Creating a Marketing Plan
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A general overview on the steps to take, considerations to make, research to conduct, and guidelines to follow for creating a marketing plan for your organization.
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Creating a Marketing Plan
- 1. Marketing Planning Charlie Fashana May 30, 2014
- 2. What is a Marketing Plan?
- 3. It is a road map and surveys the business environment, describes problems, threats and opportunities in the industry, contains a marketing strategy, and has financial projections/budgets. • Do not confuse a marketing plan with a business plan, however, the marketing plan is an integral part of the business plan.
- 4. Why do you need a Marketing Plan?
- 5. To ensure a strategic approach is undertaken to marketing guaranteeing all future marketing tactics are executed with a holistic viewpoint and long term purpose in mind and deliver a return on your objective. • Focus on testing and learning • Year over year improvement • Meaningful actions
- 6. Who should be part of the process?
- 7. The entire leadership team of the organization should play a role in developing the marketing plan. Customer insights and any available research is also integral to the development of the plan.
- 8. What should go in your Marketing Plan?
- 9. The Business What is it? What’s the history? What products and services does your business sell?
- 10. Mission & Vision What is the mission of your business (what you do)? • A one-sentence statement describing the reason an organization or program exists and used to help guide decisions about priorities, actions, and responsibilities. Smithsonian: The increase and diffusion of knowledge. (6 words) What is the vision of your business (desired end state)? • A one-sentence statement describing the clear and inspirational long-term desired change resulting from an organization or program’s work. Habitat for Humanity: A world where everyone has a decent place to live. (10 words)
- 11. Core Values What are your core values? • Corporate philosophy, words to live by, leadership principles, guiding values or principles.. Zappo’s Core Values Video
- 12. Your Brand Brand is the "name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller's product distinct from those of other sellers.” 1 • What are your brand values? • If your brand was a car what would it be? • What one word epitomizes your brand? 1 American Marketing Association
- 13. SWOT Analysis An assessment of the firm’s current position, showing the strengths & weaknesses (internal factors) and opportunities and threats (external factors).
- 15. Objectives What are your business objectives and goals? What are your marketing goals that link to this? • This could be more customers, more leads, a higher profile, more business from existing clients • Other factors to be considered include innovation (introduce five new products), image, distribution, etc.
- 16. Situation Analysis What marketplace are you in? How big is your industry? Is it a growing or declining market? What are the hot trends in your market? Who are your competitors? How are they positioned? What are your strengths? And weaknesses? How are you positioned? ENVIRONMENT COMPETITIVE
- 17. Target Market Who are your customers? Who is your ideal customer? Why? Are your current customers your ideal customers? Segment them by: • Industry • Geography/location • Demographics
- 18. Strategy
- 19. Do you want to take everything you learned from your planning process and turn it into more customers, sales, leads, website traffic and to build your brand? Then you need a Marketing Strategy. Do you want to understand what marketing you can do and the results you could get from it?
- 20. A Basic Approach Identify your target marketing and tactics to reach that market. Develop reusable marketing messages that can be used through all marketing and ensure all marketing is consistent. Plan and execute on-going, consistent and integrated marketing rather than an ad-hoc approach.
- 21. Target Audience Who is your target segment/customer and what are their demographics? How relevant is the product /service to your target audience? What are the best ways to reach this target customer? (i.e. do you have data on where they are consuming media? What channels does the customer use to obtain the product/program/service? (i.e. online, offline, mass media, CRM) Is the purchaser of the product different from the target customer? Who is the purchaser? Describe them. What is most important to them? (i.e. head of household, parent, caregiver, business owner, manager, etc.) Are there key influencers who must be reached? Who are they? How are they reached?
- 22. The Purchase Funnel Paid Media Earned Media
- 23. Marketing Messages What are the benefits of your business and product or services? What marketing messages bring these to life? Why is your business unique? What is your unfair competitive advantage?
- 24. Creative Deliverables What are the likely delivery channels and specific components recommended? • Offer/Promise • Single Net Impression • Call To Action • Tone • Support Points • Mandatory Elements
- 27. Success Metrics and Measurement Create a yearly, quarterly and monthly plan detailing exactly what you will do Work out a budget and how much it’s going to cost Work out your return on investment from your marketing strategy Establish key metrics Determine the intervals to report on and how adjustments will be made.
