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How to write a marketing plan a comprehensive guide [w templates]

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This document provides a comprehensive guide to writing an effective marketing plan, including templates. It discusses the importance of preparation, research, goals, strategy, and measurement. The key sections of a marketing plan are outlined as business information, introduction/goals, competitive analysis, SWOT analysis, target market, unique selling proposition, branding, website, marketing channels, and measurements. Extensive details are provided on each section and performing necessary pre-plan research steps like competitor analysis, SWOT analysis, creating buyer personas, and understanding the buyer's journey. The guide emphasizes developing goals, tactics, and KPIs and treating the plan as a living document.

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How to Write a Marketing Plan: A Comprehensive Guide [w/ Templates] comprehensive Guide [w/ Templates] https://www.digistore24.com/redir/312455/ nicole05/ Written by: Nicole O’halloran “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

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Abraham Lincoln knew that preparation is everything. Whether you’re chopping down a tree or figuring out how to write a marketing plan, the steps you take ahead of time are crucial to your marketing success. In this article, our marketing plan discussion will focus mostly on the digital marketing aspect, but the strategies and concepts can be expanded to encompass your entire marketing department. Why You Need a Marketing Plan How to Structure Your Marketing Plan 5 Pre-Plan Research Steps How to Plan Your Marketing Strategy Free Marketing Plan Templates Why You Need a Marketing Plan For today’s marketers, creating an integrated marketing plan that includes social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing and SEO — all tenets of a strong inbound marketing strategy — is necessary in order to attract and convert buyers in a digital age. Maybe you work for a large corporation and have been tasked with developing next year’s marketing plan, or perhaps you are launching a new start-up and need to craft a plan from scratch. Maybe it’s been 20 years since you graduated from business school or wrote your last marketing plan, and you realize that times have changed a bit. Whatever the case, the steps you take today to create a functional and straight-forward marketing plan will lay the foundation for your year ahead, helping you to get results that are measurable and quantifiable.

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But before we dive in, make sure to check out this link https://www.digistore24.com/redir/312455/nicole05/ Got it? Great! Now, let’s take a quick look at how the marketing plan should be structured. How to Structure Your Marketing Plan First, here are the sections that should be in your marketing plan. We’ll go into more detail further down in this post. ● Business Information ○ Headquarters, mission statement, marketing team, etc. ● Introduction/Goals ○ What you’re hoping to achieve and how ● Competitive Analysis ● SWOT Analysis ○ Identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats

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● Target Market ○ Explain who you will be marketing to ● Buying Cycle ○ How, when and where your buyers buy ● Unique Selling Proposition ○ Explain what differentiates you from your competition ● Brand ○ Discuss how your brand is currently perceived and how you’d like it to be perceived ● Website ○ Talk about how you plan to improve your website ● Marketing Channels ○ Explain how you will use to following channels to achieve your goals: ■ Content marketing ■ Social media marketing ■ Email marketing ● SEO ○ Explain how you SEO strategy will be incorporated ● Measurements and KPIs ○ Detail how you’ll be tracking the progression of your marketing plan ● Marketing Strategy and Tactics ○ Recap your strategy in a brief synopsis ○ Include 4-5 tactics initiatives And now, more details: 1. List your Goals First

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While developing goals may not be the first step you actually take when forming your marketing plan, listing them first on your final marketing plan document sets the stage for everything to come. 2. Explain Your Research Research will be the foundation of your marketing plan and should include: ● Competitive Analysis – Take a look at what your competitors are doing and how this could affect your marketing plan. ● SWOT Analysis – This is an analysis of your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, standard to any business or marketing plan. ● Your Buyer Personas – This will include the demographics of the buyers you are targeting as well as include any personas you want to avoid. ● Your Buyers’ Purchase Cycle – Understanding how, when, where and why your target market buys is key to converting leads. 3. Explain Your Strategy Once you have a clear grip on the landscape and understand your buyers, it’s time to explain the strategy. This phase includes: ● Defining Your Goals ● Knowing Your USP (unique selling proposition) ● Ensuring You Have a Strong Brand ● Making Sure You Have an Optimized Website

