Marketing promotion without a clear plan is like moving in the dark without a flashlight — you never know when you run into an invisible obstacle. Yes, planning is not a magic pill for surprises, however, it gives you a clear plan of action. The best way to create a marketing plan is not to complicate what can be simplified. Therefore, we offer you a basic template of a marketing plan and suggest what you need to describe in each of the sections to see a clear picture of the current situation and plan each of your steps.
Three Milestones of Your Marketing Plan
In its most basic form, your marketing plan will consist of three main parts. This is all you need to light your path. Having answered the main questions of each part, you can move on from general to particular and form micro strategies for each stage of marketing promotion. So, here is what you need to do and describe.
- Situational Analysis
- Marketing Strategy
- Budget and Financing
Let’s look at the subsections of these parts in more detail.
What to Write in Each Part of Your Marketing Plan?
Any marketing plan should begin with an analysis of the current situation – each business needs to understand the conditions under which it is going to develop.
1. Situational Analysis
The situational analysis includes three subitems.
Market Summary
The first thing you need to do is to describe the market in which you operate. In this part, you need to say about your potential customers. Of course, you already know who you work with, so you can describe your users in as much detail as possible – their age, gender, occupation, and the main problem that you solve.
Next, it is necessary to move on to market trends. When analyzing trends, pay attention to both the current and the previous period – you may be able to identify certain patterns that may be cyclical. Here is an example of the most modern trend – more and more users are starting to order fitness products to go in for sports at home in quarantine. You will most likely find the same typical trends for your industry.
After that, you need to very clearly identify the market need. This is what your users need the most. Continuing our example, this will be the most expeditious and safe delivery of goods directly to the door.
And of course, you need to understand the current market size and try to make assumptions about its growth. You can do this using the following method of economic analysis.
SWOT Analysis
SWOT analysis is the basis of all the basics. This is the simplest and most ingenious method of market analysis, which allows you to see a full-screen picture in real-time, as well as sensibly assess potential threats. Let’s remember what you need to describe in this part.
- Your strength
- Your weaknesses
- Your opportunities
- Your threats
Competition
Competitors are able to help you very much, even if they sincerely do not want this. At this stage, your task is to make a list of your strongest competitors and answer the following questions.
- What are their unique offers?
- What are their values?
- What are their missions?
- What are their weaknesses?
Pay attention to their weaknesses – these are your tips on how you can solve user problems better than others.
2. Marketing Strategy
The second stage is the marketing strategy. In this part of the plan, you need to describe the following points.
Mission
Look at the mission of your company again and write it down if it sounds clear enough. Or design your mission from scratch if your company was created recently. The best way to formulate a mission is to answer the question – Why am I doing this for my clients?
Positioning
How do you position yourself in the market? This part of the plan is intended to answer this question. In simple words, who are you? Clear positioning will give you the opportunity to formulate a turn-based strategy.
Marketing Objectives
You need to write your marketing goals as accurately as possible. They should be clear and easily measurable. For example, increasing user loyalty or brand awareness is of course also good marketing goals, but it is very difficult to measure them using mathematical methods. And these are more likely consequences and returns from your other marketing steps.
Here are some examples of clear and measurable goals.
- Increase the number of followers on Instagram to 10 thousand in three months.
- Sell a thousand units per month.
- Increase website traffic to 50 unique visitors per day.
Strategy
So, you already have clear goals. Now you need to create a clear plan of action to achieve them. For example, here’s what you can do to increase the number of subscribers.
- Come up with a user content generation company
- Launch a contest on Instagram
- Repurpose your blog articles and make a lot of visual content based on them.
Content Plan
Marketing has already become completely digital, which means you can not do without a clear content plan. Most likely this will be a separate document, but you should do the first drafts now, as well as think about the specialists who will help you with the creation of high-quality content. Start by reviewing the best writers online and choose several of the most suitable authors.
3. Budget and Financing
And the last question of your plan is how much will it all cost? To get the answer, you need to make the most accurate forecasts for your profits and expenses.
Sales Forecast
Most likely, your marketing goal already determines the level of sales that you want to achieve, so you can now calculate the expected profit, provided that everything goes according to your plan.
Expenses Forecast
Be very careful when describing projected expenses – fortunately, this can be done with minimal error. Go back to your goals and determine how many specialists you need, plus consider advertising costs.
Back-up Plan
It always makes sense to have a backup plan in case of a surprise. Go back to your SWOT analysis, look at the threats again and make the first outline of plans in case each of the threats is realized.
Conclusion
As you can see, it’s not so difficult to draw up a marketing plan. In this article, we showed you the basic template – you can expand it depending on the specifics of your business. And remember that the most important condition in any planning is to always remain in a state of common sense, even if it seems that all market conditions have turned their backs on your business.
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Business Tree Growth Featured Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay.
Gregory V. Chapman Bio:
Gregory is passionate about researching new technologies in both mobile, web and WordPress. Also, he works on Best Writers Online the best custom writing services. Gregory is in love with stories and facts, so he always tries to get the best of both worlds.