Breakthrough Sales Plateaus By Creating A Marketing Plan The Right Way

Do you feel like your company is not reaching its full potential?

Well, a marketing plan can be your best friend. It’s the key to success in any business, no matter how big or small you are. Without a marketing plan, there is no way for you to know if what you’re doing is working for your company and without knowing this, it’s impossible to make changes that will work better.

In this blog post, we will explore how a marketing plan can revolutionize the way you do business and give you a competitive edge over others in your industry.

First things first, it’s important for you to know what a marketing plan covers.  

The Structure of a Marketing Plan

Good Marketing plans are comprehensive and detailed, covering all aspects of the marketing process. They start with defining your company’s goals and objectives for a certain time period then go into market research to identify who you’re trying to reach (your target audience), what they like/want from a product or service in relation to yours, how much they will pay and where to find your target audience.

In a nutshell, use the bullet points below as a framework/checklist and make sure that your marketing plan covers the following:

1. Your company’s objectives and goals
2. The ideal marketing channels to use based on your industry
3. Your Buyer Persona
4. Marketing budget allocation for each channel (for example, you’ll need $1000 per month on Google Adwords, $2,000 on Facebook and Instagram etc.)
5. A content calendar with a timeline of specific dates, deadlines and responsibilities assigned in order of priority

1) Identify your company’s objective and Goals

To know where your companies going, you need to fully understand where your company is now and the intrinsic nature of your business. Numbers don’t lie and a marketing plan gives you the perfect opportunity to reflect and ascertain some things about your industry which you may not have previously removed the time for.

Some important considerations to make when evaluating marketing spend is factors such as the seasonality in your industry (for example – an educational business is very seasonal ie launches should be based around admission cycles) or business cycles (such as would be in a Fashion business where the latest fads and trends dominate).

Gather all of this information and identify your company’s objectives and goals. This will form the basis for what you want to achieve with a Marketing Plan. Once you have done that, it is time to move onto Step #02 in our process – where we work out the right marketing channel for your business.

2) Find the right marketing channel for your business

Not all marketing channels are created the same. Based on the type of business, some are more effective than others. For example, if you’re in the fast-moving consumer goods industry then it would be a good idea to focus on Digital Marketing channels and Social Media Marketing because these platforms are better suited for B2C businesses. On the other hand, a B2B business may want to focus on Lead Generation and Email marketing to reach their target customer.

Picking the right marketing channel can drastically improve your conversion rates thereby getting you to a positive ROI faster. But, before you pick a marketing channel, I suggest that you remove some time and find WHO the ideal customer is for your business and WHERE do they hang out in the digital world?

More on this in my next point.

3) The Buyer Persona 

Have you ever done in-depth research on your customers and wondered what your ideal customers look like? Who they are, where they live, how much money they make and why they buy from you? A buyer persona is a composite of all the answers to these questions. It’s an in-depth picture that will help you tailor your marketing strategy to be more relevant for this particular person.

Your business may be doing well, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do better. The only way to grow is by identifying your target audience and creating a buyer persona for them.

4) Budget

The goal of any good marketer should be to get a positive ROI for their customer. In order to do that, both the client and the marketer need to understand the way ‘numbers’ work.

For example, a customer wanting to get $50,000 in Sales over the next 15 days needs to understand that the platforms that are being used to market their products have a certain cost structure associated with them and their budgeting decisions need to be in line with the platforms they are using (what that means is the CPC of Google Ads may be higher than the CPC associated with Facebook).

A marketing plan should have both the budget and the subsequent performance metrics associated to the budget to be able to assess performance.

A common pitfall though is that many business owners struggle to measure performance. They are unsure of what metrics they should be using and how to accurately identify them. And, with all of the buzzwords and trends that are out there these days, keeping up with them can be difficult for marketers – especially those who don’t have an understanding of what they really mean for our industry.

To get a better understanding of how your marketing is performing you have to begin by setting goals. Every business is different, but there are some universal performance metrics that every company should be measuring:

• Sales Conversion Rate
• Marketing Cost per Lead (CPL)
• Marketing ROI and more.

To learn how various marketing channels affect these metrics you need an understanding of the platforms where your data is generating from and an understanding of the platforms that are integrated with your primary platform (such as your Email Marketing or CRM software).

5) Create a content calendar

The final stage of your plan is where the rubber meets the road and you create a Content Calendar. The calendar should have timelines with specific dates, deadlines and responsibilities assigned in order of priority. Each content step in the content calendar can also have Notes stages and responsibilities including how to implement the content upload.

For example,
18/06/2021 : Upload Educational content on Instagram

Additional Notes:

• Social media manager to submit content and hashtags for approval.
• Graphic designer to forward the design to the Social Media Manager by 15/06/2021.

A lot more can be said about Marketing Plans but for now, hopefully, you have a good understanding of what they mean, why they are essential and how if used properly can be an essential tool to help you grow your business exponentially.