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.

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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

State your business’s mission.
Determine the KPIs for this mission.
Identify your buyer personas.
Describe your content initiatives and strategies.
Define your marketing budget.
Identify your competition.
Outline your plan’s contributors and their responsibilities.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What is a Marketing Plan & How to Write One

Marketing Strategy vs. Marketing Plan

How to Write a Marketing Plan

Let's Start

TOGETHER

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Services

We offer digital marketing strategies for:

SEO Budgeting

Off-Site SEO

On-site SEO

Keyword Research

Technical Analysis

Preliminary research

Custom Desing

Capability Statement

Brochure

Business Card

The Branding Kit

Logos

What is a Marketing Plan & How to Write One

Marketing Strategy vs. Marketing Plan

How to Write a Marketing Plan

Let's Start

TOGETHER

PopularPost

Services

We offer digital marketing strategies for:

SEO Budgeting

Off-Site SEO

On-site SEO

Keyword Research

Technical Analysis

Preliminary research

Custom Desing

Capability Statement

Brochure

Business Card

The Branding Kit

Logos

Popular
Post