How to write a marketing plan

When it comes to knowing how to write a marketing plan, it takes more than just plotting out your tasks each month.

Without a well-thought-out marketing plan, you will find it harder to attract new customers, grow your business, and learn the best practices that suit your individual business needs.

Many online businesses have a ‘throw everything at the wall and see what sticks’ approach to marketing, which wastes valuable time and potentially money as you try and work out the kinks.

There are lots of online tools available to help create marketing plans, but you only want the ones that will provide workable strategies for you.

How to write a marketing plan: step one

The first thing you must do is figure out what your goals and objectives are – are you looking to increase sales? Increase engagement via social media? Grow your customer base through email marketing?

Knowing what you are trying to achieve before you start will help to determine where your marketing efforts should go.

Pro tip: As you are working out your long term goals, you need to always be asking yourself ‘Why Us?’ Understanding your USPs (Unique Selling Points) should be the lynchpin for all of your marketing efforts. Always ask yourself why customers should choose you over your competitors.

Next Steps to Success

Once you know what your goals are, the next step is to start putting real numbers next to them. You may feel tempted to keep things vague out of a fear of failure, but this won’t help you or your business in the long run.

Creating SMART goals (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound) will guide writing a marketing plan to a conclusion and allow you to properly measure how successful your efforts have been.

As well as setting up the right goals, you’ll also need to consider the obstacles that may crop up and halt your progress. Be realistic about how much time you have, the skills of your team, your limitations with technology – anything that could potentially stop you from achieving a goal.

Accepting your limitations

Some businesses have teams of marketers at their disposal, as well as designers, developers, and account managers working together on marketing plans. And some businesses have one person trying to do everything on their own!

Understanding your limitations and adapting your marketing plan to match is vital if you want to create a marketing plan for your business that will actually work!

The best way to have a marketing strategy that will yield results is to choose a small number of marketing tools at the start, and scale up as you need to. Before choosing a tool, you have to determine how much time will be put towards it, as well as the cost and people you can spare.

Targeting audiences

As well as understanding your marketing plan from a business perspective, you also need to put time into understanding how it will work from your audience’s point-of-view. How is what you doing going to help your customers? And for that matter, who are your customers?!

Before you start actioning any part of your marketing plan, you need to know the following about your target audience:

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Income
• Other interests

It’s important to remember that your audience is not a static thing, and they will be evolving regularly, so remember to mark points during your marketing plan to recheck your target audience. Flexibility is key here, so you have to be able to adapt as trends change.

Marketing strategies

As we’ve said before, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to how to write a marketing plan. Some things will work for you while others do not. We’ve gathered some of the most commonly used ones below, but it’s up to you to how/when you use them.

Content Marketing

Many eCommerce businesses have a blog to post informational and relevant content for their audience. It’s generally a good rule of thumb to keep your blog updated regularly, with new content at least once a month.

There’s no hard and fast rule for blog content, but if you are going down this road, it’s worth spending time thinking about not only the content you are going to produce but also how you are going to promote it.

Content marketing often goes hand in hand with social media so tailoring your goal to reflect the value of our content and its engagement could be a key metric for you.

Social Media

For any online business that doesn’t have much in the way of resources, social media is a great way to generate engagement with your customers for little to no spend.

You can build your brand, engage directly with customers, promote your services and products, and even advertise if you have the budget.

Just remember that not every social media platform is suitable for your audience. Do your research and find out where your potential customers are likely to be. If your target audience is men in their 50s, then Tik Tok is unlikely to the right choice for you.

Email Marketing

Sometimes dismissed by online companies as being old-fashioned, but email marketing is still a powerful marketing tool if you know how to use it. It allows you to be both creative and direct in your approach, speaking straight to your audience and cultivating a relationship that benefits both parties.

Think about how you can use email marketing lists to group your audience into sections and offer each distinct group something tailored specifically for them.

You may decide to give trade customers first look at new product lines, or give discounts to customers who have been with you the longest. There’s a lot of scope available with email marketing, as long as you put in the time to plan properly.

 

Understanding how to write a marketing plan is the first step on a long but rewarding path. If you are looking for more guidance with putting together your strategy, we can help! Get in touch today.