If you own a business, you need a marketing plan. A marketing plan outlines how you’ll communicate with your customers, apart from posting your most fire memes to Facebook. It may sound simple, but you’d be surprised to find that most companies fall short when creating their marketing plan.
Why Do Businesses Need Marketing Plans?
Businesses need marketing plans because it’s easy to get lost. There are dozens of platforms, content types, and customer bases to choose from. It’s much better to be a big fish in a small pond, so you can make as many waves as possible. A plan will keep your business laser-focused on success.
- Keep teams focused and organized
- Let you reference your goals and methods throughout the year
- Help you understand your customers
- Get the advantage over your competitors
What Should a Marketing Plan Include?
Whether you want to include a section on evergreen content or the importance of flash mobs is up to you. But there are a few staples to every marketing plan that can help you get started.
Goalsetting
Regardless of when you set your goals, it’s important to get it right. This section of your marketing plan will be your guide throughout the year and how you measure success at the end.
Do you want to increase you Instagram follower count, increase conversions on paid ads, or finally create a TikTok that doesn’t make Zoomers cringe? Be sure to take your time and make those goals S.M.A.R.T. while you’re at it. Some great goals to consider are to grow your online audience, encourage more visits to your website, or promote a specific product or service.
Learn From Your Customers
Evaluating your customer base is easily the most important part of a marketing plan. How would you like to get inside the mind of the people who purchase from you? You can use several methods to find the insights you need, like:
- Market and industry research
- Surveying
- Focus groups
- Customer interviews
- Consulting
Once you know what makes your customers tick, you can use the info to create the perfect strategy to reach them. Don’t be afraid to alter your goals based on what you find.
Learn From Your Competitors
Now that you’ve gotten inside your customers’ heads, you need to do the same for your competition. Have you done a competitor audit recently? This will tell you where your competitors are spending their marketing resources and where you can capitalize or improve.
Budgeting
Having a solid budget and plan for allocating your marketing funds is very important. Do some investigating and find out how much your goals will cost and what you need to cut. You can search online for some estimates or go over your marketing expenses from last year. Get pricing for:
- Search advertisements
- Social media advertisements
- SEO services
- Content creation
- Competitor and customer research
Last year’s marketing budget can shed some light on how to move forward. Look it over and answer a few questions:
- Did your budget yield results?
- Was anything you spent money on ineffective?
- Which products could you have added to encourage growth?
Leave It to the Pros at BadCat Digital
If this all sounds hard, we have a full team to do it for you. BadCat can help you set goals, conduct research about your customers, complete a competitor audit, and execute your marketing plan. No matter what kind of help you need, you’ll see results after signing up for our services.