How To Create a Marketing Plan in 5 Simple Steps

Whether you’re starting a new business, growing an existing business or launching a new product, a marketing plan is essential for your success. 

It can be overwhelming deciding where to start with marketing your business, especially with so many channels available, this is where a marketing plan comes in.

A good marketing plan outlines the specific actions you need to take to get a product seen and ultimately bought by potential customers.

Once you have a marketing plan to follow, you’ll always know what you will be doing, when you will be doing it and where. It prevents you staring at a blank screen and wondering what to do next.

Marketing is one the most important activities in any business, because if people don’t know that your business exists, they cannot buy from you.

1. Set your Marketing Goals

When creating a plan or strategy of any sort you need to first start with what you want to achieve. This will help you determine what actions you need to take in order to reach those goals.

New businesses might want focus their marketing efforts on building an audience, whereas an established business may want to increase sales from their existing customers.

Read more about productive goal setting here.

2. Determine why people buy

Think about this from your customers point of view. Here’s some questions to consider: 

• Why do customers buy this particular product/service from you?
• What difference does it make to them, their family, their business, their life? And how does it make that difference?
• Why should they hire you?
• What advantage will buying your product/service provide? Does it save your customers time, money or something else?
• What outcome should they expect from using your product/service?
• What problem do you solve for them?

These answers will help you to capture the attention of your target audience when used in your marketing copy.

3. Identify Your Ideal Customer

Your ideal customer is the person who is most likely to buy from you. By identifying who they are you can save yourself a lot of time and effort when planning out your marketing strategy.

This information can also reduce costs when using paid advertising.

Consider what people have the problem that your product/service solves? Who will benefit the most from what you are selling?

4. Locate your Target Audience

Now you know who your target audience are and what problems you solve for them, think about where you can get your message in front of them quickly and easily?

What marketing channels can you use to reach them? Where do they spend their time? Both on-line and off-line? Where can you find a group of people that fit your ideal customer profile all in one place? Where do they come together to chat and maybe support each other?

5. Choose 3-5 marketing channels to focus on

Pro Tip – 

Focus on the marketing channels that you can you get in front of your ideal customers all together for maximum impact 

Now it’s time to build your marketing plan…

Based on everything you now know about ideal customer,  how can you get your message where they will see it? What will get his/her attention? What types of content will she love to read/hear/see?

Combine this knowledge with your business goals and create a plan of action.

Remember to include how, what and when you are going to market on EACH of your chosen platforms.

Pro Tip – 

Write it all down. Schedule your marketing tasks in your calendar to stay on track

Follow these steps to create your own personalised marketing plan. Every business is different and your plan should reflect that.

As you get to know what works and does’t work, you can amend your plan to focus more on the strategies that work for you.