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● Creating Kick-Ass Content ● Defining Your Distribution Channels (email, social, etc.) ● Creating an SEO Strategy 4. Define KPIs & Measurement Methods After all the heavy lifting is complete, your strategy is in place and you have begun putting together and implementing your tactical plans, it’s time to measure. In fact, even before you have implemented your strategy, you should be measuring to establish your baseline. What have you done in the past and what were the results? How can those strategies shift to improve ROI? Measurement should be done before, during and after — throughout the year, on a monthly or even weekly basis — to ensure that your plans are showing positive results and to shift them if they’re not. 5. List Overarching Strategy and Tactical Plans Having tactical plans and calendars gives life to your ideas and strategies. Try focusing on 4 or 5 main tactics for the year and create execution plans around these tactics. Keep in mind that your tactics may or may not be the same as your goals. If your goals are high-level (i.e. to increase traffic by 50%) then your tactic would drill down more on how to get that result — and be as the name implies, more tactical. Remember: It’s a Guide, Not a Bible

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No one can predict the future, which is why you need to remember that your marketing plan should be a living, working document. This is not a brand handbook or a book on company policy. Your marketing plan should be: ● A reference that is used throughout the year ● Malleable to a certain extent ● Shared with all stakeholders and contributing members of your team Transparency is important when developing and finalizing the plan. By getting feedback from all departments and being clear on goals, your marketing plan is more likely to be of value and to be seen as a successful tool. A marketing plan left to collect dust is useless. What’s not useless is a fluid marketing plan that allows for change and is looked upon as a guide, not as a bible.

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Before You Plan: 5 Research Steps A common mistake that many people make is starting on the tactical plan before they have ironed out the strategic plan. But in order to formulate a strategic plan, you need to do your research. If you don’t know who you are, what you’re selling or who you’re selling to, you’re going to have a hard time convincing people to buy your product or service, never mind figuring out what tactical initiatives you should be working on. So, if you haven’t already, do your homework. Start with researching your competitors and audience; examine your customers’ buying habits; and perform a SWOT analysis. Below are steps that will help you lay a sturdy foundation for your tactical plans, and allow you to develop reasonable expectations and goals. 1. Check Out the Competition In order to determine the likelihood of success and define your marketing strategy, you need to understand the competition. Researching your competition first will also help you through the next step of performing a SWOT analysis.

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In the world of inbound marketing, there are a handful of strategies that can be useful when researching competitors. Using email and social media while surveying the content landscape will give you an immense amount of knowledge about your industry. Here are some quick tips to help you understand who you’re up against: ● Subscribe to receive your competitors’ (or those you perceive to be your competitors) emails. ● Follow your competitors on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and any other social media site where you can find them. ● Examine what content your competitors are creating — who it is aimed at, how often is it produced, who is writing it, what the content topics are, etc. MOZ recommends using Wordle to get a pulse on the competition and keep your data organized. For more on why these tactics are important, how to implement them and what data you can glean from them, read Competitor Research in an Inbound Marketing World. 2. Perform a SWOT Analysis

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Standard to any business or marketing plan is the SWOT analysis. The SWOT analysis should help you clearly define your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats so that you can develop goals and objectives that are on point and tied to your overall mission. The SWOT analysis will help you understand what differentiates you from your competition and how you should position yourself in the market. It will also help you develop your messaging and your unique selling proposition. Brutal honesty is imperative for a truly insightful SWOT. Use bullets and aim for 4–5 in each section. Limiting your lists will help you to focus on the most critical points and help retain focus. In addition to completing a SWOT for your overall marketing plan, it’s helpful to do a SWOT analysis for the different segments within your marketing plan. For example, as we will discuss further down in this piece, content marketing, social media and SEO will all be important parts of your overall inbound marketing plan and would benefit from SWOTs of their own. 3. Create Your Buyer Personas

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The days of outbound marketing have come and gone. No longer are we looking at audiences en masse. Instead, inbound marketers are honing in on the segments of those audiences that they want to target. This is a crucial step in developing an inbound marketing plan. Creating buyer personas will help you understand: ● Who you are marketing to ● What their pain points are ● Where they spend time online ● And a number of other demographic traits This information will help you to personalize your marketing materials so they are targeted and highly relevant to your audience segments. Remember: You aren’t trying to catch every fish in the sea. You’re only trying to catch the ones you want, the ones you are targeting because they have the strongest potential to turn into leads. Your net doesn’t need to be wide — it needs to be precise.

