A Great Marketing Plan

Creating A Great Marketing Plan

The following are the key points that you need to address to create a great marketing plan. Whether you’re in a B2C or B2B business, if you address each of these points then you’ll have a great foundation.

For each of the points I’ve added a little more detail about what you should include. If you’re in a well-established / organised business, then this information might be easy to find. If you’re not, then you may need to do some research.

Finally, I haven’t added a separate point about marketing budgets as there can be several different ways that these are calculated. It makes sense to allocate elements of this budget to different activities – the proportion of which will be determined by the activity and the importance that you place upon it.

Your 8 Point Marketing Plan

  1. Market Research
    • What is the size of the opportunity?
    • Your competitors – their strengths and weaknesses
    • Are there any barriers to entry?
    • What about the threat of new entrants?
  2. Customers
    • Who are your target customers?
    • Can you create customer profiles / typologies?
    • What about your existing customers – why did they choose you?
  3. Your value proposition
    • What is your unique value proposition (or USP)?
    • Where do you solve the customer problem better than the competitors?
    • Is your competitive advantage sustainable?
  4. Content marketing / building awareness
    • What type of content needs to be produced to support this?
    • What delivery / broadcast method will you use?
    • What about ‘Thought leadership’ articles?
    • Are there any industry events / awards that you should attend?
    • What about PR opportunities?
  5. Advertising / lead generation
    • Think about the activity and split by channel with a proposed % split
      • Website – don’t forget your UX, SEO, mobile optimisation
      • Social channels – what’s their role in driving traffic to your website?
      • What about online paid advertising, including PPC?
      • Consider inbound telephone call tracking for ‘offline’ advertising
      • Are there cross promotional opportunities with other businesses?
    • For all of the advertising you need to consider your budget and KPI’s for the activity
  6. Sales enablement
    • What tools are required?
    • How will you capture data of prospects from the sales funnel?
    • How will this be linked to your CRM?
    • If you haven’t done so already build a contact database
  7. Customer Retention
    • What are your methods of gaining customer feedback?
    • How will you use your CRM to segment your customers?
    • What other retention strategies could you use?
    • Don’t forget about Data Protection / Privacy for the data you hold
  8. KPI’s and Review
    • Set your KPI’s – agreed with a clear rationale (avoid vanity metrics)
    • Separate review for each key activity
    • The nature of the activity determines the review period