Developing a good marketing plan is a challenge that all marketers face at the beginning of the year or the course. buy youtube views This document is responsible for guiding our steps and guiding our decisions, so it is essential that it is well planned.
For the business marketing plan to be effective, it must contain all the necessary information. To get a cable, let’s look at the 15 key sections of a marketing plan according to Forbes .
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Marketing plan: the basics to start
1) Definition of the target audience
This section describes the consumers your brand is targeting, including both their demographic profile (age, gender), and psychographic profile (their interests) and their wishes and needs related to the products and services you offer.
My recommendation for this section of the marketing plan is that you stop to elaborate a buyer person or “robot portrait” of your ideal client. The fundamental data that you must include are:
- Who? General profile, demographic data and identifiers.
- What motivates you? Its objectives and primary and secondary challenges and what the company can provide.
- Do you need us? Your objectives, complaints and most common problems.
- How can we help? The marketing and sales messages that can help us connect with him.
- What are your pain points or pain points? Here we must identify what is the problem that leads the user to do a certain search and what words he uses for it.
- If we can clearly identify our target customers, we can more effectively target our ads and speak to them in their own language.
2) Unique sales proposition
Having a unique sales proposition is essential to distinguish your company from the competition.
So much so, that many successful companies are defined by their unique sales proposition. For example, it is the case of Mercadona and its “always low prices”.
If you have not yet defined your company’s unique sales proposal, the marketing plan is a good place to include it.
3) Price and positioning
Decisions on pricing and positioning must always be aligned either s . For example, if you want to position your brand as the highest quality in the sector, having a price too low could be harmful.
To get the most suitable pricing policy and positioning, it is a good idea to conduct a good market study to see the gaps left by the competition. It is also necessary to take into account the objective characteristics of our product and the cost of manufacturing it.
4) Distribution plan
Along with the price, the product and the promotion, the distribution or “placement” is another of the classic 4 P marketing , so it can not be missing in the business marketing plan.
The distribution plan details how you can buy your products and services , for example, through an ecommerce on your website or from distributors such as supermarkets. Of course, it is possible to combine different distribution channels to optimize the reach.
5) Offers
The offers and promotions are aimed at getting new customers and getting the previous ones to buy your product again. Although they are not essential for the proper functioning of the company, they can help you grow faster.
In this section of the company marketing plan you should detail aspects such as free trials, money back guarantees, packs of different products and, of course, discounts.
6) Marketing materials
The marketing materials are all the content you use to promote your brand to present and future customers: website, catalogs, cards, banners and much more.
In this section of the business marketing plan you will be responsible for reviewing what marketing materials you need, which are already available and which you need to create from scratch or review. Thus, you will have everything ready to put your actions in motion.
The marketing strategy step by step
7) Promotion strategy
This is one of the most important sections of your business marketing plan, since it details how you will reach new customers .
For this, you have many options, both traditional and digital marketing: online advertising, television ads, fairs, press releases, events … Choose the most appropriate for your target audience and think about how you can create synergies between them.
8) Online marketing strategy
Another fundamental pillar of the marketing plan, since in many occasions its importance surpasses that of conventional advertising. Make sure you include these sections :
- Keyword strategy : the terms for which you want to optimize your web page.
- SEO strategy : the actions that you will carry out on your website to improve your search engine positioning.
- Online advertising strategy : here we include both the SEM and banners, ads on social networks and others.
- Content strategy : to feed your website, blog and social networks and launch native advertising campaigns.
- Social network strategy : how are you going to use social networks to attract and retain customers?
9) Conversion strategy
This section includes the techniques we use to convert potential clients into real clients: improve your sales arguments, include social test elements in your landing page, etc.
10) Partners strategy
Here we will look for other brands with which we can collaborate for mutual benefit. For example, if you sell spare parts for cars, you will surely be interested in collaborating with workshops and dealers.
To detect collaboration opportunities, think of other products associated with yours that consumers buy before, at the same time or later. It includes a list of related companies in the marketing plan and a plan to contact them.
11) Referral strategy
A good referral program can increase your sales exponentially: think about what would happen if each of your clients brought you two new clients!
But for this type of marketing strategy to work, it is necessary to have a good referral plan that includes how you will encourage clients to make recommendations and the rewards that you can offer in return.
12) Strategy to increase the amount of the purchase
The average purchase price is a fundamental metric for the success of any company. Generally, it is much more efficient to make current customers buy more than trying to get new customers.
For this reason, it is necessary to include a section in the company marketing plan on actions aimed at increasing the average value of the purchase, for example, a price increase or a promotional pack.
13) Loyalty strategy
Loyalty strategies seek that customers make repeated purchases over time, increasing profits without incurring the cost of constantly searching for new customers. Two very common examples of loyalty actions are dot cards and newsletters.
The final ingredients of the marketing plan
14) Financial projections
For a business marketing plan to be brought to reality, the numbers have to square. Therefore, it is essential to project the expenses derived from the actions detailed in the plan and the benefits that are expected to be obtained with them.
15) Executive summary
Although the normal thing is that this section goes right to the beginning of the marketing plan, I included it at the end because it is the last thing you should write. As its name suggests, this section is a summary of all the previous sections, aimed at quickly finding the most important information.