Without the development of a marketing plan, it is almost impossible for a company to position its brand in the marketplace and eventually become an industry authority in the minds of potential customers.
The marketing plan is the strategy responsible for ensuring that brands achieve relevance and, consequently, generate demand for their products and services so that they can reach ideal levels of profitability and sustainability.
what is a marketing plan?
A marketing plan is an important tool to manage the efforts of a company for its communication actions, attention, promotion and brand presence. It is part of the business plan, as it helps to organise the actions to achieve established goals. Therefore, we could say that the marketing plan is the basic strategy that a company carries out to position its brand, products and services in the market.
Likewise, this plan contains and takes into account those goals that the company has in terms of turnover, commercialisation, brand diffusion and other important aspects within the marketing of a business.
In fact, many companies design their marketing plan as soon as they are conceived or established, thus allowing operations to be guided from the beginning by a series of general and specific objectives.
The objectives of a marketing plan
Marketing is characterised by measuring everything that happens in and around the company to create a better customer experience, improving products and/or services, and optimising the ways in which the company connects with its customers or potential customers.
Now that you have the central idea of its purpose in a company, we will now show you the objectives of a marketing plan:
- To guide the fulfilment of goals: an objective must be real, achievable and measurable, which is why in the process of creating the marketing plan it is so important to carefully analyse whether the company's objectives meet these premises.
- Positioning a brand: the main objective of companies is to increase their visibility and make themselves known in the market. For this, the marketing plan must have very well analysed and designed actions to impact on users so that they have your brand in mind when searching in the main search engines.
- Improve ROI: ROI (Return on Investment) is a crucial factor that determines whether the strategies or actions are truly profitable and produce the fruits that the company expects. A marketing plan provides the opportunity to better define which are those actions that will generate better results and give a guide on what path to take to achieve them.
- Optimise the sales funnel: there is no point in reaching a large number of users if we do not manage to convert them into conversions or sales, which is why a marketing plan allows us to take into account the different stages of the sales funnel and reduce the abandonment rate, which translates into many of them becoming customers.
- Be consistent: a marketing plan provides the opportunity to establish this principle from the beginning, so that the company can attract, captivate and retain potential customers of the brand, thanks to offering consistency from the logo to the products offered.
- Monitor actions: a marketing plan is the ideal tool to visualise the objectives of the company as a whole and, in this way, compare the company's progress with its aspirations and measure performance.
How to create the best marketing plan for your business
When creating your marketing plan, it is important to study how your company is viewed both internally and externally to find out what your strengths and weaknesses really are.
The marketing plan can be developed in many different steps. There is no single methodology to follow to establish a marketing plan, but we must take into account some fundamental steps.
- Analysing the current situation
As in any area of our lives, not only in the workplace, when we want to establish a roadmap it is important to define where we are going to start. Therefore, analysing the current situation of our brand will be our starting point. At this point we must analyse what things we want to improve, what objectives we would like to achieve and what is the new strategy we need to carry out to do so.
If we analyse the market and trends we will realise what is required by the sector in which our work is developed and thus be constantly updated. Also, when we analyse our competition we identify the strategies that our competitors are using and we will be able to know where we can do better and thus stand out in our sector as a quality brand.
Once we have considered the analysis of our brand, our competitors and the market, we can carry out a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats and opportunities). In addition to the SWOT, I strongly recommend also carrying out a good analysis of the buyer persona, that is, the ideal customer of our company, the one that puts "face and eyes" to the market we are targeting.
- Competitor analysis
This is one more aspect of the analysis of external factors, but it deserves its own section in the marketing plan because of how decisive it can be for the future of our company.
After selecting the main competitors, we should try to answer at least these four questions about them:
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- what is their budget and turnover?
- what is the price of their products or services?
- what is their sales process like?
- how do they get their customers?
- Setting our marketing objectives
This is one of the most important aspects of any marketing plan, but perhaps one of the most neglected. Often management sets unrealistic objectives that are far removed from the real needs of our company. That is why we recommend that you follow the SMART objectives process:
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- S for "specific": objectives must be specific and concrete.
- M for "measurable": to know if an objective has been achieved, we have to be able to measure it.
- A stands for "achievable", i.e. attainable.
- R stands for "relevant": objectives have to be relevant.
- T for "time-bound": every objective needs a time context to make sense, so don't forget to define the deadline for achieving it.
- Defining our strategies
This phase of our marketing plan will change depending on the type of business we have and the objectives we want to achieve. Once we have defined our objectives in the previous step, it will be very easy to choose which strategies we are going to carry out. However, we must know the objectives very well and be realistic when it comes to establishing how we are going to achieve them.
It is best to start with basic functions and then specify the actions as the objectives require.
- Analysis of results
Every marketing plan, once it has been implemented, must be monitored and analysed to check if it is giving the expected results. If, on the contrary, our plan is not helping to meet the objectives we had set or the strategies are not proving effective, we must review it and make the necessary changes. As we mentioned before, marketing plans are always subject to changes and modifications because this will be required by the passage of time and the measurement of results.
A well-developed and structured marketing plan is the basis for any marketing department, but also for the company as a whole, since the campaigns we carry out and the purpose of each one of them have an impact on all other aspects, not only in the area of communication and advertising.
Use these guidelines to start thinking about the marketing plan that best suits your brand.
