A marketing plan helps leaders clearly visualize marketing strategies across channels, so they can ensure every campaign drives pipeline and revenue. In this article you’ll learn eight steps to create a winning marketing plan that brings business-critical goals to life.
By following these steps, you’ll be able to develop a comprehensive and effective marketing plan that aligns with your business objectives and helps you reach and engage your target customers.
Here are the key steps to create an outstanding marketing plan:
Conduct a Situation Analysis:
Assess your current business situation, including your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT analysis). Understand the market, your competitors, and how you compare.
This information helps you to create targeted strategies that can help you capitalize on your strengths and improve upon your weaknesses.
In my experience, you need a lot of patience when doing a SWOT analysis; it requires market research and competitive analysis to become truly accurate. I tend to revisit this section periodically, adjusting it as I discover more information about my own business and competition.
Define Your Target Audience:
In this part of the marketing plan ection, you need to get plenty of space to share all the data you collected during your market research.
Outline your target audience(s) that your efforts will reach. You can include a brief overview of your industry and buyer personas. Clearly identify your target customers by developing detailed buyer personas that include demographic and psychographic information. Understand their pain points, goals, and what motivates them.
Ultimately, this element of your marketing plan will help you describe the industry you’re selling to and your buyer persona. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional description of your ideal customer. It may include things like:
- Age
- Location
- Title
- Goals
- Personal challenges
- Pains
- Triggering event
Identify key metrics for success
Now it’s time to define what key marketing metrics you’ll use to measure success. Your key metrics will help you measure and track the performance of your marketing activities. They’ll also help you understand how your efforts tie back to larger business goals.
Once you establish key metrics, use a goal-setting framework—like objectives and key results (OKRs) or SMART goals—to fully flush out your marketing objectives. This ensures your targets are as specific as possible, with no ambiguity about what should be accomplished by when.
Example: If a goal of your marketing plan is to increase email subscriptions and you follow the SMART goal framework (ensuring your objective is specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound) your goal might look like this: Increase email subscription rate from 10% to 20% in H1.
Set SMART Goals:
Establish specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) marketing goals that align with your overall business objectives. These should be quantifiable targets you can track progress against.
My mother always used to tell me, “You can’t go somewhere unless you have a road map.” Now, for me, someone who’s geographically challenged, that was literal advice.
However, it can also be applied metaphorically to marketing. You can’t improve your ROI unless you know what your goals are.
After you’ve figured out your current situation and know your audience, you can begin to define your SMART goals.
SMART goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. This means that all your goals should be specific and include a time frame for which you want to complete them.
For example, your goal could be to increase your Instagram followers by 15% in three months. Depending on your overall marketing goals, this should be relevant and attainable. Additionally, this goal is specific, measurable, and time-bound.
Before you start any tactic, you should write out your goals. Then, you can begin to analyze which tactics will help you achieve that goal. That brings us to step number four.
Determine Your Marketing Budget:
Allocate an appropriate percentage of your overall revenue to marketing, typically around 10%, to ensure you have the resources to execute your plan effectively.
Depending on how many individual expenses you have, you should consider itemizing this budget by what specifically you’ll spend your budget on. Example marketing expenses include:
- Outsourcing costs to a marketing agency and/or other providers
- Marketing software
- Paid promotions
- Events (those you’ll host and/or attend)
Knowing the budget and doing analysis on the marketing channels you want to invest in, you should be able to come up with a plan for how much budget to invest in which tactics based on expected ROI. From there, you’ll be able to come up with financial projections for the year. These won’t be 100% accurate but can help with executive planning.
Choose Your Marketing Channels:
Select the most relevant and effective marketing channels to reach your target audience, such as paid advertising, social media, content marketing, and email. Test and optimize your channel mix over time.
While your company might promote the product itself using certain ad space, your marketing channels are where you’ll publish the content that educates your buyers, generates leads, and spreads awareness of your brand.
Example: If your target audience is executives that spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, focus your social media strategy around placing branded content on LinkedIn.
Develop a Content Strategy:
Create a content marketing strategy to attract, engage, and convert your target customers through informative, valuable, and compelling content across various formats.
As you craft your own creative strategy, here are some tips to keep in mind:
- Speak to your audience: When defining your creative strategy, think about your audience—what you want them to feel, think, and do when they see your marketing. Will your audience find your creative work relevant? If your audience can’t relate to your creative work, they won’t feel connected to the story you’re trying to tell.
- Think outside the box: Find innovative ways to engage your audience, whether through video, animations, or interactive graphics. Know what screens your creative work will live on, whether desktop, mobile, or tablet, and make sure they display beautifully and load quickly across every type of device.
- Tie everything back to CTAs: It’s easy to get caught up in the creative process, so it’s important to never lose sight of your ultimate goal: Get your audience to take action. Always find the best way to display strong Calls to Action (CTAs) in your creative work. We live in a visual world—make sure your creative content counts.
- Streamline creative production: Once you’ve established a strong creative strategy, the next step is to bring your strategy to life in the production stage. It’s vital to set up a strong framework for your creative production process to eliminate any unnecessary back and forth and potential bottlenecks. Consider establishing creative request forms, streamlining feedback and approval processes, and taking advantage of integrations that might make your designers’ lives easier.
Example: If your brand is fun and approachable, make sure that shows in your creative efforts. Create designs and CTAs that spark joy, offer entertainment, and alleviate the pressure in choosing a partner.
Obtain Stakeholder Buy-In:
Ensure key stakeholders, including your marketing team and leadership, review and sign off on the marketing plan to ensure alignment and commitment.
Continuously Monitor and Adapt:
Periodically measure your marketing efforts to find areas of improvement so you can optimize in real-time. Review the performance of the marketing initiatives, analyze the results, and make adjustments to your plan as needed to optimize your efforts and achieve your goals.
There are always lessons to be learned when looking at data. You can discover trends, detect which marketing initiatives performed well, and course-correct what isn’t performing well. And when your plan is complete, you can apply these learnings to your next initiative for improved results.
Example: Say you discover that long-form content is consistently bringing in 400% more page views than short-form content. As a result, you’ll want to focus on producing more long-form content in your next marketing plan.
Read also – 5 Ways To Guide You In Creating A Good Product Package
The Bottom Line
Marketing is a key revenue driver for every business, with three in four CMOs using revenue growth to measure success. It strengthens your bottom line by building brand awareness, bringing in new customers, and ensuring your existing buyers stick around. But while marketing is critical, it’s also complex—involving strategies across different channels like email, social media, ads, web content, and more. Leaders need a way to visualize and organize all this work, so they can ensure every strategy drives pipeline and revenue.