Everyone tells you that you need to be S*** Hot at marketing if you want to be successful with your business these days and that you need some whizz of a marketing plan up your sleeve to get any traction at all. But no one ever seems to show you what a marketing plan looks like!
Well in today’s blog post I want to help you do just that, so that you can understand how powerful having a marketing plan for your marketing really is!
The art of developing a marketing plan for your business
Ok, so let me start right where you are sitting now. At this point you feel like you are struggling to get your business noticed and you have been trying lots of different tactics, but nothing seems to produce the results you desire. You do not really understand what a marketing plan is either – but you just read somewhere that you need one… confused much? I hear you!
Let us start with that.
What is a Marketing plan?
A marketing plan is an outline of stepped actions that deliver a desired result for your business in either awareness building, or a specific call to action (usually a sales-based target). There are 8 steps to completing your marketing plan and these are;
Research
Defining your offers
Audience targeting and budget outline
Outreach outline
Timeline of delivery
Content creation design guide
Content delivery and execution outline
Review process
The content within this strategy can be summarised for paid, or organic advertising campaigns, or a mixture of both.
What is the purpose of a marketing plan?
By laying out in detail what your plan for marketing your business is, you should end up with 3 key things;
Clarity about who your market is - this will make it easier to find clients and customers if you know who they are.
Create content that generates results and not the painful sound of crickets - If you understand what content your audience requires and how to speak to these potential clients, it means your content will create more interest.
Focus and direction in your business - There are so many choices in marketing content, platform and format that it is hard to decide which is the right fit for you. If you have a marketing plan laid out, then you can see exactly what your perfect choices are.
When should I create a marketing plan?
If you write a business plan at the beginning of your business, then you will need to develop a marketing plan within that before you present your business idea for funding. If, however, like most small business owners you started with little to no external funding then the chances are you have never written a business plan or considered developing a plan for your marketing.
Now whether you have already created a plan or not, today is the perfect time to start one, or revise one.
Why? Because, the way to effectively push for results with your marketing is to create a strong plan for your creation and execution on a yearly basis to account for shifts in focus.
I usually draft mine out to put into action at the beginning of the year, because this is when I also sit down and set my business goals for the year, which consists of sales targets, budgets and development.
I did not start this way, but as my first business grew and I felt overwhelmed with work, I found streamlining could only be brought in effectively if I planned my processes beforehand. Just like every other area in my business I noticed that when it came to marketing, my disorganisation was letting me down. I was posting on social media ‘on the fly’, ad-hoc if you will, my email marketing was wishy washy because I never knew what to write and PR, well, there wasn’t much of that at all.
Over the years since I started planning my marketing, I have seen huge growth in awareness, especially online for my business and I could directly correlate spikes in sales to campaigns I had created and delivered. That was proof enough for me that planning worked.
Let me show you what to include in your plan, so you can see how it plays out over the year.
“A marketing plan is a guide to the campaign and the content you intend to create and execute for a desired CTA. ”
What to include in your marketing plan
Remember I have the a marketing plan template above if you would like to download it.
I always work with 8 basic steps to my yearly plan for marketing and they look something like this.
1 Research
This initial step is critical because the results of your research will inform the rest of your plan’s development. Remember you have four main points to cover here; customer, competitor, product/service, and marketplace. Essentially in this instance you are looking for the following things in your analytics, feedback, and sales records;
Customer research – how your customer and their needs have evolved over the last year, so you can determine how you best fulfil these, who you now need to target and how to talk to them whilst you do that. Sometimes, small or big customer evolutions will happen over the course of a year, so keep an eye on what your data is telling you.
Competitor research – examples of best practice, particularly in messaging and online presence and how your competitors have changed over the last year.
Product/service research – reactions from the market to your products and products like it, as well as changes in how these are being promoted by other competitors.
Marketplace research – conversations and market shifts beyond your niche, but within the same industry that will affect your brand and customer base. For example trends in the overall beauty industry will affect your handmade soap business, just as spikes in travel to a certain destination could effect your travel agency’s focus that year.
2 Defining your offers
At this point in a marketing plan you have two annual offers; firstly your business and how it serves your audience (this is awareness marketing) and secondly, the products and services you are offering this year to fulfil your customer needs (marketing for sales). Normally at this point we almost pluck these offers from the air, but with a plan we are much more strategic than that, because we have already established through our research several points of understanding about our customers and the market.
When it comes to awareness building, I always set a target in email subscribers personally, but you might include an increase in social followers, or something else measurable. In my product and service marketing I am always looking to up my sales, so I would expect to create marketing that offers a product or service as an outcome for my customer – something where I can directly measure sales against marketing efforts (or conversion rates).
3 Audience targeting and budget outline
You will immediately see at this point that defining your target audience should feel much easier, because you have completed customer research in step one. We want to use this information to answer the following questions;
Who are you targeting with your marketing?
What marketing content are you targeting them with?
Where are you targeting them with your marketing content – on which channels?
When specifically, are you targeting them? Time, day, week, month
Why are you targeting them? In other words what pain point do you solve with your offer? Is it knowledge, or a ‘thing’.
