Building a Marketing Plan for Your Business? Start with These 7 Quick Tips

A detailed marketing plan is the key to successfully selling your incredible products and services. As you outline your different marketing strategies, activities, and business goals for the year, you’re effectively creating the roadmap that will lead you to success.

4 Benefits of Creating Your Marketing Plan

• Define measurable business goals.
• Keep your team aligned across all of your marketing efforts.
• Outline and stick to your marketing budget.
• Work on proactive marketing instead of reactive.

7 Step Guide to Creating an Effective Marketing Plan

Step 1. Understand Your Customer

Your marketing activities should be catered to your target audience. Ask yourself:

• Who is my customer?
• What are their needs?
• What makes them tick?

Answer these questions while reviewing current trends in your niche to better understand your customer today. 

Step 2. Perform a Marketing Audit

To design the roadmap for the future, you need to have an in-depth understanding of where your business is today. Review the data you use to evaluate your business and compare your current strategies to what your competitors are doing in the market. 

Step 3. Define Your Objectives

Prioritize the key objectives of your business and set SMART goals for each one. Consider the following questions for inspiration:

• How many customers do I want to acquire?
• How will we improve the customer experience?
• How will we better utilize our budget?

Step 4. Segment Your Customer Base

Get the most out of your marketing strategies by segmenting your customer base into defined audience personas. This clearly defined approach enables you to target your marketing strategies more effectively, improving your ROI.

Step 5. Identify New Customers and Position Your Business

To grow your business, you either need to find new customers to sell to or sell a greater range of your products and services to your existing customer base. Review the following strategies to identify growth opportunities within your business:

• Identify a new market or customer base that you can penetrate using your top-selling product or service.
• Determine whether there are any improvements or modifications that you can make to an existing product or service, making it more appealing to new or existing customers.
• Brainstorm the possibility of a new product or service that you can develop using your existing resources, expanding your current offering.

Step 6. Create Your Marketing Action Plan

Using all of the data and ideas you’ve gathered above, it’s time to start creating your action plan. Your plan should include the list of goals you hope to achieve, the strategies you’re going to put in place, and a list of the necessary action items that you will assign to your team members. 

Step 7. Monitor, Manage, and Adapt

To see your marketing plan succeed, you will have to monitor its progress every step of the way. You’ll need to manage all the moving pieces, measure your results, and adapt when necessary to keep your marketing plan on track to succeed.