In order to make your company’s business goals a reality you need to have a good annual marketing plan. Sit down with your team and come up with something that can lead your team’s growth, goals, and campaigns in the right direction. Things can get pretty messy without a marketing plan, and you will have a really hard time determining the number of budgets you need for all the projects.
Whether you have a dropshipping website or you own the best online casino in your state, you need a couple of variations of marketing plans. Hopefully, you will find all the necessary information down below, so read on!
Situation Analysis
Your current situation is as important as your marketing plan. The first step to creating a marketing plan is to conduct a basic SWOT analysis and determine what your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats are. Some basic understanding of the current market will also be quite beneficial. Knowing your competitors is a huge plus, too.
Consider the gaps your competitors make in their marketing plans, but also think about how their products compare to yours. Ask yourself whether you’re able to offer something that will put your product over theirs and whether or not they’re offering something.
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Target Audience
The next step towards a great marketing plan is to research your target audience. You can try to refine your current personas if you already have them developed. If not, make sure to come up with some. However, keep in mind that you need to conduct market research in order to do this.
Persona needs to include important demographic information such as gender, age, and income. In addition, it also needs psychographic information such as goals and pain points. Determine what your service or product can do to solve your persona’s problem.
SMART Goals
Many people would advise using a road map if you’re going somewhere for the first time. Now, this can also be applied in marketing, metaphorically of course. Unless you know what your goals are, you can’t improve your ROI. This is when SMART goals are going to be your best friend once you figure out your audience and current situation.
These goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. In other words, you want to be striving for goals that include a time frame for which you need to complete them, but also stay very specific and to the point with what your goals need to accomplish.
Start by writing out your goals, then begin to analyze what you can do in order to achieve them. For example, if you want to increase the number of followers on your Instagram account by 10% in the next 3 months, think about all the necessary steps you need to take.
Tactics Analyzation
By now, you should have your goals written down based on your current situation and audience. Maybe you have some ideas on what you would like to do, and this is a great time to figure out what tactics you can take in order to achieve these goals. We can take the aforementioned Instagram goal. Think about increasing the number of times you post, respond to every comment, host a giveaway.
There are many ways you can achieve your goals. So, the best thing you can do is to brainstorm and write everything down. From there, you will be ready to determine which tactic is the best one for you and your goals. However, you need to keep one more thing in mind – budgeting.
Set a Budget
You have to know your budget if you want to implement any of the ideas mentioned above. It doesn’t matter too much if your tactic is to increase following on social media if advertising doesn’t fit in your budget. Estimate your budget when you analyze all your tactics to make sure it is actually possible to implement them.
Additionally, include the time it will take to complete each of your tactics. Some assets need to be purchased, like ad space, so this can play with your budget for quite a while. Then, you will be ready to start your marketing campaign and dominate the field!
