Six steps to create a successful marketing plan
Marketing is the powerhouse behind every business’s growth. To truly maximise your marketing efforts, clarity on your goals is essential—and that’s where a solid plan comes into play!
Here are our six key steps to creating your strategy and building a successful marketing plan. You may also like to listen to this episode of the Revitalise & Grow podcast: Season 1, Episode 2: Setting your strategy
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So, what is a marketing strategy?
A marketing strategy is your go-to-guide for defining, prioritising, planning, and executing projects to influence profitable customer action. Marketing is not just about producing content. Marketing is about producing content that produces results! And a marketing strategy provides the roadmap for you and your team to execute well-planned projects that can be measured against a clearly defined goal.
This process not only helps you target the right audience with the right content and the right level of effort, but helps you understand the impact your marketing projects have upon the growth of your organisation.
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Setting SMART goals
First things first, you need to start with your goal in mind. Your marketing goal should be SMART: a specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound metric that drives every marketing effort.
For example, a SMART goal for an adventure travel company could look like this:
Increase the adventure travel company’s website traffic by 30% and social media engagement rates by 20% through a combination of content marketing, social media campaigns, and targeted ads over the next six months.
Work out what is realistic, aligned with your business’s overall aims and give yourself a time-frame to achieve the goal by.
- How to track and measure your goals and ROI
Marketing measurement requires tools to make this a reality. You need to connect the dots between the content you publish and the results it produces towards your goal.
Google Analytics’ Goals function is a great way to help you track the actions that are driving more leads and using UTM tracking links means you can measure the effectiveness of specific channels more accurately.
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Targeting a specific audience
Your target audience is the ideal customer you want to attract to your product or service through your marketing efforts. Your marketing plan should include customer personas, which detail your target audiences’ who, what, when, where, and why. Demographics such as gender, location, job title and business size are useful but to truly understand your audience you need to know their lifestyle habits, values and the challenges they face to produce content that will really resonate with them.
A common mistake is thinking you need to target two or three, or more, audiences. Target one audience to begin with—the one with the greatest potential for growth—so you don’t spread yourself too thin, dilute your messages, and actually hurt your chances of attracting the right prospects to your brand. It is better to target one audience well than to try to appeal to everyone and end up appealing to no one!
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Prioritising projects
Project prioritisation is the process that helps you decide which work will influence your marketing goals most effectively. Our top tip is to take on the projects with the largest potential first! This process helps you prioritise your projects even further.
Maximise your minimal resources by prioritising the projects that have the largest opportunity for growth while minimising the effort you spend on projects that will not dramatically boost your results.
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Planning project timelines
A marketing project timeline is your roadmap to campaign success, detailing the creation of every piece of content over a set period. Kick things off with a brainstorming session to spark ideas for all the content you’ll need—it’s the perfect way to set the stage for future activities.
Sticking to a well-organised timeline with effective time management boosts your chances of success. Organisation is key!
Clear expectations and deadlines in your marketing plan are crucial for hitting business goals. Always consider how to prioritise each project, how each element drives growth, understand your audience, and track your ROI!
Creating your marketing strategy doesn’t need to be complicated or costly, but a comprehensive plan will have a positive impact on the bottom line of your business. If you’d like to discuss with us further:
