“According to the Search Engine Journal, 50% of small-medium sized businesses do not have marketing plan in writing.” – Search Engine Journal
Data shows that companies that have established business marketing plans have a decided advantage over their less prepared competitors. However, not all marketing plans are created equal. Just because you have a plan, doesn’t mean it’s a winning one. The best marketing plan help we can offer is this:
All of your time and effort will be wasted if you don’t have a system that allows you to track progress, measure success, and calculate ROI.
Build a Marketing Strategy With Room to Grow
It’s important to start with the understanding that a marketing plan is meant to be a living document, not one that you file away and never improve upon. Successful marketers and business owners will need to maintain an edge by continuously evaluating their plan against changes in the marketplace. This process includes:
- Understanding or your ideal target audience and the factors that contribute to their buying decisions.
- Considering new innovations and tools for engaging customers
- Staying up to date with trends and changes within your specific industry
- Researching search engine algorithm adjustments
- Using new technology to provide a cutting-edge customer experience
Consider how much more effective your marketing efforts and investment will be when you plan with a growth-driven mentality! This approach is characterized by both short and long term strategic planning, and by the development of scalable and customizable marketing products.
An effective marketing plan should have diversification at the heart of it’s approach. At Farotech, we often say we believe in systems, not solutions. There are countless stories of companies that put all of their eggs in one basket, only to have it all crash when an algorithm changes or a social platform changes their approach.
In other words, we encourage businesses to build websites, marketing collateral, customer relationship management (CRMs), marketing automation systems and assets in a manner that not only allows for, but expects, change. As you’re regularly evaluating your plan, you’ll also be able to tweak and make adjustments as needed.
Anatomy of a Successful Marketing Plan
The idea of building a strategy that is “growth-driven” might be a new concept, but you’re probably quite familiar with many of the traditional key components of a marketing strategy. As a review, we’ll describe them here and then take some time below to dive into some specifics.
- Conduct Market Research
Analyze the market dynamics, including trends and supply and demand levels. Know your competitors, industry pricing, the impact of your geographic location, and any factors that might challenge your ability to reach potential clients with your product or service.
- Establish Goals
Set up marketing goals that are specific and quantifiable. They should directly align with your business goals and should be realistic based on what you learned during your market research.
- Create a Mission Statement
Clearly identify what you’re contributing to the market, who your product or service is meant to benefit, and how your business is a unique provider. Establishing a strong Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is an important part of this step.
- Identify Your Target Audience
Identify your ideal customers and describe their buyer persona. In short, who are your customers? What do they care about? How are you going to solve their problem?
- Determine Your Pricing and Positioning
Locate your business within the market and set a pricing structure that is both competitive and realistic according to your business plan. Develop consistent, dynamic branding.
- Implement a Marketing Strategy
Outline how exactly you plan to increase brand awareness, communicate your unique selling proposition (USP), and engage with potential customers. What system will you put in place to ensure that you’re reaching the right potential clients with the right message at the right time?
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- Make a Marketing Budget
Plan for your marketing strategy to fit into a feasible budget. Focus your resources on a sustainable, systematic plan and don’t waste money on best guesses or silver bullets.
- Evaluate Metrics and Analysis
Commit to regularly measuring your marketing results and make changes as necessary. In fact, everything about your marketing should start and end with data.
A tip for starting with data: Request a custom, comprehensive gap assessment that will highlight opportunities for growth and outline a three- to five- year projected plan for your business.
A tip for ending with data: Whether you’re working with an in-house team, an outside marketing company, or several individual venders, make quarterly analytics reports a required part of your regular marketing review.
Revising Number 6
While writing a marketing plan, a huge portion of your time and energy is obviously going to be devoted to step six: Developing the action points of your actual marketing approach.
One of the first things you’ll need to decide is whether you’re going to take a more traditional, outbound approach or whether you’re ready to enter into the world of inbound marketing. Or, as we usually recommend, pursue a hybrid of the two.
Inbound marketing is a strategy that uses your website to:
- Generate cold leads
- Warm them up through a nurturing process
- Convert those leads into customers
- Encourage those customers to become brand ambassadors for your business
Outbound allows you to:
- Effectively utilize and monetize an existing list
- Craft specific messages for particular buyer personas
- Set goals for CPA (cost per acquisition) and manage a budget accordingly
- Take advantage of interruption marketing with heavy awareness messaging
- Reach people who don’t know who you are yet
A hybrid approach is valuable because it:
- Uses a gap assessment to customize a strategy specific to your business
- Gives you a path toward thought leadership as well as target marketing
- Allows you to tell great stories and pair those stories with strategic campaigns
Here at Farotech, we use and recommend a growth-driven, digital marketing system that is measurable and scalable that combines the best parts of inbound and outbound together.
Our unique process is designed to maximize your investment and put your marketing budget to better use. We believe marketing should never be a shot in the dark.
Developing a marketing plan can be really difficult. Particularly if you’re too close to your products and services or too familiar with your own brand, it can be hard to see the big picture. When you need to get inside the heads of your potential clients, we recommend using an outside marketing company to help you take a step back and analyze where you may have gaps in your approach. Filling those gaps can yield incredible results for your company.
Our process at Farotech is backed by conversion science and every step we take is part of a purposeful system.
Remember our most important piece of marketing advice:
All of your time and effort will be wasted if you don’t have a system that allows you to track progress, measure success, and calculate ROI.
To learn more, contact us for a free marketing consultation. We’d be glad to talk with you about developing your marketing strategy to help your business grow and thrive.
