Complete Guide to Creating a Marketing Plan for Business
Marketing a product requires proper marketing techniques. One of the techniques is to understand the marketing plan as a guide for businesses in developing their marketing.
The marketing plan contains several elements, one of which is what actions the company chooses to take to get the target market. For that, know the meaning, examples, and how to write a marketing plan in this article.
What is a Marketing Plan?
A marketing plan is a strategy roadmap that marketers make as much as possible before marketing a product.
In addition, according to Philip Kotler (2023), a marketing plan is an output or output from the marketing process. This plan is made to respond to various conditions that are or may occur in the company.
Marketing plan is often considered the same as marketing strategy. This assumption is actually not appropriate because the two are very different.
This is because a marketing plan is a document that contains a set of marketing strategies that the company wants to achieve. Meanwhile, the marketing strategy is more about achieving plans than one of the strategies that you make in the marketing plan.
The Importance of a Marketing Plan for Your Business
Importance of Marketing plan, Without a marketing plan, consumers and clients cannot find out about your company.
So, here are marketing plan objectives that are useful for your company's needs.
- Facilitate the coordination of marketing activities
- The identification process for business development is easier
- As a reference for making business changes
- As a basis for determining company policy
- Know your target market more clearly
- Know and reproduce information on market changes and competitors
- Creating wider relationships and networks with other organizations
- Increase profits with an efficient and effective business
How to Creating a Marketing Plan
The following is how to write a marketing plan so that it can help your work.
1. Determine your Business Vision and Mission
The first and most important step in making a marketing plan is to determine the vision and mission of the business. With a specific business vision and mission, it is hoped that the marketing strategy will be more focused.
2. Determine the Target Market
Determining the target market is important so you can implement an effective marketing plan. With your target market, you will be more focused on marketing your products and developing your business.
The target market can be defined as who you want to attract to buy your product. One effective way to determine the target market is to do market research and create buyer personas. Buyer persona is a representation of the typical target customer for your business.
3. Competitor Analysis
If market research directs you more to identify consumers, then this stage will help you identify competitors in the business you are creating.
Why is competitor analysis important to do? Because by knowing who the competitors are in your business, you can make a better strategy than your competitors.
The way to analyze competitors is very easy. You can do this with research and content activities through the channels they have.
Apart from that, you can also become an imaginary consumer to simply try the products and services offered by your competitors yourself. Only after that do an analysis to find out their shortcomings.
4. Set KPI (Key Performance Indicators)
An effective marketing plan should also include the KPIs of each division involved in the planning document.
KPI is individual metrics that measure various elements of a marketing campaign. This metric will help you set goals or objectives for each individual involved in the marketing plan.
5. Developing a Marketing Strategy based on AIDA
The next step is to develop a marketing strategy using the AIDA concept. There are several elements that make up the AIDA concept, namely Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action.
- Awareness/Attention : To increase brand awareness in the target market
- Interest: attract target market interest based on their problem
- Desire: provide various alternative solutions to the target market
- Action: directing the target market to take the action you want. For example, purchases.
After implementing a marketing strategy, you can go to the next stage by running content marketing with the following considerations:
- Content type. Decide what type of content you will create. Whether it's blog posts, infographics, ebooks, or YouTube videos.
- How much content to create. Adjust to the marketing strategy that you make.
- What channel will be used to distribute the content.
6 Set a budget
Each marketing plan certainly requires a fee. Therefore, it is important for you to make a marketing budget.
7. Use Marketing Tools
Marketing tools can be used to make it easier for you to run a good way to start a business from scratch. There are various kinds of digital marketing applications that you can use to manage your business. The following are some marketing tools that you can use to help run your business.
- Canva. Create graphic designs for marketing needs.
- Trello. Record and manage to-do-lists.
- Mailchimp. Create various campaigns and send them to consumers.
- SociaBuzz. Looking for influencers to collaborate with to promote products.
- Hootsuite. To manage multiple social media accounts at the same time that work with the team.
- Social Mentions. Find out what your audience is talking about on your topic or another topic.
- SEMRush. Develop marketing strategies based on competitor performance and own website.
- Google Analytics. To Get traffic information, performance analysis, and visitor data.
Marketing Plan Example
How to describe a good marketing plan? The following is an example of a marketing plan that Hadehana made based on the company's product type.
Marketing Plan sample for small business
To make it clearer, please see a simple template, an example of a marketing plan for small business:
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Type | Bakery Company |
| Vision | to make bread X the people's favorite choice |
| Mission | building brand awareness of Bakery X |
| Target market | children to adults |
| Content and media strategy | bread variant videos to upload on Instagram |
| KPI | Instagram Reach gained 6000 followers |
| Marketing Budget | $xxx (content creator team and social media specialist) |
| Marketing Tools | Hootsuite, Social Mentions |
Example of Service Company Marketing Plan
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Type | architect consultant |
| Vision | provide comprehensive planning services |
| Mission | building brand awareness that has been certified and trusted |
| Target market | adults, upper middle class |
| Competitors | other architectural consultants |
| Content and media strategy | creating blog articles on websites about references for planning a comfortable home |
| AIDA's goal | increase the interest of the target market |
| KPI | getting more than 10000 article visitors |
| Marketing budget | $xxxx |
| Marketing tools | Google Analytics |
That's the meaning, examples, and how to make a marketing plan for your business and company needs. One of the important elements in the world of marketing can be used as a report that is able to describe the effectiveness of marketing strategies for the next year, quarter or month.