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For more information about buyer personas, read How to Avoid 4 Buyer Persona Mistakes for advice and a free template on developing your personas. You may need to do research in order to completely develop your personas, but before you dive into that endeavor, check out 9 Questions You Need to Ask When Developing Buyer Personas. You may find you already have all the data you need! 4. Learn Your Buyers’ Buying Cycle After you have identified your buyer personas, the next step is figuring out how these personas think and ultimately make the decision to buy. According to HubSpot and adopted by all those who believe in the inbound marketing methodology, there are three steps in the buyer’s journey: ● Awareness ● Consideration ● Decision Each of these stages are major opportunities for you as a marketer to nurture your potential customer by providing valuable content about the product and or problem they are trying to solve. Here are three stats from Forbes that prove just how important content is in nurturing a prospect throughout the buyer’s journey: ● 70-90% of the buyer’s journey is complete prior to engaging a vendor (Forrester)

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● A consumer engages with 11.4 pieces of content prior to making a purchase (Forrester) ● Consumers are 5x more dependent on content than they were 5 years ago (Nielsen) To learn more about the buyer’s journey and how you can align your marketing plan with your customers buying habits, check out Pardot’s Understanding the Buyer’s Journey. And if you are a B2B company, read our article B2B Lead Generation Starts with Mapping the Buyer's Journey. 5. Nail Down Your Budget Of course, executing all of your marketing hopes and dreams isn’t feasible if you don’t know how much money your company can invest. Identifying your budget will dictate which goals you can tackle first, the manpower you can recruit to help, and the extent to which your marketing plan can go for the month, quarter, or year. Check out our marketing budget post for more information about planning your budget, and make sure to download our free marketing budget template while you’re there. How to Plan Your Marketing Strategy Now that you’ve done your research, you’re ready to start formulating a marketing strategy for your plan.

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1. Identify Your Goals Goals are the most important part of your plan. If you have completed your research, you should have been able to identify your weaknesses and areas of opportunities. Setting both quantitative and qualitative goals around these findings, as well as developing KPIs, will be essential. They will help you set a clear path, understand your marketing ROI and redirect your tactics as you move through the year, if you find certain strategies are working better than others. Goals should be obtainable, but not easy. You want to make sure you are shooting for the stars without ending up discouraged and overwhelmed. Here are some general tips to keep in mind when developing marketing goals and objectives: ● Evaluate your current position in the market and set realistic goals. ● Understand your growth year-to-date and set attainable but challenging goals accordingly. ● Tie your goals to your businesses overall mission and vision.

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● Don’t overwhelm yourself. Pick no more than 2 main goals and 3-5 supporting goals. ● Accept that sometimes you will fail and not reach all of your goals. Be OK with that and learn from your failures. ● Create goal milestones to make reaching the goal more digestible. And remember: We’re are marketers, not heart surgeons. Have fun, get creative and don’t take yourself or your marketing too seriously! 2. Know What Makes You Unique Knowing your unique selling proposition (USP) and marketing that USP is critical if you want to beat your competition and solidify your company’s value in the marketplace. Your USP ties in closely with your brand and your content because those are the conduits your USP will be communicated through. And communication is key. Clearly state your USP and do it often — on your website, in your emails, through your ads, etc. For tips on formulating your USP, check out The Ultimate Guide to Finding Your Unique Selling Proposition. 3. Make Sure You Have A Strong Brand Branding can be fun, but it can also be tricky. A brand can be one of the strongest assets a company possesses and, if done right, will encourage customer loyalty every business dreams of. But brand consistency is key. Check to make sure your brand is consistently represented across all channels, including your:

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● Logo ● Website design ● Tradeshow booths and displays ● Print marketing materials ● Business cards and email signatures ● Advertisements ● Packaging design ● Social media profiles ● Sales collateral Take a look at all the places where your audience comes in contact with your brand and ask yourself what each piece is saying about your brand as a whole. If your brand encompasses several sub-brands or subsidiaries, have you strategically audited your brand architecture to leverage maximum brand equity? Not only will a well- designed, cohesive brand architecture benefit you in brand value and recognition, but an online brand strategy will benefit your SEO/search rankings as well. 4. Optimize Your Website Website design is more than just a pretty homepage. Your website is often the first impression your prospects will get of your company. That means that your website has to be more than pretty — it needs to be clear and functional. If your site is cluttered and hard to navigate, you will automatically lose potential buyers. Just think about the last time you went to a poorly designed, cluttered website. Did you stay long? What was your immediate impression of that company?

