How to write a marketing plan: The ultimate guide

Understanding the concept of a marketing strategy

A marketing plan delineates your planned marketing and advertising endeavors for a set duration, often the upcoming 12 months. It elucidates your methods to engage, entice, and convince customers to purchase your offerings, complete with defined objectives, initiatives, and responsibilities.

While major corporations may employ a comprehensive marketing strategy with distinct plans for each facet, Kazim advises smaller business owners to maintain simplicity. She emphasizes practicality over grand strategy, focusing on actionable steps to attain specific targets.

Understanding the objectives of a marketing strategy

Your marketing plan delineates the promotional strategies aligned with your business goals outlined in the business plan. It targets specific markets and solutions while aligning with the strategic plan, providing a roadmap for the next few years.

Having completed your business plan, you're aware of your target audience and objectives. The marketing plan becomes your blueprint for pursuing key revenue streams effectively.

Moreover, a robust marketing plan instills confidence in financial institutions, showcasing your business's potential for success to lenders.

Constructing a marketing strategy in five simple steps

1.Perform a SWOT analysis

Evaluate your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats:

• Strengths are advantages that enhance your market position, like unique skills or cost-effective technologies.
• Weaknesses are limitations hindering goal achievement, such as outdated tools or delivery issues.
• Opportunities are avenues for business growth, like new markets or emerging technologies.
• Threats are potential challenges, such as labor shortages or economic/political changes.
  Include a competitive analysis to understand your competitive standing in the market, as strengths and weaknesses are relative to your competition.

2.Define customer profiles

Segment your current customers into three or four primary groups, potentially based on industry or purchase size. Delve into the specifics that distinguish these customer groups: demographics, preferences, buying behavior, decision-making criteria, etc. This step is crucial for showcasing your deep understanding of your customer base. Create detailed profiles, including age, gender, occupation, income level, education, and location. Understand their purchasing motivations and what sets your products apart from competitors.

"This is often a revelation," notes Kazim. "Many entrepreneurs assume their customers are homogeneous, but that's not the case. By refining customer segments, you can allocate your marketing resources more effectively."

3.Establish clear goals

What are your marketing plan's objectives? Ensure they are feasible and practical. For smaller businesses, business and marketing goals often align. Utilize the sales targets outlined in your business plan, focusing on:

• Market share
• Total customers and customer retention rates
• Average transaction size

Not all objectives need to be financial. Kazim advises setting non-financial targets like digital engagement metrics. Can you quantify social media interactions in terms of followers, shares, retweets, comments, and likes? Utilize tools like Google Analytics to track website traffic and conversion rates over time. While these may not directly impact revenue, they serve as vital indicators of your brand's health.

4.Consider the "Four Ps" of marketing

After defining your goals and target audience, it's time to strategically plan how to achieve them. For each customer segment, Kazim recommends assessing the "Four Ps" of marketing to fulfill their needs effectively:

Product: Determine which product or service best meets their needs. Do you need to modify your existing offering to stand out in the market?
Pricing: Set the pricing strategy. Can adjustments enhance your competitive edge? Pricing is influenced by production costs, distribution, sales, and desired profit margins.
Place: Identify where customers search for, select, purchase, and use your product or service. Are your offerings accessible in the right places, both physical and online?
Promotion: Decide on communication and sales strategies. This encompasses advertising, sales efforts, PR, social media, email marketing, and other promotional activities.

"If you understand your customers well, figuring out how to reach them should be intuitive," notes Kazim. "For instance, if you're marketing visually appealing items like handmade jewelry to women, platforms like Pinterest and Instagram should be your main focus."

Include a timeline for your tactics and assign responsibility within your team to ensure implementation.

5.Develop a financial plan

Calculate the expenses associated with implementing your identified tactics. Consider all aspects, from content creation and design to necessary customer relationship management (CRM) tools.

Creating a budget can be daunting for many entrepreneurs, especially if they're new to it, notes Kazim. Her advice is to keep it straightforward.

Typically, Kazim suggests allocating a minimum of 1% of total revenue towards marketing expenditures, a standard practice across industries.

"It's not a comprehensive financial strategy," Kazim clarifies. "All you need is a budget. You've outlined your objectives; now determine the costs required to achieve them."

Additionally, Kazim emphasizes gaining approval from the bookkeeper or CFO, as they oversee financial matters and will approve the budget proposal.