The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Creating a Marketing Plan in 2023

Introduction:

Greetings, fellow marketers and business owners! Have you ever spent countless hours developing a marketing plan for your business, only to find that it doesn’t yield the results you were hoping for?

I’ve been there, and I understand how frustrating it can be. But fear not! In this blog post, I’m going to share with you my tried-and-true tips for creating a marketing plan that actually works.

Know Thy Customer: Identifying and Understanding Your Target Audience

The Delphic Maxim ‘Know Thyself’ by Socrates holds true in both life and work. The notion that you need to fully understand who you want to serve holds true in the world of Marketing as well. In the modern age, every marketing penny you spend and any marketing plans you create have to include your customer as the focal point.

But so many businesses do the opposite and for good reason. After all, everyone wants to increase their profits and establish their business as a household name. However, your customers think from a very different angle. I like to explain this relationship like this:

• Your Customer has a problem: Depending on the customer journey, he/she might not know about it. Even if they know, they are looking for a solution first and foremost, not to help a company cross $1MM in sales.
• Your Brand needs revenue: Businesses need to cover costs and the way to do that is to generate more revenue.

The perfect Marketing Plan lies at the heart of these two statements. It needs to be customer-centric in the sense that it helps them solve their problems. However, it also needs to be aligned with your business goals so it provides you a good ROI.

Therefore, to create a successful marketing plan, you need to start by clearly defining your goals and your target audience. Without these two things, you’ll be shooting in the dark. Here are a few questions to ask to get started on the right track:

1. Who is my customer?
2. What is their problem and how can I solve it?
3. What’s my goal? Do I need more revenue OR should I establish my brand first?
4. What makes my solution different from the ones existing in the market?
5. How can I best allocate my resources to get a good return on investment?

The best way to answer these questions would be to take out a pen and paper and write down your free-flowing thoughts. I feel like that is you will be closest to reality and free from bias. 

Learning From the Best: Borrowing Ideas From Your Competitors

The second step in our Marketing Plan process is to become a ‘Brand Spy‘. What’s that, you might ask? I think of Brand Spies as undercover agents who monitor competitors, pinpoint their exact strategies and results, and gain valuable insights.

Are you ready to become a Brand Spy then? This is a process that cannot be skipped over in the marketing plan creation process. You need to ask these fundamental questions before you move ahead:

1. What is my competition doing compared to myself?
2. What gaps and plus points do they have in their strategy?
3. How are they utilizing their resources for the best results?
4. What can I do to one-up them in the market?

Beyond the questions and answers process, you also need to take a look at what your competitors are doing, what channels they’re working on, and what kind of audience they’re targeting. You can cover most of these steps through the art of Social Listening.

At the same time, you need to understand your competitor’s financial position. If it’s a publicly-traded company, you can easily find their financial reports and assess how they’ve performed for a certain quarter.

This will give you valuable insights into what you should be doing with your own marketing efforts while making sure you have the right mix of investment and a positive ROI.

Which Way to Go? How to Choose the Right Marketing Channels

Now that you understand who your audience is and what your competitors are doing, it’s time to find the right marketing channels to approach them on. A lot of this section will be covered by the competitor analysis as you’ll understand where your audience likes to hang out and how your competitors are targeting them on these specific platforms.

There are countless marketing channels available to you, from social media to email marketing to traditional advertising. But not all channels are created equal, and what works for one business may not work for another. It’s important to choose the channels that are best suited to your business and your audience.

Consider factors like your budget, the time and resources you have available, and the preferences of your target audience. Here’s a quick way to determine which marketing channels you should focus on:

• For Social Media: Check out your competition and analyze how your target audience engages with the content. If engagement is visibly high on a certain social media platform, you need to start prioritizing them.
• For Email: Check out industry insights and statistics. You need to figure out whether your audience even uses emails or not. And even if they do, what kind of campaign would work best for you, in the long run?
• Paid OR Organic: This ties down to the resources that you have. If you want quick results and have financial capability, paid is the way to go. However, I would still recommend focusing on organic as a secondary goal as it’s significantly better over the long term.

Content is King: Crafting Engaging and Relevant Content That Converts

Have you ever noticed when you run ads that even though customers view your ads, most of them don’t hit ‘Buy’? In most cases, this isn’t because your ad or creative was bad or that you didn’t spend enough. Your audience just wasn’t warm enough. What does that mean? I will explain here.

You see, the Customer Journey is one of the most crucial elements in Marketing and you need to understand it holistically if you want to create a successful Marketing Plan. Let’s explain this concept.

In a customer journey, your audience moves in a series of steps from ‘not really interested’ to ‘maybe I should give it a go’ to ‘here, take my card’! The way you promote your content during these stages will make or break your campaign. I’ll now explain this using the cold, warm, and hot methods.

• Cold: These are people who have never heard of your brand, and have a problem but don’t fully realize it. You need to hit them up with brand-building content including how-to guides, listicles, and informational content.
• Warm: This is the audience that has interacted several times with your content but still isn’t ready to buy. You need to send them case studies, customer testimonials, & MORE informational content.
• Hot: These are the people who are most likely to hit purchase. For them, you need to promote free demos, ebooks, basically anything of value that will make them take their cards out and swipe it.

And a word of advice here. Ignore what the nay-sayers claim – Content is STILL the King.

Adapt and Succeed: The Art of Adjusting Your Plan to Achieve Results

Finally, you’ve made it! You’ve got yourself a fancy Marketing Plan and are ready to convince your boss (might be you yourself) to finally give it a go. You’re seeing some tremendous results but also some plateaus here and there. This is perhaps where brands seem to stagnate.

As the old saying goes, ‘If it’s working, there’s no need to fix it’.

Businesses, in the process of short-termism, stagnate when they see that their marketing plan is working. It’s not as simple as simply plugging in a USB and hitting send. For a Marketing Plan to truly succeed, you need to constantly scrutinize it and make adjustments where necessary.

I like to think of it as ‘rowing a boat’. When you’ve just set out to catch fish, that’s when your Marketing plan is actually being implemented. As you navigate high and turbulent tides, and also calm passages, you have to maneuver the boat in certain ways to not lose control of it, right?

It’s the same with Marketing Plans or any strategies in general. You have to be the driver at the front making sure the ride progresses as smoothly as possible.

How to row this boat then? For starters, you can use analytics tools to track your progress and identify areas where you can improve. You can also take feedback from your customers as well as employees to identify and fix any gaps in your strategy. Don’t be afraid to make changes if something isn’t working and don’t hesitate to try new things.

Marketing is an evolving game. You need to evolve with it!

Conclusion:

In conclusion, creating a marketing plan that actually works takes time, effort, and careful consideration. But with the right approach, you can achieve your marketing goals and grow your business.

Remember, it’s all about defining your goals and audience, researching your competition, choosing the right marketing channels, developing a killer content strategy, and monitoring and adjusting your plan as needed.

Good luck, and happy marketing!