How to Write A Marketing Plan: 4 Tips To Get You Started
Marketing Plan Who?
Marketing plans are the key steps in helping your business achieve goals and push your team into the direction of growth. Having a plan and reevaluating the plan can help make the goals clear and up to date. Having a goal without a plan is just a wish, and the first step is knowing how to create the plan!
The first step is to step back, well sort of. Stepping back allows for your team to understand the big picture goals and where the marketing specifically is trying to head.This is similar to the business plan goals, but the idea is to focus more on the marketing side of those goals and projects that lead into promotion and then sales.
Next step is understanding your buyer personas, which are fancy words for understanding your customers. This starts with market research, understanding your industry is key to helping develop a solid plan. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional description of the ideal customer and focusing on the traits they possess including age,location, goals, and personal challenges. You might have multiple types of buyers that frequent your goods or service, which is something to document and understand. Each
buyer has different interests, priorities, and goals, understanding the characteristics of
each will help you focus your content and attract the ideal customer.
The third step is to understand why, when, and where these buyers are looking and going to find your product or service. These are called trigger-based marketing, what is triggering your customer to search for your business? Are they buying cookies for the holiday, are they looking for a local café, or maybe they are looking to get their nails done by a local salon? These are all triggers for someone to search for in their local area. Listing what triggers your ideal customer would be interested in finding your
business is key for the plan and where you need to focus your marketing projects.
The last step is to write out ways to complete these goals and the plan to do so while also thinking about the buyers and the triggers. Maybe your goal is to increase your Instagram following by 10%, in order to do this, you might need to do a giveaway to promote your Instagram handle, respond to comments, and post four times a week with incentives to share what you posted. Another goal is to get more foot traffic into your store, social media is one place to start by adding content related to visiting the store,
another is to leverage Google’s Local Inventory Ads which is when someone searches for an item, and it shows where they item can be found near them. Exploring different ways to complete these goals and unique ways to make your brand and company different is key in a marketing strategy.
Other areas to help with online marketing include Google Keyword Planner which helps understand keywords to bid on for Google Ads to allow for advertisements when people search those keywords. Another area is websites like Buffer and other online social media account managers which gives data including clicks, impressions, comments, when people are looking at your content and which days are the best days to post for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and others.