It A good product is not enough. You need a marketing plan so you can market your product more effectively to reach a wider audience.
So, how do you make a good marketing plan? You can read this article, starting from understanding to examples of marketing plans that can serve as inspiration.
What is a Marketing Plan?
Marketing plan is a marketing plan to achieve goals in a specified period. This planning includes marketing strategy and several other marketing activities.
Maybe some of you think that a marketing plan is the same as a marketing strategy. This is not the case. So, here is a comparison table that can help you understand the difference:
| Marketing Strategy | Marketing Plan |
| Details the marketing initiatives that must be run in order to realize the marketing objectives. | Contains one or more marketing strategies. |
| The marketing strategy functions to earn income through marketing campaigns that have been carried out. | The marketing plan functions to link all marketing strategies so that the company’s goals and mission are achieved. |
So in short, a marketing plan is making marketing strategies aligned with your company’s vision and mission. With the help of a marketing plan, your marketing strategies don’t overlap and can be structured properly.
Reasons Why You Need a Marketing Strategy for Your Company
Marketing plan is very important. Then, what are the benefits that you will get when using it?
- Make it easier for you to develop strategies Making a marketing plan will make it easier for you to develop strategies. That way, you can avoid making any mistakes. Whatever business opportunity you take advantage of, a marketing plan can simplify the process of preparing the strategy.
- Avoiding Unclearness in the Future With a marketing plan, all team members already know what goals will be achieved, what strategies will be used, and who will be responsible. So from now on, whatever business you (will) run, whether it’s a digital business or not, prioritize a marketing plan for success before your eyes.
How to Make a Good Marketing Plan
There are eight steps in making a marketing plan, namely:
- Define your Business Vision and Mission
- Define Your Target Market
- Know Who Your Competitors Are
- Create a Content Strategy
- Determine Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for Your Business Marketing Plan
- Define your Marketing Budget
- Determine What to Don’t need
- use marketing tools
1. Defining Your Business Vision and Mission
The first and most important step in creating a marketing plan is to define a business vision and mission. It is hoped that a more targeted marketing strategy will result from having a clear business vision and mission in place.
2. Determine the Target Market
Determining the target market is important so that you can implement an effective marketing plan. Finding your niche will help you market your products more effectively and grow your company.
One definition of a target market is the specific group of people you have in mind as ideal customers for your goods or services. One effective way to determine the target market is to do market research and create buyer personas. Buyer persona is a representation of the typical target customer for your business.
Created a target market and buyer persona that contains demographic data: gender, age, location, personality, and other information related to potential buyers.
It would be nice if you collect as much data as possible to create buyer personas so that the products you offer can be more targeted.
3. Know Who Your Competitors
Know who your competitors are an important part of a marketing plan. Why? Because in this way you can find out what trends are in your industry. That way, you can adapt your business strategies and campaigns to the ongoing trends.
There are several surefire ways to be able to recognize who your business competitors are:
- Become an imaginary customer. This method is arguably the most powerful. You can buy competitors’ products, after that analyze their products and services. Find out what’s so special about a competitor’s product or service. Then you can imitate and modify it so that your products and services are better.
- Stalking marketing channels. Start by becoming a follower on a competitor’s social media and subscribing to their email marketing. Also study the blog content. Then create content that is better than competitors.
- Dig up information from consumers. Find loyal customers of your competitors. As loyal customers, of course they understand the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. Find out why he chose a competitor and not your product.
4. Create a Content Strategy
Executing a content strategy will make it easier for you to achieve company goals. Mainly to attract the attention of the target market to invite them to subscribe.
Or in other words, content helps you do AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action). Here’s the full explanation:
- Awareness/Attention: increase brand awareness and attract the attention of the target market
- Interest: attract the target market’s interest based on their problems
- Desire: offer solutions to the target market
- Action: direct the target market to take the action you want. For example, purchases.
After deciding which one to focus on, you can start running content marketing, such as:
- Types of content. Decide what type of content you will create. Whether it’s blog posts, infographics, e-books, or YouTube videos.
- How much content to create. You can create daily, weekly, monthly, or even quarterly content. Everything can be adjusted according to the workflow and short term goals that you have set for your content.
- What channel will be used to distribute the content. Some popular channels that you can use are: YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
5. Determine Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for Your Business Marketing Plan
All marketing plans that are made must of course be measured for success. The way to measure it is to determine the Key Performance Indicator (KPI).
KPIs or performance indicators are metrics that can measure various elements of marketing campaigns such as: organic website traffic, social media traffic, number of products sold, etc. These metrics help you build short-term goals.
