Marketing is a highly important aspect of business. Without proper promotion and marketing, your business may not gain the customers and sales it needs. Before actually creating marketing material, you first need a watertight marketing plan. An effective plan will make sure that you don’t waste time and resources on fruitless promotions. It should also help you gain greater insight into your customers and the most suitable marketing for your business. In this article, we look at how to create an effective marketing plan!
1. Create a picture of your target customer:
One of the basic cornerstones of marketing is to identify your target customer – your target demographic. Who are your products/services aimed at? Who is likely to need your business? Without effective research into your target customer, your marketing plan will ultimately be bland and ineffective.
Before even drafting marketing ideas, you should spend time doing basic customer research. This should include creating a picture of your ideal customer. Include factors like sex, age range, employment, and geographical location. This information should be then factored into your marketing plan.
2. Build an effective business brand:
Part of the plan should also be developing a brand. Virtually every popular business has a strong brand presence. You can recognize them from the smallest of things like a logo, colors, or a slogan. Whilst you may not be able to recreate this, your brand should still be visible.
Your brand should include a logo, company colors, fonts, and even the type of language you use. There are many free tools available to create branding like Logo Creator and Canva. With a brand in place, it should then be used consistently in your marketing.
3. Set realistic goals for your marketing campaigns:
It is also highly important to set goals for your marketing. Without targets and goals, how do you hope to understand if the marketing was successful or not? Your goals should ideally align with your business plan and overall strategies. Examples of goals could include X marketing campaign must attract X new customers, or Y marketing campaign must convert to Y sales.
Ideally, the goals should be realistic, but still, push you and drive you forward.
4. Set review dates to assess marketing campaigns:
The second part of the above process is to review your goals and assess the effectiveness of your campaigns. With goals set, you should then schedule a series of review dates. On these review dates, you would gather marketing data and see if you managed to achieve your goals. This is an important part of continual improvement. You should also objectively look at the marketing to see areas of improvement, and what worked well.
5. Consider marketing outlets you want to use:
Lastly, your plan should also look at the different available marketing outlets. There is a huge range of ways you can market your businesses, both offline and online. Not every method may be suitable for your business. As a result, spent time analyzing which outlets could prove the most effective.
This could include social media platforms like Instagram, SEO, paid advertisements, and offline marketing, for example. To start, you may only want to concentrate on one or two marketing methods and make sure they are successful first. In time, you could then review your plan and potentially expand into new outlets.
An effective marketing plan is relatively easy to compose if you know the basics. Brand reputation, identifying your target customer, setting goals, and exploring different outlets are all great things to include in your plan.