As a business owner, you should regularly review your team’s marketing strategy at least once a year. Some businesses may benefit from assessing it multiple times a year. After all, your marketing plan is what helps keep your marketing on the right track. It exists to help your business reach its goals every year.
These strategies require thorough planning. Effective marketing begins with creating a well-informed marketing strategy. Without a carefully thought out marketing plan, it becomes incredibly challenging to know what funds to allocate where. You must think through various factors to ensure that your marketing plan works.
An effective marketing plan helps narrow your focus, define your vision and business goals, and creates an outline of how your strategy should operate. When you have done that, you set your marketing campaign and business up for success.
ARYU Advertising continues to operate as one of DFW’s premier digital advertising agencies. We have years of experience creating effective marketing plans across various industries. We understand the importance of being thorough when crafting a refined marketing plan.
ARYU Advertising is poised to help your business reach its full potential, increasing its sales along the way. Give us a call to learn how we can help.
Creating a Marketing Plan
Each industry will need to create a marketing plan that fits their business and industry’s specific needs. For example, a dentistry clinic will be targeting a different audience than a law firm. Regardless, there are several steps that help all businesses craft an efficient marketing strategy:
1.) Assess Your Situation
Before you do anything, you need to figure out where your business currently stands. Perform a SWOT analysis, meaning search for your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Find what you do best, where your marketing is lacking, what potential opportunities your strategy can reach, and what obstacles are in your way.
Also, take a hard look at your competitors. How does your product differ from theirs? How is their product or service better than yours? Do you offer something your competitors do not? What sets you and your competitors apart?
By doing so, you can find and solve any problems your customers may have.
2.) Determine Your Target Audience
By now, your business should already have an idea of the type of person you want to target. However, it is a good idea to reevaluate this audience to ensure you are targeting the right group of people.
After assessing your situation, you should understand where your company is and how the market is. This information will help you define your audience.
Create a buyer persona. A buyer persona is a detailed description of who your desired target customer is. It should include age, gender, income, and other demographic information. However, you should also include information such as: What drives them to make a purchase? Is there a problem that your product or service can fix for them?
Once you have defined who your ideal target is, you can create better-defined goals.
3.) Establish Goals
Goals are just as vital to an effective marketing plan as establishing a target audience. How do you know how well a strategy is doing if you never set any goals?
You know your company’s situation and who you are targeting. Use this information to establish SMART goals (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound goals). You will create specific and measurable goals to be completed within a given time frame.
Before you begin any marketing plan, you must establish goals. Your plan should help you reach these goals.
4.) Evaluate Your Strategies
Once you’ve defined your audience and set your goals, it is time to review what tactics you intend on using and which ones will best help you achieve your goals.
You may already have strategies your business has been using for some time. However, you have to figure out which tactics will work best in achieving your new SMART goals. Additionally, you’ll need to determine what channels and actions to zero in on. If your goal is to increase followers on a social media platform, your methods will be specific to that platform.
Knowing your goals will help you narrow down the strategies that will help you complete your goals. Remember, you should always keep your budget in mind when determining plans.
5.) Budget
Your budget determines what you can and cannot do with your marketing plan. Before you even start your marketing plan, you must assess your budget.
For example, your tactics might include paid search and paid social, but your budget only has room for one. If that is the case, you may not be able to achieve your goals. When establishing strategies, always keep your budget in mind. Keep in mind how much a method may cost when planning how long and what actions you look to accomplish with it.
You must be able to determine what strategies you can afford and what assets you need to purchase in order to accomplish your goals.
Essentials to Include
When creating an effective marketing plan, there are many factors you should include, regardless of your industry. These pieces of information are essential to an effective marketing plan. They are:
- Summary: Who your business is, where you are located, what services and products you offer, and your mission statement; include your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
- Initiatives: Avoid big-picture initiatives and focus on the things specific to your marketing plan, such as your goals and the strategies used to reach them.
- Target Market: Explains the industry you are in, who your competitors are, and who your target audience is.
- Strategy: Focuses on the “Seven Ps of Marketing” (product, price, place, promotion, people, process, and physical evidence) that describes what your business offers that your competitors don’t.
- Channels: Where do you plan on marketing your product or service? Where will you publish content that educates consumers, generates leads, and boost brand awareness? (for example, social media or search engines)
Crafting an effective marketing strategy takes careful consideration. You must be thorough in your planning, detailing who you plan to target and what specific goals you have. You should always keep your budget in mind throughout this process to ensure you can be as efficient as possible with what you have.
ARYU Advertising has years of experiencing assisting countless businesses across several industries grow their business and improve their sales. If you are interested in creating an effective marketing plan, contact ARYU Advertising, and let us help.
