundation from which all of your marketing strategies are developed and enables you to tie each one of them back to a more comprehensive marketing campaign and corporate objective.
For instance, your business is introducing a new software product and is encouraging users to sign up. This calls for the marketing department to develop a marketing plan that will help launch this product onto the market and drive the desired number of signups.
The department makes the decision to start a blog specifically for this industry, a new YouTube video series to establish expertise, and a Twitter account to participate in the discussion. All of this works to draw in a crowd and persuade them to use the software.
In conclusion, the company’s marketing strategy is focused on launching a new software product and encouraging signups for it. Three marketing tactics will be used by the company to carry out that strategy: a Twitter account, a new industry blog, and a YouTube video series.
Of course, the company may view these three initiatives as a single, comprehensive marketing plan, with each having its own unique content strategies. It’s up to you to decide how specific your marketing strategy should be. Nonetheless, every marketing plan goes through a particular set of steps in its creation. Find out more about them below.

How to Write a Marketing Plan

  1. State your business’s mission.
  2. Determine the KPIs for this mission.   
  3. Identify your buyer personas.                        
  4. Describe your content initiatives and strategies.                         
  5. Define your marketing budget.              
  6. Identify your competition.              
  7. Outline your plan’s contributors and their responsibilities.
  1. State your business’s mission.
Declaring your mission is the first thing you should do when writing a marketing plan. Although this goal is particular to your marketing division, it should support the overarching goal of your company. Be precise without going overboard. This marketing strategy still has plenty of room for you to describe how you’ll expand your clientele and complete your goal. For instance, your marketing objective might be to “attract an audience of travelers, educate them on the tourism industry, and convert them into users of our bookings platform” if your company’s mission is to “make booking travel a delightful experience.”
  1. Determine the KPIs for this mission.
Every effective marketing plan outlines the department’s method for monitoring the success of its mission. You must choose your key performance indicators (KPIs) in order to accomplish this. KPIs are specific metrics that track each component of a marketing campaign. Establishing short-term goals that fit your mission and updating business leaders on your progress are made easier with the aid of these units.
Take our example of a marketing mission from the step above. We might use organic page views to monitor website visits if one of our goals is “to draw a traveling audience.” One KPI in this instance is “organic page views,” and we can watch our total number of page views increase over time.
In step 4, these KPIs will be discussed once more.
  1. Identify your buyer personas.
A buyer persona is a profile of the target market you want to reach. Age, sex, location, family size, and job title are a few examples of this. Each buyer persona should accurately represent the present and future clients of your company. Therefore, all business leaders must agree on your buyer personas.
  1. Describe your content initiatives and strategies.
The key components of your content and marketing strategy should be included in this section. You have a plethora of content types and distribution channels at your disposal right now, so you must make a wise decision. In this section of your marketing plan, you must also describe how you’ll use your content and distribution channels.
Specified in a content strategy should be:
  • Which content types you’ll produce, such as blog posts, YouTube videos, infographics, and ebooks.
  • How much you’re going to produce. The amount of content can be measured in daily, weekly, monthly, or even quarterly increments. Everything is dependent upon your workflow and the immediate objectives you have for your content.
  • The objectives (and KPIs) that you’ll use to monitor each kind. Organic traffic, traffic from social media, traffic from emails, and traffic from referrals can all be KPIs. Your objectives should specify which pages, such as product pages, blog pages, or landing pages, you want to direct that traffic to.
  • The platforms through which you’ll make this content available. You have access to well-known channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram.
  • Any form of paid promotion that appears on these channels. 
  1. Define your marketing budget.
Your content strategy may make use of numerous free channels and platforms, but there are a number of unaccounted-for costs that a marketing team must take into account.
Use these costs to create a marketing budget and list each expense in this section of your marketing strategy, whether it be freelance fees, sponsorships, or a new full-time marketing hire.
  1. Identify your competition.
Knowing your target market is a necessary component of marketing. Investigate the major players in your sector, and think about creating profiles for each. Remember that not every rival will present the same obstacles for your company.
For instance, while one competitor may be dominating search results for terms your website should appear for, another competitor may have a sizable online presence on a social media platform where you intend to create an account.
  1. Outline your plan’s contributors and their responsibilities.
It’s time to outline who will be doing what now that your marketing strategy has been fully developed. You don’t have to get too involved in the day-to-day tasks that your staff members are working on, but you should be aware of which teams and team leaders are in charge of which content types, channels, KPIs, and other things.
Now that you are aware of the reasons why you must create a successful marketing strategy, it is time to get to work. If you’ve never created a plan from scratch, it can be overwhelming. That’s why we are here to help. Our clients use a variety of marketing plans we’ve developed all year long to help them reach their marketing and sales objectives. Contact us to start creating your marketing plan.

