A marketing plan is a strategy your business will follow to organize, implement and meet overall business goals.
By implementing the right plan, you can make educated business moves to generate a large return on investment to a target audience that will engage with your brand.
Market Research
Complete market research on who your consumers will be and what their buying habits are. By identifying who they are, how old they are, where they shop, and even how much they like to spend, you can tailor-make a marketing plan directed specifically at them.
Target Market
Once your research is complete and you can identify the target market, you can then separate them into different segmentations; as an example, your target market could be segmented into females or males.
This is a smart way to differentiate who is in your audience and move forward with a marketing strategy to target them.
Positioning
You will have to determine how you would like your company to be perceived, and this will position your business within the market against your competitors. By creating a persuasive branding and marketing campaign, you will be able to communicate who your company is and give a positive impression to who you want to be seen by.
Competitor Analysis
Doing a competitor analysis will give you a good idea of where your competitors are placing themselves in terms of how much they’re pricing their products, what they are doing to advertise, and who they are trying to attract.
You will be able to identify your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses, which will help you refine your strategy to target your customers in a way that they are not.
Market Strategy
This element is the rock of your marketing plan. It is here you will decide which marketing tactics you want to use to communicate to your target audience. You will need to consider creating an online presence through a website and social media, as well as thinking about starting an email database to literally communicate to your customers.
As well as online activity, an offline marketing strategy is just as important. Education leaflets, business cards, and other promotional products should be used here. From previous research, you should be able to know where your target audience shop, read and buy, and this will guide where you should invest your money.
Budget
You will need to dedicate a budget to your marketing activities and track the return on investment you will get. To work out your return on investment percentage, take how much you’ve made from your marketing activities and divide it by how much was spent on advertising, and multiply by 100.
This will help you know if what you are spending is returning profit to your business.
Tracking
By tracking the activities you have invested in, and the return on investment will help you analyse what your target audience are responding to. Depending on these results, you can then invest where the results are proving best and make an even bigger return on investment.
