Creating a Marketing Plan: The Basics

One must take certain steps to create and execute a successful marketing plan, a method to the madness. It requires a lot of research and effort to ensure that your strategy aligns with the vision and mission of the company you’re creating it for.

Where to Begin?

Defining the company’s target audience is the first step to creating a successful marketing plan. If the company you’re working for already has an idea of its target audience, that’s a great starting point.

However, if you are building up the company’s buyer persona from scratch, it would help to begin ideating and identifying the characteristics their ideal customer has. Think about who will be interested in the product or service. Who would benefit from it the most? And who will keep coming back for more?

Once you have a clear image of the buyer persona, write your thoughts and flesh out their profile. This will help you later and act as a guide that will help tailor your marketing messages and the most effective channels to reach this ideal audience segment.

Get Specific

SMART objectives are essential. These should easily tie in with the overarching goals of your campaign but should be quantifiable, and you should be able to measure them. For example, a potential marketing plan objective could be to “increase sales by 35% in the next quarter through the launch of a new product.”

Once you have set your goals, you should start thinking about your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), another quantifiable measure to help build your strategy. When you think about KPIs, consider the tactics you will use to execute your plan.

Money Talks

Once you have your marketing strategy ready, be it a social media strategy, email marketing, or even paid advertisement, you need to think about how your tactics align with your client’s fixed marketing budget or how much it’s going to cost them to go through with the plan should they not have a pre-set budget amount. 

You must determine the cost of each marketing tactic and allocate the right amount of resources based on your client’s potential return on investment.

Execution

The timeline in which your marketing plan is to be employed is an integral part of helping measure whether or not the goals set are being met within the specified time. Giving start and end dates to each marketing activity will help keep everything on track.

Your timeline should be realistic and consider the time it would take to produce and execute the campaign.

By following these steps, you, as a marketer, can ensure that all your efforts are worthwhile. Targeting the needs of your client’s target audience while generating a positive return on investment for them will help establish yourself as a key member in their company’s success