How to Create a Comprehensive Marketing Plan

Regardless of which mass media routes you're using to market your business, it is vital that you take the time to have a comprehensive plan in place. Without a thoughtful plan, you risk wasting valuable time and money on unfruitful marketing efforts. 

Creating a Comprehensive Marketing Plan

This plan should outline a number of different areas, including:

• Your company's goals: It helps to have every department involved in making S.M.A.R.T. goals
• The overall strategy that aligns with your company goals
• A competitive analysis that identifies key competitors' products, pricing, tactics, and more
• Campaigns you intend to run that point people to your offers, products, and services (Take advantage of our campaign planning worksheets) to reach your S.M.A.R.T. goals
•  Your target audience (utilize our buyer persona worksheets to get started): Ideally, you'll start with 3-5 buyer personas and continue to refine those over time

Mapping Out Your Marketing Campaigns

Who is the Target of this Campaign?

Discovering a campaign's target seems like the easiest component, but you would be surprised how many businesses have difficulty defining this group. Too often, businesses feel that their target is too broad, and thus miss out on actually targeting anyone in particular. Refine the group you are targeting just enough so that your content is focused and has the best opportunity to appeal to them. This is where buyer personas come in really handy to create targeted content.

Which Marketing Channels Will You Use?

Defining the channels you want to utilize for your marketing campaign is vital and has a lot to do with the audience you previously defined. Are TV commercials the best outlet to reach your target demographic? What about social media? Or email marketing? Odds are, no one channel is perfect for your campaigns, so you need to determine what you hope to get out of each channel and find the balance of your chosen marketing channels.

What are Your Competitors Doing?

This is the area where you will define what your competitors are doing and can identify ways that you will differentiate yourself from them (or steal some ideas! Don't recreate the wheel if you don't have to). If you have a direct competitor running a very specific campaign, you will want to ensure that you are not just mirroring exactly what they're doing. You've got to distinguish what makes you different and how you can better solve their pain points than the competition. 

Always Be Evolving

This concept of "always be evolving" is one we can't stress enough! Marketing cannot be approached with the “set it and forget it” mentality. With proper planning and an evolving strategy, you will be best equipped to identify ways to further enhance your campaigns as time goes on.