Develop an Effective Marketing Plan
Define Your Business's Mission
Begin your marketing plan by clearly stating your mission. While specific to the marketing department, it should align with the overall business mission. Be concise yet provide room for expansion on customer acquisition strategies.
Source: HubSpot - 5 Steps to Create an Outstanding Marketing Plan
Determine Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Establish KPIs to track mission progress. Choose metrics that align with your mission, such as tracking website visits for audience attraction. These KPIs will be revisited in later steps.
Source: HubSpot - 5 Steps to Create an Outstanding Marketing Plan
Identify Buyer Personas
Clearly describe the characteristics of your target audience, including age, sex, location, family size, and job title. Ensure alignment among business leaders on these buyer personas.
Describe Content Initiatives and Strategies
Outline your marketing and content strategy, specifying content types, volume, goals, and distribution channels. Include any planned paid advertising across various platforms.
Source: ClickUp - 11 Free Marketing Plan Templates to Build a...
Clearly Define Plan's Omissions
Explicitly state what your marketing team will not focus on in this plan. Justify these omissions to help stakeholders understand decision-making rationale.
Define Your Marketing Budget
Develop a comprehensive marketing budget, covering expenses like freelance fees, sponsorships, and new hires. Utilize available templates for effective budget planning.
Source: ClickUp - 11 Free Marketing Plan Templates to Build a...
Identify Your Competition
Research and profile key competitors in your industry. Recognize variations in challenges posed by each competitor, such as search engine rankings or social media presence.
Outline Plan's Contributors and Responsibilities
Clearly define the roles and responsibilities of teams and leaders involved in content creation, channel management, KPI tracking, and more.
Incorporate these steps to build a robust marketing plan. Refer to available guides and templates for additional support in creating effective and results-driven strategies. </response>
A deeper dive.
1. Create an overview or primary objective.
Our business mission is to provide [service, product, solution] to help [audience] reach their [financial, educational, business related] goals without compromising their [your audience’s valuable asset: free time, mental health, budget, etc.]. We want to improve our social media presence while nurturing our relationships with collaborators and clients.
2. Determine the KPIs for this mission.
For example, if I wanted to focus on social media growth, my KPIs might look like this:
We want to achieve a minimum of [followers] with an engagement rate of [X] on [social media platform].
The goal is to achieve an increase of [Y] on recurring clients and new meaningful connections outside the platform by the end of the year.
3. Identify your buyer personas.
Use the following categories to create a target audience for your campaign.
Age:
Gender:
Profession:
Background:
Interests:
Values:
Goals:
Pain points:
Social media platforms that they use:
Streaming platforms that they prefer:
For more useful strategies, consider creating a buyer persona in our Make My Persona tool.
4. Describe your content initiatives and strategies.
Our content pillars will be: [X, Y, Z].
Content pillars should be based on topics your audience needs to know. If your ideal clients are female entrepreneurs, then your content pillars can be: marketing, being a woman in business, remote working, and productivity hacks for entrepreneurs.
Then, determine any omissions.
This marketing plan won’t be focusing on the following areas of improvement: [A, B, C].
5. Define your marketing budget.
Our marketing strategy will use a total of [Y] monthly. This will include anything from freelance collaborations to advertising.
6. Identify your competitors.
I like to work through the following questions to clearly indicate who my competitors are:
Which platforms do they use the most?
How does their branding differentiate?
How do they talk to their audiences?
What valuable assets do customers talk about? And if they are receiving any negative feedback, what is it about?
7. Outline your plan's contributors and their responsibilities.
Create responsible parties for each portion of the plan.
Marketing will manage the content plan, implementation, and community interaction to reach the KPIs.
Social media manager: [hours per week dedicated to the project, responsibilities, team communication requirements, expectations]
Content strategist: [hours per week dedicated to the project, responsibilities, team communication requirements, expectations]
Community manager: [hours per week dedicated to the project, responsibilities, team communication requirements, expectations]
Sales will follow the line of the marketing work while creating and implementing an outreach strategy.
Sales strategists: [hours per week dedicated to the project, responsibilities, team communication requirements, expectations]
Sales executives: [hours per week dedicated to the project, responsibilities, team communication requirements, expectations]
Customer Service will nurture clients’ relationships to ensure that they have what they want. [Hours per week dedicated to the project, responsibilities, team communication requirements, expectations].
Project Managers will track the progress and team communication during the project. [Hours per week dedicated to the project, responsibilities, team communication requirements, expectations].