How to Make an Effective Marketing Plan
How to Make an Effective Marketing Plan
Do you know that the growth of business requires a good marketing plan? A marketing plan helps you to make goals and further procedure to achieve them.
With a goal-centric marketing plan, you can understand where are you standing now and how much effort will be required to reach the destination. In today’s article, I will tell you about my personal experience in making an effective marketing plan.
What is a Marketing Plan?
A marketing plan is an analytical collection of to-do lists to promote your business successfully.
A marketing plan can be as short as one page and can be spread to multiple pages depending on the size of your company.
I have divided the article into two parts.
- Part A – Research and collecting information by understanding your competitors
- Part B – Creating your marking plan
Now, you have an overview of this article. Let’s start it by analyzing competitors.
Part A: You vs. Competitors – A deep Research to Understand the Market
Your competitors’ data can help you to understand the market, required efforts and users approach. Once you have market data, it will be a bit easier to create your effective marketing plan.
1. Business Initiatives
This option is for your business. Of course! You cannot know the further goals strategies of your competitors but the ultimate goal is to gain more and more sales.
Here I would recommend you to note the conversation rate for the current year. Now, you have to decide what conversation rate you want to achieve next year. Benchmark publishing sites can help you to know that what will be the expected growth and conversation rate of a specific industry so; you have to see the expected growth of your niche.
This data will help you to create measurable goals. We will do it in part b.
2. Target Audience
Search engines can help you to know that on which regions your competitors are putting efforts to gain the maximum audience.
Audience target also depends on the product or service that a company offers. But, if you are your competitors also are open to the world than this analysis is helpful. I recommend to use SEMrsuh and see the competitors’ rankings based on countries.
3. Market Capturing Strategies
How your competitors are capturing the marketing and how much you can improve it for your business. In the market capture analysis, you have to note the following data of your competitors:
- Products
- Price
- Method & process
4. Marketing Budget
We cannot miss the budget element. You can use any SEM (Search Engine marketing) tool to see your competitors’ active and previous ads and the amount spent on those ads.
With ads, also see the keywords and PPC costs that your competitors are paying to drive traffic. Now, you can easily know how much they are spending on search & display ads.
Your marketing budget will be a bit higher as you also have to include the additional charges such as marketing software billing & any event if you host.
5. Marketing Channels
There are lots of marketing channels. Beginner marketers mainly focus on search and social channels and do not notice other popular methods of driving traffic.
You have to analyze all the marketing channels that your competitors are using especially sponsored posts. During analysis, if you found that your competitor is gaining too much traffic from a specific site (other than social) than they might be publishing sponsored posts.
Follow that source URL to see that either it is a regular post or a sponsored post. If that source site has a good reputation and traffic than note this site and includes it in your marketing plan.
Part B: Steps to Make an Effective Marketing Plan
You have read the above 5 points about competitor research. Now it’s time to use the collected information to make your marketing plan.
1. Define your Business
This is an easy task. You only have to write an overview of your company. Write about your products and how your products solve the users’ problems.
In your business analysis, you can also include your current revenue and target revenue, partnerships (if you have). In the next steps will be doing some detail tasks.
2. SWOT Analysis
Strength, weakness, opportunity and, threats are collectively known as SWOT. This analysis is just like an audit. You have to do a SWOT analysis for your and your competitors. After this analysis, you will find some more space for your products.
Hint: You can join SmartSheets.Com free to get their SWOT analysis templates.
3. Target Audience
Before making an effective marketing plan, you have to analyze your right audience. If you are an existing business than it is very easy to do. Just go to Google Analytics and see the audience. Do not forget to use audience, country, language filters for detailed analysis.
If you just launched your company, then you have to do some market research to collect this data. Google Trends is a popular tool that can provide enough data to start your marketing.
4. Smart Goals
A goal that is measurable, attainable, time-bound and relevant is known as a smart goal.
Now, it’s time to make a road map. With an analytical approach, you have to create smart goals.
You can create multiple goals such as targeted sales, targeted conversation rate, email collection, social audience. But, make sure that every goal can be measured. Let’s see an example of a smart goal.
Suppose that your goal is to gain 20% more YouTube subscribers. This goal is simply measurable and attainable.
Do not forget to analyze your current growth rate before making a goal. You can see these analytics in your Google Analytics account.
Tip: Use Google Analytics goals to track the users’ activities on the site. Google Analytics will record the users’ activity data and based on this data, your marketing plans will improve.
5. Make Strategies List
Once you have written down all your goals, the next step is to make an action plan to achieve those goals.
Take the above YT subscribers example again. If I want to increase 20% more subscribers than I have to either publish 3 – 4 more videos weekly or I will put extra efforts on my video SEO or I will run ads on YT. It depends on me how much actions I choose for a goal. For YT subscribers, either I can select one of the above or apply all of them.
6. Your Budget
Budget analysis is another important part of the effective marketing plan. You have a clear idea that how much you will spend on ads this year.
Your budget will depend on your goals, tools that are required, PPC costs and charges of hiring a marketing team. Having more goals might require more investment and vice versa.
Again see the YT subscribers’ example. If this year I spent $300 on YT ads and next year I want to gain 20% more subscribers than I also have to spend 20% more amount on video promotions. The same thing applies to other social accounts.
Bonus: Optimize Landing Pages
You must have a landing page when you will run ads. Your landing pages should be users friendly and the user can easily reach to the final step where you want to take him.
Want I mean by optimizing landing pages? Suppose you are running an online store. User lands and now he has to pay the bill to buy an item. If your payment process includes 3 – 4 steps than your payment method is not optimized. Rather than filling too much data, giving a sign-up option and saving information is a good idea.
Amazon is the best example of an optimized payment option. All the process does on the same page and they do not redirect users to multiple pages.
If you are also using such options that need hierarchy than track each page by using Google Analytics goals set up. It will help you to know at which stage users leave the site.
Your Job
These were some simple steps to make an effective marketing plan. I am sure you will find this information useful and now your marketing plan will be better than the previous.