- 28. Thank You!
Editor's Notes
- Personal introduction, background and brief overview of the presentation.
- You may have a lot of questions about marketing planning, strategy, execution. But throughout this presentation, I’m going to ask you a number of questions. Most, if not all, of which you’ll know the answer. The goal of my presentation is to get you to be thinking about all the questions you need to ask yourself, your organization to help you put together a marketing plan. So what is a Marketing Plan?
- It is a road map and surveys the business environment, describes problems, threats and opportunities in the industry, contains a marketing strategy, and has financial projections/budgets. A marketing plan is concerned more with strategy whereas a business plan is more concerned with financial information. The primary purpose of a business plan is to raise money, keep the business profitable, etc.; the primary purpose of a marketing plan is to provide direction for a company. We’ll focus on both planning and strategy in this discussion. Notice I didn’t go straight to talking about TV commercials, billboards and other paid advertising tactics? Marketing is so commonly stereotyped to just be flyers and “arm and a leg” slogans. Roadmap graphic courtesy of http://www.ascp.org/Residents/Resident-Resources
- To ensure a strategic approach is undertaken to marketing guaranteeing all future marketing tactics are executed with a holistic viewpoint and long term purpose in mind and deliver a return on your objective.
- It’s really the building blocks, the foundation on which all of your marketing efforts come from. Having a solid Marketing Plan will allow you to ensure all initiatives, campaigns, efforts are in line with the plan. It will allow you to establish baselines for expenditures, expected results, and success metrics that will help you with all future actions. Notice I didn’t say Return on Investment. Certainly ROI is a huge component to many marketing strategies. But not everything can be directly attributable to every marketing tactic and success can be defined in so many ways. The easiest thing to consider apart from increased sales or revenue is meaningful actions (website traffic, signups, downloads, social shares, engagement, etc.). Testing and Learning is also key in today’s ever changing environment.
- I’m sure many of you wear many hats in your organization, are responsible for much more than just marketing. And that can be a good thing when working on a Marketing Plan because you’ll be deeply aware of all facets of the organization. But should it be just you that handles the Marketing Plan for your organization?
- Ideally, it should be a team effort with all key leaders and stakeholders in the organization contributing. This will ensure there is alignment on all inputs and no confusion or disparity when it comes time to execute. Outside of the organization, research also plays a key role into the development of the plan. Can you conduct any primary research or leverage any secondary research to provide you with the necessary insights for the plan?
- The may seem basic, and even not necessary to include. But honestly, documenting everything will help you (and your partners, stakeholders, vendors) truly understand who you are, where you came from, what you do. Everything. This can also serve as a bit of a sanity check – to make sure everything that follows remains in alignment and in scale to the business as it is.
- The marketing environment must be discussed. This is often referred to as the situation analysis. This section will look at external environmental factors such as the market, marketing channels, economy, technology, legal and political climates, and sociocultural factors.. Along with the competitive situation related to your business and industry. Failing to pay close attention to these factors will dramatically impede your ability to adapt, adjust, find key selling points, niche opportunities, and more.
- With the current state of the economy, having a well-defined target market is more important than ever. No one can afford to target everyone. Small businesses can effectively compete with large companies by targeting a niche market. The target markets have to be studied. Who are your target customers? Have their needs changed? Is the company doing a good job of satisfying the needs of its customers? Are you current customers or your target customers your ideal customers? Knowing exactly who your customers are will also allow you to effectively market to them – aligning relevant messaging, using appropriate channels, etc.
- Part of the overall Marketing Plan are Marketing Strategies. They are different. The strategy begins to focus on “how” – your Go To Market strategy and implementation of the overall plan. A marketing strategy has two key components: a target market and a marketing mix (tactics) to satisfy the target market.
- So now that you know all of that other stuff about your business, what can you do to make something happen? Do you want to take everything you learned from your planning process and turn it into more customers, sales, leads, website traffic and to build your brand? Do you want to understand what marketing you can do and the results you could get from it? This is where the strategy comes into play. Depending on your company, situation, budget, etc. you can find that you may have one all encompassing strategy or many if you’re running multiple campaigns, introducing new products, etc. But you’ll know all of that based on everything you put in your plan.