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Similarly, if visitors can’t tell what you sell or why you sell it, they will leave. All it takes is the click of a button and they are on to the next provider. There’s often a direct correlation that if your website is hard to work with, your company must be hard to work with. So be clear in your messaging. Make sure your site is a place that people want to stay, not only because it’s nice to look at but also because the information visitors need is easily found. There is an entire science and methodology behind website design including where to place buttons on the page, what content works best where, what colors convey certain feelings, and so on. For more, check out 4 Examples of Fantastic Web Design for inspiration and consider hiring a web designer who specializes in inbound marketing and SEO to ensure your website is reaching its full potential. Also, consider if you should hire an agency to take your website to the next level (Vital specializes in WordPress website design and development, and Magento website design and development). 5. Create Kick-Ass Content If you have read anything about inbound or content marketing you have likely heard the overused phrase “content is king.” While it may be overused, when it comes to inbound marketing it’s pretty spot on. Content is the meat that will attract your buyers. It is what Google uses to search for keywords and drive users to your site and what buyers use to glean information and knowledge about their problem as they move through the buyer’s journey. Content is all of the written words used to convey your brand including: ● Website copy ● Landing pages ● Blog posts

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● Newsletters ● Emails ● Social media posts But it’s not just having content that matters — it’s having quality content that is consistent. Content marketing is about providing useful information to your customer base. It’s about informing rather than selling. Think of it this way: If you write intelligent and thought-provoking blog content on a weekly basis that in some way solves a problem, answers a question or simply entertains your target audience, you will become a go-to resource for those potential buyers. They will come back to your site time and time again because you are providing a free service to them, all the while building trust and establishing brand clout in a non-intrusive way. And when these devoted followers realize they need the product you sell, guess who they are most likely to buy it from? You got it. They are going to go to you, the company they trust. Check out Is Youtility the Future of Marketing by Jay Baer, New York Times best selling author and social media and content strategist to learn more about this important concept. So, your content is essential for nurturing your customers as they move through the buyer’s journey. But in order to do this successfully, you need to know what types of content to use and when. Here are the recommended content types for each stage of the buyer’s journey. Awareness Stage

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● eBooks ● eGuides ● White Papers ● Editorial Content ● Reports ● Blog Posts Consideration Stage ● Webinars/Webcasts ● Podcasts ● Video ● Expert and Solution Oriented Guides and White Papers Decision Stage ● Product Comparisons ● Case Studies ● Free Trials/Downloads ● Product Focused Content But it doesn’t stop there. Buyers aren’t the only ones that like helpful content. Google does too! Creating solid content is important for your SEO strategy.

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To learn more about creating a content plan read, How to Build a Compelling Content Strategy for Your Boring Industry or The Secret to a Stand Our B2B Marketing Strategy? Content Marketing. 6. Define Your Distribution Channels As important as content is, without distribution your content goes to waste. It is useless. So it’s essential to have a clear understanding of how each channel works and to use a mix of paid, owned and earned media. Social Media In the world of social media, it pays to have an overall strategy that is tweaked depending on the social channel you are working in. For example, the way you market on Twitter will differ from the way you market on LinkedIn or Facebook. They are different sites with different purposes and your messaging needs to reflect that. One strategy that does work across them all is using photographs. Posts with pictures get higher clicks and engagement across the board. And because social media is all about getting your content and your messaging seen, timing is important. According to sumall.com, the key is to catch people in their downtime, early in the morning, on their breaks or at night. Here is what they recommend for timing: ● Twitter: 1-3pm weekdays ● Facebook: 1-4pm and 2-5pm weekdays ● LinkedIn: 7-8:30am and 5-6pm Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday ● Tumblr: 7-10pm weekdays and 4pm on Fridays

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● Instagram: 5-6pm weekdays and 8pm on Mondays with a sweetspot at 6pm ● Pinterest: 2-4pm and 8-11pm weekdays with weekends being the best Of course, depending on your industry and audience, these times could vary. The key is to test and retest in order to see when your buyers are engaging. Look at the competition. See who is doing social successfully in your space and note their patterns. And remember, your engagement on social media is key. When you interact with your audience you are telling them you heard them, you are enhancing your brand and you are showing authenticity.

