When you’re trying to run a business, one of the most important things you’ll need to work on is marketing. A solid marketing plan can make the difference between a booming business and bankruptcy. But the strategic marketing plan process can seem a little overwhelming at times.
Before you get all wrapped up in ROI analysis and Facebook ads, take a step back and look at where you are and where you want to go. Setting up a strategic marketing plan is a little like planning a road trip. Read on to learn how to navigate the strategic marketing plan process to success. As a treat, you can also hop over to these helpful strategies if you have plans to market your business globally.
Set Goals and Analyze
The first key to a successful marketing strategy is to have specific goals you want to achieve. This can be “I want to average 200 visitors on the website a day,” or “I want to increase our customer conversion rate by 5 percent.” Make it SMART — specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.
And we’re not done with the acronyms yet — once you have your goals in place, it’s time to run a SWOT analysis. This looks at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to your business. This analysis will help you figure out where you stand in the industry, where you need to grow, and how you can do that.
Map It Out
Once you know where you are now and where you want to go, it’s time to start making a map to get there. And in this case, we mean a literal message map. This will help you pin down the overall message you want to send to your customers and the smaller pieces that will help you build to that overall message.
Start by writing down the big overall message you want to send to your customers. From there, start breaking it out into smaller chunks with information about your services, your clients, your story, and all the best parts of your business. Then you can break each of those chunks into smaller individual messages that will serve as your marketing content.
Go on a Mission
If you’re going to keep the drive and motivation to get where you need to go, you need to have a mission statement. This will be the touchstone you and your company always come back to. When you’re trying to work out how to manage marketing, trying to resolve conflicts, or trying to grow the business, you should always come back first to this mission statement.
You can use some of the phrases you came up with during your message mapping to generate your mission statement. Think about what your overall goal is with owning your business and what makes it special. Why do you do the hard work of running this business, and why should customers care about your business?
Choose Your Weapon
You have your starting point, your goal, your mission, and your map, so now it’s time to pick the vehicle that will get you where you want to go. What marketing tactic you choose will depend a lot on your target customer. You want to meet them where they are, so take a look at the places they spend their time and the ways they consume content.
The choice to use digital marketing vs traditional marketing will depend on who this target customer is. If you’re a tech company looking to sell to young people, you’re going to want to hit social media hard. If your products are geared towards the Boomers and Xers, traditional marketing techniques may serve you better.
Set a Timeline and Budget
Remember, you want your goals to be SMART, and part of that is timeliness. So set out a specific timeline for when you want to achieve your marketing goal and how long each step to get there should take. This will let you know if you’re on track or if you need to tweak your marketing plan.
You should also set a budget for your marketing plan at this time. You need to find the right balance between spending enough to get the traffic you want without breaking the bank. If you can’t afford your current marketing goals, that’s okay; scale back, start smaller, and keep those goals for later on down the road.
Delegate
By this point, you should have a pretty solid marketing plan in place: what goals you want to achieve by which dates, which marketing tools you’re going to use, and how much money you’re going to spend doing it. So now you need to decide how this marketing plan is going to get implemented. And that means delegating.
If you have employees who are savvy with the marketing tactics you plan to use, delegate marketing tasks to them. If you don’t have anyone in your company with that expertise, either arrange for training for you and your employees or outsource to marketing companies and freelancers. You need to make sure you leave enough time for you to run your business, so don’t be afraid to ask for help.
Update
The single most important thing you can do to make your strategic marketing plan work is to update it as needed. Look at analytics every single day, and keep track of what works and what doesn’t. Know what demographics are seeing your content, and track how your marketing is affecting your sales.
Make sure you give your plan time to work; viral success doesn’t happen overnight. But don’t be afraid to make changes when you need to. A good marketing plan should be flexible and should always be looking at the next landmark down the road.
Set Up Your Strategic Marketing Plan Process
The strategic marketing plan process is really a matter of knowing where you are now and where you want to go. Being specific about what you want and how you plan to get there will help you find solutions that work for you. And being flexible in your plan will make sure you stay on track with those goals.
If you’d like to discover more great tips for managing and growing a business, check out the rest of our site. We have advice for entrepreneurs about everything from money to office management and more!
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