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.
- Shopify — Everything you need to start, run and scale your business.
- 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.
- 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.
- Canva — Canva is an online design platform that makes it easy to create stunning visuals for any purpose.
- 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.
- Campaign Monitor — Campaign Monitor gives you everything you need to run beautifully-designed, professional email marketing campaigns to grow your business.
- Authory — Authory is the first automated platform bringing together all the content you create. Have your articles, videos, podcasts and more in a single place — no matter where you publish them.
- Intercom — Intercom helps over 25,000 global organizations deliver better customer support via personalized conversations and automated support.
- GotPrint — GotPrint offers high-quality, affordable business cards with a variety of paper stocks, sizes, and finishes. Design your own or choose from thousands of templates. Get your cards fast with free shipping and no hidden fees.
- Copyblogger — Content marketing tools and training.
- Nimble — A G2 Crowd Market Leader, Nimble helps you build relationships everywhere you engage — from your inbox to across the web. Try it free – no credit card required.
- InsideView — InsideView provides sales intelligence to help companies find and win more customers. It offers data on companies, contacts, industries, and news, as well as tools to build and target lists, track accounts, and engage with prospects.
- Emercury — Discover the email marketing platform marketers use to reach, convert and retain their customers.
- SmartSuite — Plan, track, and manage any type of work.
- Google Analytics — Google Analytics gives you the tools you need to better understand your customers. You can then use those business insights to take action, such as improving your website, creating tailored audience lists, and more.
- ClickFunnels — ClickFunnels gives you everything you need to market, sell, and deliver your products and services online! Without having to hire or rely on a tech team!
- Moda — Grow your eCommerce business with high-converting email and SMS, backed by data superpowers!
- Yotpo — Yotpo’s eCommerce retention marketing platform drives repeat shopper sales with connected solutions for reviews, SMS, email, loyalty, and subscriptions.
- Amaze — If you sell online, you need Amaze. Try Amaze for yourself today and see the difference.
- Immerss — See how digital clienteling and live shopping will improve your business on all fronts.
- Pardot —
Pardot is a B2B marketing automation platform that helps marketers create more leads, generate more pipeline, and empower sales to close more deals. It provides powerful tools to create, deploy, and manage online marketing campaigns.