Where to start writing a marketing plan
How do you go about writing a marketing plan when you don’t know where to start. Why do you need a marketing plan? I’ve never needed a plan before so why now?
A marketing plan is a strategic plan to grow your business and talk to your customers. Ultimately, it is to enable you to sell more products or services and make sure that these are put in front of your customers at the right time and in the right place.
A marketing plan will include who your target market is and the planned activity and budget on how you’re going to reach them. Including your budget in the plan will ensure that you spend consistently on marketing and that ultimately meet your business objectives which in turn will lead to a profitable business.
So how do you start?
Review what you do now with your marketing and where you want to go with your business. What are your business objectives for the year ahead? What are your target markets and where will you reach them? From this you can create a plan and content to reach them and what budget you will need.
With a plan in place it makes it much easier to be reactive if an opportunity comes along or you have to change direction in your business due to outside market pressures.
Having a plan in place means that you can measure how successful it is too. Have the marketing plan delivered the required number of leads/sales. Has it increased web traffic or social media reach?
What do you need?
The best way is to start with a calendar and mark out all your product launches, events and key dates throughout the year that you already know about. Are there any key target markets you are going after and what level of resources will you have to target them.
How?
You will then be able to target the right channels to reach your customers and work on the right messages to get them to buy your products and services, as ultimately that’s why you’re in business, is to make a profit and solve your customers problems.
What next?
Make sure that you implement your plan consistently as this is what will generate results and measure these results.
Review
Make sure you take time to review your plan on a regular basis as it may need amended as your business develops and you start to generate results. With more success you may want to invest more into marketing and product development.
We’d be happy to talk to you about how to implement the above and where you should start. Just call us today on 07738 966588.