5 Things Every Marketing Plan Needs (& Why The Basics Help)

You’re tired of hearing about how great your competitors are. You know you have a good product, but no one knows it exists!

Imagine having a marketing plan that gets people talking about your company and its products. Your customers will be so happy with the results they’ll tell their friends, who will tell their friends, and before you know it, everyone in town is buying from you.

With a proven marketing plan, you can get more people to buy from you than ever before. For example, a digital marketing agency London increased sales by up to 30% in just six months after implementing a robust marketing plan.

So, in this blog post, we will review the five most important aspects of any marketing plan.

1. Create a Goal and Choose it Wisely

Before you begin implementing your marketing plan, you need to consider why you are building one in the first place. For example, why do you want more people buying from you? Knowing the answer will help provide purpose throughout this process.

For instance, if you’re creating a marketing plan to increase sales, your goal might be 10% growth in 6 months. If you’re creating a marketing plan to get more people talking about your company online, then your goal might be doubling the number of followers on Twitter or quadrupling Facebook likes.

As long as it’s measurable, it doesn’t have to be a single goal. Instead, you can have multiple goals that work together to achieve your overall business goals. For instance, you might want to increase sales and get more people talking about your company online.

The cool thing about setting goals is that you don’t need a degree in marketing to do it. However, if you want one, there are plenty of free goal-setting tools out there that can help.

2. List Your Audience & Why They Matter

Everybody knows that a good marketing plan involves knowing your target audience, so let’s start with this list. This will provide the foundation for every other aspect of your plan.

When you’re thinking about your target customer, you need to consider more than just demographics or who they are. It would help if you also thought about their needs, wants, desires, fears, pains, challenges and what keeps them up at night.

For instance, if you’re reading this blog post right now, then there’s a good chance that you either own your business or work for one. Therefore, you know exactly what keeps your business leaders up at night. You can use this to your advantage when customizing a marketing plan for a specific individual or company.

This is important because you don’t want to develop generic plans that will work with multiple people or companies. Doing this makes it more likely that the plan won’t achieve its goal because it’s not designed specifically to the needs of your target customer.

3. Use an Effective Marketing Mix

The marketing mix is simply how you plan to market your business – the tools and tactics you will use to promote your business online. For instance, if you’ve ever seen one of those maps that show the world as a globe, you have seen an example of the 4 Ps.

The Four Ps are product, place, promotion and price

The first one, product, is something that most people know about. However, it doesn’t always mean physical products – think services instead of things. For instance, if you own a business in the service industry, the service you offer would be your product, not the physical office space where you conduct business.

Next is price. This ties into value because the market decides what a fair price is for your product or service. If you’re selling something that people don’t think has any value, they won’t pay much for it, no matter how low the price you try to charge.

Of course, people also care about where you offer your products or services. This is called the distribution channel, and it focuses on how they can get their hands on what you’re selling. Not only that, but they must be able to do this in a way that doesn’t cost them too much money or time or inconvenience them in any way.

Finally, promotion is all about telling people you exist and how to find your product or service. The key thing here is that promotion includes how you make yourself known online.

For example, let’s say that you own a local coffee shop in New York City. You sell these amazing vanilla lattes that cost $10 each. You don’t sell your lattes online, but you use Facebook to promote them. This is where the term promotion gets tricky because it’s not always simply advertising or telling people about your products.

Now imagine that one day it starts raining hard in the city, and you make a clever post on your business page that shows how much better a vanilla latte tastes when it’s cold out. This is a form of promotion because you have someone looking at the page and seeing this, but it’s also a form of advertising because you expose your offering to people who may not know about it. The marketing mix is simply how you plan on doing that.

4. Get Your Plan In Writing

One of the most effective ways to make sure you stay on track is to write a plan. Writing a plan isn’t always necessary, but in some cases, it’s better to write one because doing so can help improve your chances of success. If you don’t, everyone will have different ideas about what needs to be done and how it needs to be done. This leads to confusion, wasted time and incomplete work.

You don’t have to write a 50-page report or anything. If you want, you can write down the steps that outline what needs to be done and why it’s important for success. For example, you own a local flower shop in New York City, and you want to start using social media marketing. Instead of making a plan, just telling everyone “we’re going to use Facebook” is too vague.

5. Measure Success And Failures

How do you know if your plan is working? This is where measurement comes in and why some people refer to it as analytics. While each social network will provide its own tools for measuring how many people are engaging with your content, you need to use these tools and Google Analytics and other analytics tools to measure what’s working.

For example, you can use a social media management tool like Hootsuite to schedule posts and monitor engagement in real-time. You can also use these same tools to automate some of your work without consuming all of your time.

If you can show that your social media marketing is helping increase business, then the chances are good that you’ll be able to convince people to invest more money in it. The same thing goes for showing how these efforts aren’t working. It’s fine to test things out and fail, but it’s never okay to not know what worked or didn’t work in the first place because this will only lead to more wasted time and money.