A marketing plan helps to keep your business on top of the needs and desires of your target market and improve profitability.
Operating without a plan is a bit like driving without a destination in mind, or a map!
But a 12-month marketing plan enables you to set marketing goals for the year and create a set of strategies and activities for getting there.
Marketing plan elements
A sound marketing plan should contain these elements:
- Mission: states the mission of your plan, which also needs to align with the business’s overall mission and vision.
- Goals: creates measurable targets for all the aspects of the plan – such as attracting 15% more traffic to the website, increasing the number of leads by 10%, and so on.
- Target audiences: sound marketing always begins with knowing what your target markets need and desire. A good way to go about this is to create buyer personas that describe the typical customers you want to attract.
- Marketing strategies: this includes the types of marketing content you intend creating – such as articles, blogs, videos, e-books and social media posts. However, it should be more than just a list of strategies – it should also specify how much and when of each. A content calendar can be useful for this.
- Budget: explains the costs involved in your campaigns and what each one entails.
- Competitors: a profile of the competitors within your industry and any challenges they present.
- Plan participants and responsibilities: marketing team members and their tasks and projects over the year.
One of the most important aspects of a marketing plan is evaluating your campaigns to determine which strategies and methods have been the most successful. This information is very valuable in other ways too – you can use to feed into the development of next year’s 12-month marketing plan.
Speak with the team at Sanctuary Labs to formulate your twelve-month marketing plan.