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How to write a marketing plan a comprehensive guide [w templates]

  • 1. How to Write a Marketing Plan: A Comprehensive Guide [w/ Templates] comprehensive Guide [w/ Templates] https://www.digistore24.com/redir/312455/ nicole05/ Written by: Nicole O’halloran “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
  • 2. Abraham Lincoln knew that preparation is everything. Whether you’re chopping down a tree or figuring out how to write a marketing plan, the steps you take ahead of time are crucial to your marketing success. In this article, our marketing plan discussion will focus mostly on the digital marketing aspect, but the strategies and concepts can be expanded to encompass your entire marketing department. Why You Need a Marketing Plan How to Structure Your Marketing Plan 5 Pre-Plan Research Steps How to Plan Your Marketing Strategy Free Marketing Plan Templates Why You Need a Marketing Plan For today’s marketers, creating an integrated marketing plan that includes social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing and SEO — all tenets of a strong inbound marketing strategy — is necessary in order to attract and convert buyers in a digital age. Maybe you work for a large corporation and have been tasked with developing next year’s marketing plan, or perhaps you are launching a new start-up and need to craft a plan from scratch. Maybe it’s been 20 years since you graduated from business school or wrote your last marketing plan, and you realize that times have changed a bit. Whatever the case, the steps you take today to create a functional and straight-forward marketing plan will lay the foundation for your year ahead, helping you to get results that are measurable and quantifiable.
  • 3. But before we dive in, make sure to check out this link https://www.digistore24.com/redir/312455/nicole05/ Got it? Great! Now, let’s take a quick look at how the marketing plan should be structured. How to Structure Your Marketing Plan First, here are the sections that should be in your marketing plan. We’ll go into more detail further down in this post. ● Business Information ○ Headquarters, mission statement, marketing team, etc. ● Introduction/Goals ○ What you’re hoping to achieve and how ● Competitive Analysis ● SWOT Analysis ○ Identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats
  • 4. ● Target Market ○ Explain who you will be marketing to ● Buying Cycle ○ How, when and where your buyers buy ● Unique Selling Proposition ○ Explain what differentiates you from your competition ● Brand ○ Discuss how your brand is currently perceived and how you’d like it to be perceived ● Website ○ Talk about how you plan to improve your website ● Marketing Channels ○ Explain how you will use to following channels to achieve your goals: ■ Content marketing ■ Social media marketing ■ Email marketing ● SEO ○ Explain how you SEO strategy will be incorporated ● Measurements and KPIs ○ Detail how you’ll be tracking the progression of your marketing plan ● Marketing Strategy and Tactics ○ Recap your strategy in a brief synopsis ○ Include 4-5 tactics initiatives And now, more details: 1. List your Goals First
  • 5. While developing goals may not be the first step you actually take when forming your marketing plan, listing them first on your final marketing plan document sets the stage for everything to come. 2. Explain Your Research Research will be the foundation of your marketing plan and should include: ● Competitive Analysis – Take a look at what your competitors are doing and how this could affect your marketing plan. ● SWOT Analysis – This is an analysis of your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, standard to any business or marketing plan. ● Your Buyer Personas – This will include the demographics of the buyers you are targeting as well as include any personas you want to avoid. ● Your Buyers’ Purchase Cycle – Understanding how, when, where and why your target market buys is key to converting leads. 3. Explain Your Strategy Once you have a clear grip on the landscape and understand your buyers, it’s time to explain the strategy. This phase includes: ● Defining Your Goals ● Knowing Your USP (unique selling proposition) ● Ensuring You Have a Strong Brand ● Making Sure You Have an Optimized Website
  • 6. ● Creating Kick-Ass Content ● Defining Your Distribution Channels (email, social, etc.) ● Creating an SEO Strategy 4. Define KPIs & Measurement Methods After all the heavy lifting is complete, your strategy is in place and you have begun putting together and implementing your tactical plans, it’s time to measure. In fact, even before you have implemented your strategy, you should be measuring to establish your baseline. What have you done in the past and what were the results? How can those strategies shift to improve ROI? Measurement should be done before, during and after — throughout the year, on a monthly or even weekly basis — to ensure that your plans are showing positive results and to shift them if they’re not. 5. List Overarching Strategy and Tactical Plans Having tactical plans and calendars gives life to your ideas and strategies. Try focusing on 4 or 5 main tactics for the year and create execution plans around these tactics. Keep in mind that your tactics may or may not be the same as your goals. If your goals are high-level (i.e. to increase traffic by 50%) then your tactic would drill down more on how to get that result — and be as the name implies, more tactical. Remember: It’s a Guide, Not a Bible
