Why do You Need a Marketing Plan

And 7 Steps to Creating One

Developing a marketing plan today may seem lost in the day-to-day activities of a busy marketing department. The list of tasks in Asana, Tello, or your simply trustworthy notebook may lead you to “production mode”, instead of “planning mode”.

Photo by Danielle MacInnes on Unsplash

Regardless of how you set up your day, setting up your marketing objectives ahead and ensuring there is a clear plan, view, and way to achieve them is without a doubt, the best thing you and your team will do to achieve success. A plan isn’t just good for setting long term objectives, it can help you daily with:

• Your day to day tasks: Having an overall strategic plan can ensure that you’re spending time in daily tasks developed to achieve the goals you set up initially;
• Focus: By focusing your attention on the planned activities you and your team have a clear vision, clear understanding o “what needs to get done” and how to achieve it;
• Collaboration: No plan is executed in isolation, so when planning each team member is often looking into how that strategy or tactic may reflect in their workday and responsibilities. A plan highlights how teams work together and when facilitating collaboration;
• Measuring success: Your marketing plan should not only set the tone but highlight ways to measure success through early defined Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s)

The Making of a Marketing Plan?

In my view, the answer should follow the KISS principle (Keep It Simple Stupid).

You don’t want to overcomplicate, the more you do, the harder it will be to focus. The best is to think of the overall picture than break it down.

In terms of marketing it might be something like:

• 5Year Marketing Plan: Define where you want your business to be in 5 years, what do you want to achieve? How would you see growth and how well does your marketing plan aligns with your overall business growth. Remember, one should follow the other and it is often Marketing supporting/following your intended business growth.
• Yearly Marketing Plan: If the 5year plan focuses on the overall intention, this is more strategic. It defines your tactics campaigns and ideas and often includes goals, timelines, budgets, and responsibilities. Think of it as your yearly step towards your 5year plan.
• Campaign Plan: It could be that your marketing plan includes one or more campaigns, if that is the case then you should develop a campaign plan. A campaign plan is more tactical, it focuses on elements of that campaign like the message, imagery, channels, etc. It defines all the major areas you would need to concern yourself with to execute that campaign and it would always include ways to verify success (KPI’s).
• Action Plan: This is up to you. Many businesses will include their action plan into their campaign plan being one more area to address in achieving the campaign’s goals. But this is up to you, you can separate your action plans from the campaign plan and treat it as a separate resource that you/your team would use daily.

The Yearly Marketing Plan is the one that most businesses’ marketing departments will focus on. At some point in the fiscal or calendar year, a business will be looking into building a Yearly Marketing Plan. This often happens once direction from leadership is given into what to focus on for the year ahead. Also, it is simple to plan it yearly as there are often staff changes, yearly revenue targets, and year on year business evaluate their last year performance.

Although your business year may be split into quarters, your marketing plan doesn’t necessarily need to follow that split but quarterly targets and goals must be considered. As marketing campaigns aren’t static you can start a campaign in Q1 and finish it in Q2, but you need to consider when that campaign will start yielding results and what quarter will those results reflect into.

7 Steps of a Yearly Marketing Plan

These may vary, but most marketing plans will include some variation of the following X steps:

1. Set goals/objectives: This is the what. What do you want to achieve? Is it increasing your brand awareness? generate leads? generate sales? expand your business to new territories, audiences, or products/services? Defining your goals or objectives is key to identify how you will achieve them. Oh! and make sure your objectives are SMART.
2. Analyse your market: There are many business/marketing analysis models: SWOT, PESTEL, AIDA, RACE, etc. Whether you decide on one or the other, or for a combination of 2 models, there is no right answer. Ultimately you will need to consider what model speaks to your goals and objectives better, for example, if you are launching a new product a SWOT analysis may be the best option as it gives you an overview not only of the market but your competing products as well. On the other hand, when looking for market expansion the PESTEL model may be your best choice as it will reflect the micro and macro environment of your business.
3. Identify your audience: Most marketeers will aim to influence anonymous individuals (or businesses) who share a challenge that their business aims to solve. Regardless of selling services, products, or fundraising, your business should have something to offer to someone who wants it, and finding out who that someone is is key. In most business marketeers will start by defining target audiences or personas, these would serve as the basis of your marketing strategy as they will give you information about your potential audience’s likes, dislikes, habits, and most importantly: Why they want your product! Understanding what is the real problem that someone wants to fix by buying your solutions is the basis of good marketing. If you know who you are talking to, you will know how to talk to them.
4. Define your channels: This could be a step in itself as part of your 5th step. When developing your personas or target audiences you will be looking to identify where these people are? Where they look for information and who they reach out to to get approval on what to buy. We all do this, regardless if approvals are from a senior colleague, your mother, or a respected friend. Understanding the channels people use to find information and educate themselves helps define what tactics are most appropriate to sell your business. Again, you can do this as part of step 5 but why would you consider a channel that is completely irrelevant for your audience? I like to think that identifying the channel first is a great way to weed through unnecessary actions.
5. Define your tactics/Build your plan: This is where you will start laying out your campaigns and tactics. How many campaigns will you consider in one year? Are these campaigns time-sensitive? How are these campaigns going to help you achieve your goals? You could have specific one-off campaigns or long terms campaigns that have ongoing tactics or activities. Depending on your goals, and your audience channels layout what you want to do, when and how these would be measured. At this point, a Gantt Chart, a calendar plan, or an action plan could be beneficial as it will help you plan out your yearly activities.
6. Define your budget: This is where you will define your budget, identifying each campaign’s needs and how much you should allocate to each. It could be that your budget is split by tactic, not campaign, but I find it easier to consider campaign budget instead. Each campaign could be redone next year if proven successfully, but success is only effectively measured against how much you’ve spent on it. So, make sure you understand your campaign’s Return on Investment (ROI) as this will allow you a better choice on whether you should redo them or not. Also, don’t forget about fixed and variable costs, your staff, consultants, specialists, and tech all cost money and this should be considered in your overall marketing budget.
7. Analysis: I’ve mentioned KPI’s but this is where they shine. Part of your plan should include some kind of measuring and analytics program. Ahead of effectively delivering your tactics and campaigns, you should consider how these will be measured and what kind of factors you will be looking at from a weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly point of view. Ensuring you have a clear vision of how you will measure success is a fundamental step to achieve it.

And that’s it! Building a Marketing plan shouldn’t be a scary thought. It’s relativity simple once you have the recipe, just walk yourself through the different steps and look out of your own office to answer any questions you may come up with regarding your environment, market, and targets. Speaking with current customers is a great place to start to gain insight into what you need to do to succeed.