A marketing plan is the basis of a company's strategy to achieve its goals. It should be flexible, analytical and quick to implement, have a structured and systematically focused content, and have defined areas of responsibility and established control procedures.
what are the objectives of a marketing plan?
- To orientate the achievement 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 actions that are very well analysed and designed to impact on users so that they are aware of your brand 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 company's objectives as a whole and, in this way, compare the company's progress with its aspirations and measure performance.
what steps should you take to create a good marketing plan?
- Conduct a situation analysis- a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats and opportunities) analysis can be very useful, giving you a fairly complete picture of your market, resources, strengths and weaknesses.
- Carry out a complete analysis of the competition. 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 present and future of your company. After selecting the main competitors, you should try to answer at least these four questions about them:
- 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?
- Set digital marketing objectives. Once you are clear about your place in the market and what your strengths are, work on setting objectives to be clear about where you should direct all your actions. Everything you plan should be geared towards achieving these goals. You can be guided in the development of this part of your digital marketing plan by SMART objectives, i.e. specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound objectives.
- Segment the target audience, i.e., know who you want to target, what their tastes, needs or preferences are, how they satisfy them... This is the time to create your buyer persona.
- Toachieve a good positioning, it is important to be very clear about what your value proposition consists of and to identify the channels in which your audience is usually present (social networks, blog, email, etc.).
- Create a content strategy: This strategy is essential to create, distribute and manage original content that attracts users and positions the brand as a benchmark in their minds. It is also necessary to draw up a specific communication policy for each channel.
- Measuring results: Analytics has become a fundamental pillar for optimising results and investment. Each action and its corresponding results must be measured through different KPIs to know if we have obtained the expected ROI. Measuring the effectiveness of the actions and strategies implemented will help us to correct everything that does not work to achieve the proposed goals set.
Remember that a well-developed and well-structured marketing plan is the basis for any company in the sector. Use the guidelines and steps we have given you to start planning your marketing plan and everything will surely go smoothly.