6. Set Your Marketing Budget
Since every marketing plan costs money, it is important for you to create a marketing budget.
To prevent spending costs for marketing from swelling, you can follow the following methods:
- Look back at the business you have
To determine a budget, you must first know what stage your business is at now. Are you just starting out? Or is it already established? Because the marketing budget for a business that has just started and an established one is certainly different. For example: for a business that has just been started, of course there will be more expenses in creating a brand identity such as logo design, creating a website, and so on.
- Make a list of operational
This list of expenses, for example, contains: sales tax, web hosting, content writer fees, or any expenses for business purposes. After knowing how much spending is in operations, of course you will have an idea. What is the maximum budget you have to spend on marketing.
- Trace the customer’s
purchase track By knowing the customer’s purchase track, you will know which marketing strategy has proven to be more effective in sales. So, in that marketing strategy you can budget more.
7. Determine What Doesn’t Need to Be Done
The marketing plan contains not only what the marketing team should pay attention to, but also what should not be considered. If there are other aspects of your business that are not included in your services, include them in this section.
By determining what doesn’t need to be done, you can focus on the vision and mission that was set at the beginning. So, all the marketing campaigns that you will do are more targeted. Targets can also be achieved quickly.
So, don’t forget to make a list of things that don’t need to be done so that your whole team knows which ones don’t need to be done.
8. Use Marketing Tools
After following the ways to create a marketing plan, now is the time for you to use marketing tools. Marketing tools are not directly included in the marketing plan, but they are still important because they can be used to make it easier for you to run way to start a business from scratch .
There are various kinds of digital marketing that you can use to manage your business. Here are some marketing tools that you can use to help run your business:
- Canva – create graphic designs for marketing needs.
- Trello— records and manages to-do-lists, which can also be shared with colleagues.
- Mailchimp– create various campaigns, send them to customers, then see how they perform.
- SociaBuzz — looking for influencers to collaborate with to promote your product.
- Hootsuite– manage multiple social media accounts with a team.
- SocialMention — find out what netizens are talking about your topic or other topics.
- SEMRush–devise a marketing strategy based on the performance of your competitors and your own website.
- Google Analytics–get traffic information, performance ratings and visitor insights.
Sample Marketing Plan
Even though you already know how to make a marketing plan, you may still be a little confused. To clarify, please study various examples of marketing plans based on the type of product:
Example of a New Product Marketing Plan
An example of a new product marketing plan is arguably simpler than an ordinary marketing plan. This is because the new product marketing plan focuses on the awareness stage of AIDA’s strategy.
You have to focus on increasing awareness because generally not many people know about new products. So, you need to attract the attention of the target market so they know your product or brand exists.
To make it clearer, please refer to this simple template as an example of a new product marketing plan:
- Type: Fried chicken company X
- Vision: making fried chicken X the people’s favorite choice
- Mission: building brand awareness of fried chicken X
- Target market: children to adults
- Content strategy and media: video of the process of making fried chicken to upload on Instagram
- KPI: Instagram Reach reaches more than 6000 accounts
- Marketing Budget: $ (team of content creator and social media specialist)
- Marketing Tools: Hootsuite, Social Mention
Sample Marketing Plan Service
Company Service company includes for example tourism agents, laundry businesses, website creation services, etc. The following is an example of a service company’s marketing plan:
- Type: XYZ laundry business
- Vision: provide safe laundry services for any clothing material
- Mission: establish cooperation with certified washing product companies
- Target market: adults, middle and upper class
- Competitors: other laundry businesses
- Content and media strategy: create a blog article on the website about tips for washing clothes safely
- AIDA goal: increase target market interest
- KPI: get more than 10,000 article visitors
- Marketing budget: $
- Marketing tools: Google Analytics
Example of a Goods Company Marketing Plan
For those of you who have a business selling clothes, handicrafts, etc., here is an example of a product company’s marketing plan:
- Type: YZ clothing online shop business
- Vision: make it easier for customers to buy YZ clothes from anywhere and anytime
- Mission: create an online store website that accepts orders 24 hours
- Target market: millennial
- Competitors: other online shops
- Content and media strategy: creating Facebook ads promo discount
- AIDA’s goal: invite potential customers to take action immediately with transactions
- KPI: increase conversions by up to 50%
- Marketing budget: $
- Marketing tools: Facebook Ads, Google Analytics
Now, It’s Time to Make a Marketing Plan!
Read the theory already, see the examples already, now it’s time for you to practice!
Set up notes or use any device, then assemble your marketing team (if you have one). Begin by following the eight steps we mentioned above in compiling your marketing plan.