  • 7. No one can predict the future, which is why you need to remember that your marketing plan should be a living, working document. This is not a brand handbook or a book on company policy. Your marketing plan should be: ● A reference that is used throughout the year ● Malleable to a certain extent ● Shared with all stakeholders and contributing members of your team Transparency is important when developing and finalizing the plan. By getting feedback from all departments and being clear on goals, your marketing plan is more likely to be of value and to be seen as a successful tool. A marketing plan left to collect dust is useless. What’s not useless is a fluid marketing plan that allows for change and is looked upon as a guide, not as a bible.
  • 8. Before You Plan: 5 Research Steps A common mistake that many people make is starting on the tactical plan before they have ironed out the strategic plan. But in order to formulate a strategic plan, you need to do your research. If you don’t know who you are, what you’re selling or who you’re selling to, you’re going to have a hard time convincing people to buy your product or service, never mind figuring out what tactical initiatives you should be working on. So, if you haven’t already, do your homework. Start with researching your competitors and audience; examine your customers’ buying habits; and perform a SWOT analysis. Below are steps that will help you lay a sturdy foundation for your tactical plans, and allow you to develop reasonable expectations and goals. 1. Check Out the Competition In order to determine the likelihood of success and define your marketing strategy, you need to understand the competition. Researching your competition first will also help you through the next step of performing a SWOT analysis.
  • 9. In the world of inbound marketing, there are a handful of strategies that can be useful when researching competitors. Using email and social media while surveying the content landscape will give you an immense amount of knowledge about your industry. Here are some quick tips to help you understand who you’re up against: ● Subscribe to receive your competitors’ (or those you perceive to be your competitors) emails. ● Follow your competitors on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and any other social media site where you can find them. ● Examine what content your competitors are creating — who it is aimed at, how often is it produced, who is writing it, what the content topics are, etc. MOZ recommends using Wordle to get a pulse on the competition and keep your data organized. For more on why these tactics are important, how to implement them and what data you can glean from them, read Competitor Research in an Inbound Marketing World. 2. Perform a SWOT Analysis
  • 10. Standard to any business or marketing plan is the SWOT analysis. The SWOT analysis should help you clearly define your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats so that you can develop goals and objectives that are on point and tied to your overall mission. The SWOT analysis will help you understand what differentiates you from your competition and how you should position yourself in the market. It will also help you develop your messaging and your unique selling proposition. Brutal honesty is imperative for a truly insightful SWOT. Use bullets and aim for 4–5 in each section. Limiting your lists will help you to focus on the most critical points and help retain focus. In addition to completing a SWOT for your overall marketing plan, it’s helpful to do a SWOT analysis for the different segments within your marketing plan. For example, as we will discuss further down in this piece, content marketing, social media and SEO will all be important parts of your overall inbound marketing plan and would benefit from SWOTs of their own. 3. Create Your Buyer Personas
  • 11. The days of outbound marketing have come and gone. No longer are we looking at audiences en masse. Instead, inbound marketers are honing in on the segments of those audiences that they want to target. This is a crucial step in developing an inbound marketing plan. Creating buyer personas will help you understand: ● Who you are marketing to ● What their pain points are ● Where they spend time online ● And a number of other demographic traits This information will help you to personalize your marketing materials so they are targeted and highly relevant to your audience segments. Remember: You aren’t trying to catch every fish in the sea. You’re only trying to catch the ones you want, the ones you are targeting because they have the strongest potential to turn into leads. Your net doesn’t need to be wide — it needs to be precise.
