Creating a marketing plan is crucial for establishing a foundation for your company’s marketing efforts. With collaboration between your marketing and sales team, you can create a well-rounded marketing plan with essential customer insights. This approach ensures you develop messaging about your company’s products and services that resonate with your customers, stand out from competitors, and keep your team members knowledgeable and invested in your business. This ensures that your efforts and budget spent on marketing efforts help you reach your business goals.
The steps and strategies required to build a marketing plan can be time-consuming and challenging, but we’ve created a Marketing Plan Template to help you get started! Our free marketing plan template covers all the foundational elements for successful marketing. The template will help you define your business goals, outline customer information, and determine how to measure your success, along with who and how to implement the total marketing plan.
The key to your marketing plan is that it should be flexible – while appropriate benchmarking and goal-setting can give you a sense of direction and accountability for your business, you can’t predict the future – hello, COVID-19! A flexible marketing plan allows you to adapt to changes in the economy, your company, and other unexpected events and pivot strategies to keep your marketing plan on track.
What Does a Marketing Plan Consist of?
For a marketing plan to be well-rounded, you must establish clear objectives and strategies for achieving them. Not only does this help keep track of your goals, but also instills accountability to ensure your goals are met. A good marketing plan will set clear, realistic, and (maybe most importantly) measurable objectives. These objectives should include:
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- Project & Task Deadlines
- Responsibility & Resource Allocation
- Budget Breakdowns
Elements of A Marketing Plan
With so many marketing tools, channels, and resources available, foundational marketing elements often get overlooked when creating a marketing plan. At its core, a solid understanding of your company, customers, and competition will allow you and your team to meet business goals promptly and efficiently by proving to be a reliable and indispensable asset.
Our free marketing plan template includes all of the important foundational marketing elements. Together, they support the necessary steps and strategies to help you meet your business goals. Foundational elements included in the template are:
- Defining the Business
- Value Proposition
- S.W.O.T Analysis
- Product & Service Breakdown
- Competitive Research
- Market Research
- Overall Marketing Strategy
- Brand Messaging
- Brand Positioning
- Branded Design Assets
- Brand Voice & Tone
- Monitoring & Measuring Performance
Implementation
After completing your marketing plan, it may seem natural to assume that the work is done – however, you’re just getting started! Now is the time to set your marketing plan into motion. There will be many moving parts to oversee through team delegation, utilizing various tools, and assessing factors that will influence the fluidity of your marketing plan. For optimal success, your marketing plan will require regular review and edits to ensure your business goals and marketing plans are aligned and headed in the right direction.
Let’s work together!
Are you struggling to put pen to paper for your marketing plan? Or perhaps your business is experiencing a transition period, and you’re not sure what direction you want to steer your business. Our Marketing team can help organize and define the core components of your business necessary to support your business goals. Contact us today to work with an experienced team to build a marketing plan.