- This is the most basic approach to a marketing strategy – but if you’re low on time, resources and dollars, keep these things in mind. Know your target audience and align the tactics to the appropriately. Reusable messages, similar to your brand guidelines, are developed to ensure consistency across all platforms. Think long term, plan ahead. That doesn’t mean don’t be flexible, nimble and able to jump on an opportunity, but make sure your strategies are mindfully thought out with longer term mindset. I’ll expand on these steps over the next few slides.
- Target market is the broad view of who you’d like to sell your products and services to. The target audience is the specific group of people within your target audience at which the marketing message of a product is aimed at. So who are these people, and what do you know about them?
- Seemingly every marketer, agency, textbook, blog has a different take on the purchase funnel. This one I think is the best. At its base we’re talking about three things: Awareness – the customer is aware of the existence of a product or service Consideration – actively expressing an interest in a product group or aspiring to a particular brand or product Purchase – taking the next step towards purchasing the chosen product Its critical to understand where your target customers are in this funnel so you can appropriately cater to them. This particular graphic is great because it shows the value you can earn from taking a customer through the funnel, and what providing them with a great product or service will yield for you in return. Purchase Funnel Graphic courtesy of http://conversionscientist.com/audio-available/drilling-in-on-social-conversion-strategies/
- Generally speaking, these are the questions you need to ask yourself before sending an email blast or running a promotion. If you’re not thinking about these things, its unlikely you’ll hook your target audience. Remember that the way these messages are put together need to be well aligned with your brand platform.
- More specifically, there are a number of considerations that should go into your creative. Whether its for major campaigns with a theme, simple headlines, or basic copywriting, these things need to be considered: Offer/Promise – What is the offer that will motivate action? Single Net Impression - What is the ONE thing that we want our target to understand/believe? Call to Action - What do we want our target to do? Tone - What is the tone/voice (i.e., educational, matter-of-fact, humorous, etc.)? Support Points - What are the relevant features and benefits that prove/support the single net impression? Mandatories - What must be included (i.e., brand identity guidelines, printing requirements, etc.)?
- This slide says marketing mix. A Traditional Marketing Mix is taught as the 4 P’s – Product, Price, Promotion, Place. Some include a 5th – People. This one is much more tactic related and I’d say falls within Promotion. Look at how many channels are available to you to communicate to your customers. We could hold a separate session on how to effectively utilize each of these mediums, but I want to show this to you to at least get you thinking about what’s out there. You’ll notice that the majority of the channels listed here are digital and social in nature, many of which didn’t even exist 10 years ago. This is critical to understand and stay current on. The video and the next slide further shows some data that supports the need for using these new, mainly digital channels.
- Here are a few graphs from eMarketer. By the way, I’d recommend subscribing to eMarketers daily emails – they provide a lot of content, data, and trends that will help you plan and make decisions, especially if you have limited research resources. The graph on the left shows the steady 5 year decline is time spent with traditional media devices such as TV, Radio and Print and a growing trend in Online and Mobile. Combining online and mobile devices, eMarketer expects US adults to spend 5 hours 46 minutes with digital media daily this year, increasing digital’s lead over television to well over 1 hour per day. That increase is almost exclusively attributable to mobile. In 2014, US adults will spend 23.0% more time with mobile on an average day than in 2013, according to eMarketer’s forecast—and that’s led to mobile cannibalizing time spent with just about every other category. The graph on the left shows that social network usage among US adults has made the switch to majority-mobile this year. More than half of mobile social networking will be conducted on smartphones, and tablets will account for an additional 15 minutes per day on average. Last year, US adults spent 33 minutes on social networks online vs. 29 minutes on mobile devices. In total, adults are spending 1 hr and 7 mins on social networks per day. These are things to be thinking about when your trying to determine how to best reach your audiences.
- In closing… I can pretty much guarantee you success if you follow what was outlined previously. But you need to follow up on your work. Tracking is key. Choose your KPI’s – key performance indicators – the metrics that will help you define success. How frequently can you realistic report on this? Is that sufficient? Align results to dollars spent to determine ROI. Only in doing ample tracking and measurement will you be able to make adjustments and improvements.
- I hope you walk away from today having a better grasp of what goes into a Marketing Plan, as well as an understanding of how integral marketing should be to an organization’s overall strategy.