A beginner’s guide to get you started on your marketing journey
The marketing plan is a conceptual blueprint that marketers use to understand the product or services to provide marketing strategies. It requires a lot of research, planning, and data collection. I use the following five steps to create an effective marketing plan:
- Determine your goal
As a marketer, it is important to know why you are creating the marketing plan. In other words, it is the starting point of your process. If you do not have a correct roadmap, the following steps in the process will be difficult. The marketing goals can be anything, for example, if your client’s company is a start-up then your goals will be things like launching the product or service into the market, to improve customer acquisition, sales and brand awareness. - Knowing your customers will help you find the target market
There is a difference between the customer and consumer, not all the customers who purchase your products will be a consumer, for example, if a person buys a LEGO’s for their children, the parent will be the customer and the children who use LEGO’S are the consumers. So take the time to categorize who your customer and consumer are which will help you in developing better marketing strategies.
The target market is a particular segment in which the company wants to sell the product or service, and it can be chosen with the help of the market segmentation process. The consumers or customers in the target market segment will mostly have similar characteristics so it will be easy for marketers to satisfy their requirements as it requires only one marketing mix strategy. For example, if you look at Google, it has many products but each of its products is designed to attract a various target audience, like Google wallet for customers who want to purchase while travelling, Google maps for smartphone users, etc. By breaking your audience into segments it will be a great advantage to differentiate your services from the competitors and will be easy to find the opportunities and threats. - Include the industry and company analysis
Industry analysis: It is very important to know about the client’s industry while working on a marketing plan because it will give you a better understanding about competitors in the same industry. One of the best methods for industry analysis is ‘Porter’s 5 Forces’.
Company analysis: To understand better about the company, perform a SWOT analysis, which will give you a clear picture of the company’s current performance, and where to focus on further to improve the company’s growth, profitability, and sales. - Marketing strategy
Now, you know who your customers are and your company’s performance, so it is time to create the marketing strategy. In recent days, marketing has shifted from a traditional way to a new digital era. But it is your call now to decide where you want to market your products and services. Digital marketing is doing great in terms of increasing customer engagement, leads, and sales but we cannot just ignore the traditional marketing ideas. Some of the old marketing ideas still have life for example brochures, flyers, and not to forget guerilla marketing which is very creative and has the power to attract the audience and boost sales. - Measuring the efficiency of your marketing strategy
Well, now since you have created a innovative marketing strategy is your job done? No, you have just created the idea but you are not sure whether it has worked well or has it increased the profitability? One of the best methods to check the effectiveness of your marketing strategy is to use Google analytics to measure the number of visits to your website, KPIs (Key Performance Indicator), the leads generated, and customer interactions for each marketing campaign.
These aren’t the only points that you should include in your marketing plan, but are few key points you should consider. In the past, I have been able to make successful marketing plans with these points and I hope that they will be of use to you as well.