  • 12. For more information about buyer personas, read How to Avoid 4 Buyer Persona Mistakes for advice and a free template on developing your personas. You may need to do research in order to completely develop your personas, but before you dive into that endeavor, check out 9 Questions You Need to Ask When Developing Buyer Personas. You may find you already have all the data you need! 4. Learn Your Buyers’ Buying Cycle After you have identified your buyer personas, the next step is figuring out how these personas think and ultimately make the decision to buy. According to HubSpot and adopted by all those who believe in the inbound marketing methodology, there are three steps in the buyer’s journey: ● Awareness ● Consideration ● Decision Each of these stages are major opportunities for you as a marketer to nurture your potential customer by providing valuable content about the product and or problem they are trying to solve. Here are three stats from Forbes that prove just how important content is in nurturing a prospect throughout the buyer’s journey: ● 70-90% of the buyer’s journey is complete prior to engaging a vendor (Forrester)
  • 13. ● A consumer engages with 11.4 pieces of content prior to making a purchase (Forrester) ● Consumers are 5x more dependent on content than they were 5 years ago (Nielsen) To learn more about the buyer’s journey and how you can align your marketing plan with your customers buying habits, check out Pardot’s Understanding the Buyer’s Journey. And if you are a B2B company, read our article B2B Lead Generation Starts with Mapping the Buyer's Journey. 5. Nail Down Your Budget Of course, executing all of your marketing hopes and dreams isn’t feasible if you don’t know how much money your company can invest. Identifying your budget will dictate which goals you can tackle first, the manpower you can recruit to help, and the extent to which your marketing plan can go for the month, quarter, or year. Check out our marketing budget post for more information about planning your budget, and make sure to download our free marketing budget template while you’re there. How to Plan Your Marketing Strategy Now that you’ve done your research, you’re ready to start formulating a marketing strategy for your plan.
  • 14. 1. Identify Your Goals Goals are the most important part of your plan. If you have completed your research, you should have been able to identify your weaknesses and areas of opportunities. Setting both quantitative and qualitative goals around these findings, as well as developing KPIs, will be essential. They will help you set a clear path, understand your marketing ROI and redirect your tactics as you move through the year, if you find certain strategies are working better than others. Goals should be obtainable, but not easy. You want to make sure you are shooting for the stars without ending up discouraged and overwhelmed. Here are some general tips to keep in mind when developing marketing goals and objectives: ● Evaluate your current position in the market and set realistic goals. ● Understand your growth year-to-date and set attainable but challenging goals accordingly. ● Tie your goals to your businesses overall mission and vision.
  • 15. ● Don’t overwhelm yourself. Pick no more than 2 main goals and 3-5 supporting goals. ● Accept that sometimes you will fail and not reach all of your goals. Be OK with that and learn from your failures. ● Create goal milestones to make reaching the goal more digestible. And remember: We’re are marketers, not heart surgeons. Have fun, get creative and don’t take yourself or your marketing too seriously! 2. Know What Makes You Unique Knowing your unique selling proposition (USP) and marketing that USP is critical if you want to beat your competition and solidify your company’s value in the marketplace. Your USP ties in closely with your brand and your content because those are the conduits your USP will be communicated through. And communication is key. Clearly state your USP and do it often — on your website, in your emails, through your ads, etc. For tips on formulating your USP, check out The Ultimate Guide to Finding Your Unique Selling Proposition. 3. Make Sure You Have A Strong Brand Branding can be fun, but it can also be tricky. A brand can be one of the strongest assets a company possesses and, if done right, will encourage customer loyalty every business dreams of. But brand consistency is key. Check to make sure your brand is consistently represented across all channels, including your:
  • 16. ● Logo ● Website design ● Tradeshow booths and displays ● Print marketing materials ● Business cards and email signatures ● Advertisements ● Packaging design ● Social media profiles ● Sales collateral Take a look at all the places where your audience comes in contact with your brand and ask yourself what each piece is saying about your brand as a whole. If your brand encompasses several sub-brands or subsidiaries, have you strategically audited your brand architecture to leverage maximum brand equity? Not only will a well- designed, cohesive brand architecture benefit you in brand value and recognition, but an online brand strategy will benefit your SEO/search rankings as well. 4. Optimize Your Website Website design is more than just a pretty homepage. Your website is often the first impression your prospects will get of your company. That means that your website has to be more than pretty — it needs to be clear and functional. If your site is cluttered and hard to navigate, you will automatically lose potential buyers. Just think about the last time you went to a poorly designed, cluttered website. Did you stay long? What was your immediate impression of that company?