The next step of defining our audience targeting outline is to establish relevant Calls to Action (CTAs). Thinking across the year you may have two areas of focus; firstly, building general brand awareness, which may include things like email list building, and secondly pushing for results in general, or specific sales of products and services. These are the offers defined in step two.
The final thing to outline here is budget. Budget really depends on two things; firstly if you have the funds to outsource help from content marketing managers like myself, or buying into a system to help you automate, or manage parts of your plan. Secondly, if you don’t have the funds what can you utilise for free and how much time can you block out to dedicate to your plan’s execution. So, budget is about two things: time and money.
4 Outreach outline
Once we have defined who we are targeting and with what, it is time to decide exactly where we will aim to reach them.
There are two main focuses in our business marketing, and this is ‘inbound marketing’ and ‘external’ marketing’. Inbound marketing is anything we create and distribute ourselves and external is distributed by a third party, like a newspaper who may or may not create the content themselves.
Let us look at the options within each.
Inbound channels include social media, web copy which might include assets like landing pages, SEO assets like blog posts and back links, email marketing in the form of opt-in offers as well as emails to an existing audience, and finally direct mail which may include things like flyers and brochures.
External channels include media and press, as well as online outreach through guest posting on someone else’s blog, or appearances which may include events, or Facebook live sessions in closed Facebook groups. On top of this there is also in person event attendance and speaking.
5 Timeline of delivery
When exactly we choose to deliver the content we have created is crucial to its success, because we want to make sure our efforts get the most attention. I start this process each year by laying out the year in advance with key dates, considering sales peaks and troughs. For example, if you are an ice cream salesman your optimal time to advertise your product and get the most sales is when the weather is warmest. Likewise, when I used to sell the wool yarn with my craft business, summer was the worst time for sales, because wool was far too hot to knit with. If like me you have a mix of products or services, then you will easily be able to see which item fits where in your annual campaign.
Once I have the year lightly mapped out, I outline a more singular focus on quarterly goals. This breaking down of the year helps me to avoid sensations of overwhelm when working on my marketing alongside my paying work. I also find that the majority of what I market benefits from a 30-90 day lead.
The real detail of my plan comes in a monthly breakdown of my campaign and this is where I will outline individual content form and design, along with timing of release gauged by my analytics understanding of platforms of choice. I am not directly creating the content within my plan, instead I am outlining that content, so that later when the time draws near, I have given myself a to do list of content creation ideas. No more staring at a blank page!
6 Content creation design guide
Giving yourself a guide to work to does two things, firstly as explained in step five it helps you to outline your marketing pieces. What it also does is guides you through how to remain on brand with your content, which is incredibly important from a business perspective, because this helps your content stand out from all the rest, by being immediately identifiable.
There are a few questions I answer, and I include in my design guide for content creation and these are;
What content would best highlight my CTA?
How is this content going to make my CTA clear?
How can I create a story with my content to deliver on a CTA? Remember people like story flow and they want to learn to trust you through your outreach.
What content format is best for which channel?
What do I need to create ahead of time?
How am I going to deliver that content? Remember automation is your friend here.
Finally, how does this content piece benefit my audience and my target push & how does it elicit engagement? Engagement is not just about likes, it is about comments, shares and ultimately click-throughs.
7 Content delivery and execution outline
Knowing which systems you have in place to help you with your marketing campaign is another big thing to have nailed down at the beginning of the year. It might be that this year you need to hire help from a Content Marketing Manager like myself, or get guidance on your plan. Your systems may also include email marketing and social media services… I have reviewed a few already here on the blog; Hootsuite and Buffer. Being organised ahead of time really makes a difference when it comes to execution and results.
8 Review process
Finally the review process is an outline on how you plan to assess your results and at what intervals. I find that as I go into a new quarter it is important to review the previous one, so that I can adapt and make changes as needed to get the results I desire. On top of this I collect my Google Analytic, email marketing and social media stats weekly, so that I can monitor changes and areas of note for my quarterly review.
That is it - your marketing plan!
Of course it is going to take some time to work out, but once you have it in place it helps you to guide your marketing in a focused direction throughout the year, something which you are probably missing without it.
“If you want focused results in sales, then you need to focus your marketing and that starts with drafting out a marketing plan.”
Your Content Marketing Manager’s Top Tip – How I keep on top of the detail in my marketing plan
My favourite workflow tool is Asana, it helps me manage big projects, like my marketing plan alongside the day to day in my business. Here is a walkthrough if you have not seen the desktop version of the app before;
With a big project like my marketing plan I will create a separate project on my Asana dashboard (choosing a specific project colour) and break down the section tabs with my eight steps. Within these sections I can then create my fully detailed task list. Once I have created those tasks, I can dedicate dates and times for each (or even staff members if you have someone working with you on this).
When I come to work each day, I can see my set tasks and distinguish which of those tasks, if any are related to my marketing plan by the colour block. I find this helps me to feel like I am always chipping away at a bigger project, but without that stressful feeling of overwhelm I might otherwise get, if I left big chunks of work until a specific day each month. You know what I mean… those days when you have big plans and life throws something much more urgent at you, meaning of course your project gets pushed back, again!
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