We offer digital marketing strategies for:

SEO Budgeting

Each project is different. Some websites need constant maintenance and optimization, while others require minimal attention. This means that the price of SEO services is calculated based on the time and research required to obtain quality finishes. The SEO budget depends on the size of the website, the degree of optimization and the scale of optimization that a website, blog or e-commerce requires.

The level of optimization of a website considers the amount of research, technical analysis, keywords, link building and maintenance on and off the site.

For their part, web stores need more optimization than personal blogs to maximize traffic and conversion rate, so they need more comprehensive packages.

Finally, the optimization scale implies the geographic reach of the website, as it implies different tactics depending on the strategy.

Consider applying SEO to your website and making it the heart of your digital marketing strategy. Contact us to discuss how to multiply the income of your company.

Off-Site SEO

External SEO is concerned with improving the ranking of a site on search engine results pages through promotional techniques such as:
  • Creation of external and internal links. With the aim of generating web traffic as an additional source and developing greater value. This can drive more traffic to your website, increase reputation, and increase rankings.
  • Marketing in social networks and brand promotions. These actions involve strategy and tactics in social media, both in organic and paid actions to give boost, visibility, credibility and traffic to the website, blog and e-commerce.

On-site SEO

On-site SEO involves optimizing the content of the website, blog and e-commerce at a structural level to make it more trackable and friendly for users and search engines. Includes optimization of title tags, internal links and URLs.

Some On-site SEO actions are:
  • Include keywords in the URL, in case the plugins don’t.
  • Using short and precise URLs, with the recommended keywords.
  • Use keywords at the beginning of the title tag.
  • Use keywords in subheadings in the content of your notes, as Google also searches for keywords in the heading tags.
  • Optimizing images and alt text that describes what’s in the image helps to identify the images and media in your site content.
  • Use synonyms and keywords that would be relevant to search items. When Google presents search results, it also looks for synonyms for the main keyword and other accompanying keywords.
  • Use internal and external links. Internal links connect the content of one web page to another on the same website. On the other hand, external links connect the content of your website with another website, enriching the content and adding value to searches.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is about locating the most searched words and phrases by users. This means that it is essential to tag the content of your site so that search engines can easily locate them.

The keywords used should target frequently used search words and phrases that are relevant to your content and add value to searches. The more keywords that are used and the more relevant they are to users, the easier it will be to find your website, blog or e-commerce. Also, if your website has a higher reputation, it will also be more relevant and better positioned.

Also, it should be taken into account that the position of the keyword in the URL affects its ranking and that the length of the keyword also influences the web positioning. Shorter URLs are easier to find and obviously rank higher.

Technical Analysis

Technical Analysis SEO technical analysis involves an in-depth review of the technical elements to improve so that Google and other search engines can index and crawl your website, blog or e-commerce.

The most common trouble spots are:
  • Need to correct “crawling errors” that prevent Google robots from seeing a page on your website and therefore not appearing in the search engine.
  • Optimize your site so it can be easily viewed from mobile devices, tablets, and desktops. Let us remember that we are in times of “mobile first”.
  • Fix broken links and make 404 errors friendly. Broken links can significantly hurt your SEO ranking because users and Google will have a hard time reaching your site and cause a drastic decrease in web traffic and sales.
  • Verify if you have an SSL certificate and a site with HTTPS encryption, which implies the protection of your data and those of your users from malicious programs and trackers on the Internet. It is an excellent ranking signal as it guarantees a secure connection with Google and reduces the abandonment rate.
  • Optimize page loading speed. This is essential, since if your sites take a long time to load, not only will you have a bad ranking in the Google list, but your users will quickly leave the site and you will lose potential sales.

Preliminary research

Preliminary SEO research focuses on finding out what’s on your website. This checklist is the content you have and discover the best way to select relevant bookmarks to optimize your website, blog or e-commerce. It includes the topics of your content, the types of media present, and benchmarking, that is, researching sites with similar content.

The goal of SEO is to differentiate yourself from your immediate competition, making your content on your website unique. This means that if your website has valuable content and responds to organic user searches, it will be easier for web crawlers to find.

The research done dives into the website’s specific market and the audience it is trying to reach. This step takes many factors into account and is one of the most expensive considerations in your budget.

Custom Desing

You deserve to have your own custom designs. We’ll create a design that’s uniquely yours, with a brand message that reflects your personality and goals.

Capability Statement

The design of a Capability Statement is a challenge, you need to be concise to summarize all the important information about your company on one page, think of your Capability Statement as if it were your resume.

Brochure

We create the brochure of your company, brand, product or service from scratch specially designed to show your value proposition to the target audience.

Business Card

Make your business card design stand out. We take the time to understand what you need so you can have an impactful card that will make your company stand out.

The Branding Kit

We make sure that our clients have a professional and unique corporate brand that allows them to promote their companies and increase their chances of success.

Logos

We take great care in every detail to make your brand unique! Our logos are handmade and then digitally designed, always thinking about the concept of the brand and target audience.