  • 17. Similarly, if visitors can’t tell what you sell or why you sell it, they will leave. All it takes is the click of a button and they are on to the next provider. There’s often a direct correlation that if your website is hard to work with, your company must be hard to work with. So be clear in your messaging. Make sure your site is a place that people want to stay, not only because it’s nice to look at but also because the information visitors need is easily found. There is an entire science and methodology behind website design including where to place buttons on the page, what content works best where, what colors convey certain feelings, and so on. For more, check out 4 Examples of Fantastic Web Design for inspiration and consider hiring a web designer who specializes in inbound marketing and SEO to ensure your website is reaching its full potential. Also, consider if you should hire an agency to take your website to the next level (Vital specializes in WordPress website design and development, and Magento website design and development). 5. Create Kick-Ass Content If you have read anything about inbound or content marketing you have likely heard the overused phrase “content is king.” While it may be overused, when it comes to inbound marketing it’s pretty spot on. Content is the meat that will attract your buyers. It is what Google uses to search for keywords and drive users to your site and what buyers use to glean information and knowledge about their problem as they move through the buyer’s journey. Content is all of the written words used to convey your brand including: ● Website copy ● Landing pages ● Blog posts
  • 18. ● Newsletters ● Emails ● Social media posts But it’s not just having content that matters — it’s having quality content that is consistent. Content marketing is about providing useful information to your customer base. It’s about informing rather than selling. Think of it this way: If you write intelligent and thought-provoking blog content on a weekly basis that in some way solves a problem, answers a question or simply entertains your target audience, you will become a go-to resource for those potential buyers. They will come back to your site time and time again because you are providing a free service to them, all the while building trust and establishing brand clout in a non-intrusive way. And when these devoted followers realize they need the product you sell, guess who they are most likely to buy it from? You got it. They are going to go to you, the company they trust. Check out Is Youtility the Future of Marketing by Jay Baer, New York Times best selling author and social media and content strategist to learn more about this important concept. So, your content is essential for nurturing your customers as they move through the buyer’s journey. But in order to do this successfully, you need to know what types of content to use and when. Here are the recommended content types for each stage of the buyer’s journey. Awareness Stage
  • 19. ● eBooks ● eGuides ● White Papers ● Editorial Content ● Reports ● Blog Posts Consideration Stage ● Webinars/Webcasts ● Podcasts ● Video ● Expert and Solution Oriented Guides and White Papers Decision Stage ● Product Comparisons ● Case Studies ● Free Trials/Downloads ● Product Focused Content But it doesn’t stop there. Buyers aren’t the only ones that like helpful content. Google does too! Creating solid content is important for your SEO strategy.
  • 20. To learn more about creating a content plan read, How to Build a Compelling Content Strategy for Your Boring Industry or The Secret to a Stand Our B2B Marketing Strategy? Content Marketing. 6. Define Your Distribution Channels As important as content is, without distribution your content goes to waste. It is useless. So it’s essential to have a clear understanding of how each channel works and to use a mix of paid, owned and earned media. Social Media In the world of social media, it pays to have an overall strategy that is tweaked depending on the social channel you are working in. For example, the way you market on Twitter will differ from the way you market on LinkedIn or Facebook. They are different sites with different purposes and your messaging needs to reflect that. One strategy that does work across them all is using photographs. Posts with pictures get higher clicks and engagement across the board. And because social media is all about getting your content and your messaging seen, timing is important. According to sumall.com, the key is to catch people in their downtime, early in the morning, on their breaks or at night. Here is what they recommend for timing: ● Twitter: 1-3pm weekdays ● Facebook: 1-4pm and 2-5pm weekdays ● LinkedIn: 7-8:30am and 5-6pm Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday ● Tumblr: 7-10pm weekdays and 4pm on Fridays
  • 21. ● Instagram: 5-6pm weekdays and 8pm on Mondays with a sweetspot at 6pm ● Pinterest: 2-4pm and 8-11pm weekdays with weekends being the best Of course, depending on your industry and audience, these times could vary. The key is to test and retest in order to see when your buyers are engaging. Look at the competition. See who is doing social successfully in your space and note their patterns. And remember, your engagement on social media is key. When you interact with your audience you are telling them you heard them, you are enhancing your brand and you are showing authenticity.