A marketing plan outlines your marketing strategy, including how to attract new customers, retain existing customers, and promote your product or service. Creating a marketing strategy is essential to ensure you target the right people in the right channels and get the most money to grow your business.
A marketing plan will be an important part of creating your business plan. In a business plan, a marketing plan helps explain how your business fits into the market, who you are, and how you stand out. Small business marketing is how you promote your product or service to increase sales through customer engagement.
1. Research
The first step in learning how to write a marketing plan for your business is research. You will want to consider your market as a whole , your competitors, their marketing strategies, and the marketing strategies they have used in the past , if any. Your research will tell who your target customers are, how they buy your product , which marketing channels will best serve your business, how you want to communicate with customers, and what your marketing budget will be.
While not all of your research will be included in your marketing plan, it will help inform your marketing strategy. The end product will be a more condensed and consolidated version of your research.
2. Know your business
To create an effective marketing strategy, you need to know the ins and outs of your business. What makes your product or service unique? What is your company's mission? Why did you start this business in the first place? Remembering what makes your business unique will help inform your marketing strategy and show customers why they should choose to work with you. Additionally, looking at your business from the customer's perspective can help you uncover unique strengths that you may not have considered before.
3. Understand your customer
In addition to your business and the products or services you offer, you need to consider your customer when writing your marketing plan.
Understand your customers. who they are, what they like, their pain points, how your product or service solves their problem, how and where they consume media, and how to connect with them. Much of the success of your marketing strategy depends on knowing and communicating with your customers.
Identify your target market and limit your reach to specific demographics, such as athletes or parents, to help you find the best way to reach them. If you cast your net too far, you can look stupid and have a hard time attracting customers.
4. Highlight your unique selling proposition
Your company's unique selling proposition, or USP, is what sets you apart. If you want to sell your product or service well, you need to make sure it offers something your competitors don't. To do this, you need to find your USP.
You probably have a good idea of what your USP is, but now is the time to pull together all the great ideas you gathered in the previous steps into one easily shareable statement. Consider this your elevator pitch. You want to tell someone why your product or service is better in 30 seconds. You can even make a cool slogan out of it!
5. Look at the competition
If you want to make the right decisions for your business based on your inside information, you also need to understand what your competitors are doing and how it's working for them.
Learn about their products, prices and marketing strategies. Check customer reviews to see what people love about their business, then use that information to improve your sales and marketing strategy.
6. Know your number
Marketing strategy costs money; However, it shouldn't be too much. In fact, there are plenty of free marketing ideas you can try . However, if you want to make money in the long run, you may need to spend some money. Before deciding on your marketing plan, understanding your business finances is key to creating a realistic marketing budget .
7. Show, don't tell
If you have pre-made marketing materials such as logos, ads, or social media posts, be sure to include them in your marketing strategy. This shows investors or lenders that you have made tangible progress in your business marketing plan.
8. Master your strategy and reach your customers
The only way to really know if your marketing strategy is working is to show it to real people and get their feedback. Although you don't need to create a full marketing plan to get feedback, it's a good idea to go over some general ideas before the focus group. These can be potential customers or friends and family members. make sure you get their real opinion. Use the results to modify your strategy to better serve your customers.
What to put in a marketing plan?
Now that you've researched your marketing strategy, you need to create an action plan that will show you and investors how you will market your business. You can use the following as a marketing plan template to organize your research:
Product or service review. If your business sells products, include details such as size, type, color, features, and price. For services, detail what they are, what problems they solve, why they are needed, and how much they charge.
Target customer personas. who are they how old are they? Where do you live? How much do you earn on average? Are they married or single? Do they have children and/or pets? What are their desires, needs and desires?
USP You know what differentiates your business by studying the market, competition and customers. Be sure to explain what makes your business unique.
Market budget. Determine how much of your overall business budget you plan to spend on marketing. Based on your research, you can include assumptions about how this budget will increase your sales.
Marketing channels. For a complete marketing plan, you can probably use a combination of several channels: email. mail , social networks, SMS , local , digital , etc. The details you focus on are the expected revenue for each budget and the numbers to track (views, clicks, customers, etc.).
Transformation and retention strategies. Find a plan that will get your customers to pay , keep them, and build customer loyalty. New customers are important, but so is customer retention. After all, acquiring a new customer costs more than building a relationship with an existing customer.
Transaction guarantee. Due to space limitations, you may want to include only a few points in the marketing plan section and include the rest in the business plan appendix.
A version of this article was originally published by Fundera, a subsidiary of NerdWallet.
