A marketing plan is a document that outlines the specific actions you will take to promote and grow your business.
It helps you identify our target audience, set marketing goals, and develop strategies and tactics to reach those goals.
What do we need to include in our marketing plan?
There are a few key components that should be included in any marketing plan.
The first is a description of our target audience. This is important because we need to know who we are marketing to in order to effectively reach them.
Next, we need to set marketing goals. These should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals that will help us track our progress and ensure we are on the right track.
You need to consider what your marketing goals are, for example:
- Increase brand awareness: Getting more people to recognise and remember your brand.
- Generate leads: Generating interest in your product or service and getting potential customers to provide their contact information so you can follow up with them.
- Increase sales: Increasing the number of products or services you sell.
- Improve customer retention: This goal is focused on keeping existing customers coming back to your business.
- Increase website traffic: Getting more people to visit your website.
- Increase social media followers: This goal is focused on increasing the number of people who follow your business on social media platforms.
- Increase email subscribers: Getting more people to sign up for your email list.
- Increase customer loyalty: Creating a strong emotional connection with your customers and encouraging them to continue doing business with you.
We also need to develop strategies and tactics to reach our marketing goals. These can include things like social media marketing, email marketing, content marketing, and more.
Finally, we need to create a budget and allocate resources to our marketing efforts. This will help us ensure that we have the resources we need to effectively implement our marketing plan.
How do we develop a marketing plan?
There are a few steps we can follow to develop a marketing plan. The first is to conduct market research to gather information about our target audience and the competitive landscape. This will help us better understand our customers and how to effectively reach them.
Next, we need to set marketing goals and develop strategies and tactics to reach those goals. This will require some brainstorming and creative thinking to come up with ideas that will be effective at reaching our target audience.
Once we have a solid plan in place, we can create a budget and allocate resources to our marketing efforts. This will help us ensure that we have the resources we need to implement our marketing plan and achieve our marketing goals.
Finally, we need to track our progress and adjust our marketing plan as needed. This might involve testing different strategies or tactics to see what works best, or it might involve adjusting our budget based on the results we see.
Popular marketing tools for small business
- Monday.com — Highly effective teams choose monday.com to manage their work.
- Mailchimp — Mailchimp helps small businesses do big things, with the right tools and guidance every step of the way.
- Sendinblue — Take your digital marketing to the next level.
- PipeDrive — Pipedrive is the easy-to-use, #1 user-rated CRM tool. Get more qualified leads and grow your business.
- Restream — Multistream & reach your audience, wherever they are.
- Moosend — The fastest path from email marketing to business growth.
- Antavo — Antavo is a loyalty program solution for businesses that helps them to create and manage loyalty programs for their customers.
- Shopify — Everything you need to start, run and scale your business.
- Canva — Canva is an online design platform that makes it easy to create stunning visuals for any purpose.
- Upflowy — Upflowy is a drag and drop tool to build and optimize web experiences.
- Missinglettr — Missinglettr helps businesses automate their social media marketing. It creates a year’s worth of content from one blog post, and schedules it to post on social media for maximum reach.
- Salesforce — Salesforce is a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform that helps businesses of all sizes manage their customer relationships.
- Kissmetrics — Kissmetrics is a powerful analytics and marketing platform that helps businesses track, analyse, and optimise their customer journey.
- Udemy — Udemy is an online learning and teaching marketplace with over 213,000 courses and 57 million students. Learn programming, marketing, data science and more.
- TapClicks — A set of automated marketing solutions designed to work in unison, powered by your data.
- FreeAgent CRM — #1 User-Rated Alternative to Salesforce
- OptimizePress — OptimizePress is a powerful website builder that helps you create high-converting sales pages, membership sites, and more. It’s easy to use and comes with a range of features to help you get the most out of your website.
- BigCommerce — Learn how BigCommerce powers your business with enterprise ecommerce capabilities—with lower cost and complexity.
- NiceJob — NiceJob is an online reputation management platform that helps businesses build their online presence and increase customer loyalty.
- Webflow — Build your site for free and take as long as you need. Just add a site plan for more pages, and a custom domain when you’re ready for the world.
- Audiense — Identify relevant audiences, discover amazing actionable insights and inform your strategies to grow your business.
- ActiveCampaign — Visit our website to learn more.
- BrandBucket — BrandBucket is an online marketplace for buying and selling unique, brandable business names. It offers a wide selection of creative, memorable names that are perfect for startups, products, and services.
- Orderbot — Order management & orchestration made easy
- Lead Forensics — Lead Forensics is the industry-leading solution in turning anonymous B2B website visitors into high-quality, actionable opportunities for your business.
- Stamped —
- Pastel — Review and comment on websites live. One click to share with clients and teammates.
- Brand24 — Media monitoring made easy – get instant access to brand mentions across social, news, blogs, videos, forums, podcasts, reviews and more.
- 20NINE CRM — An alternative to cumbersome CRM for small businesses. Manage clients, sales, communication & documents from the mobile and computer!
- SugarCRM — Sugar helps business create customers for life with the world’s most intelligent CRM platform. With SugarCRM, you let the platform do the work. Get a demo today!