Marketing and Sales

Create a Marketing Plan

What is a marketing plan?

Your target marketing plan is a plan of action designed to promote and sell a product or service, reach customers, and build brand awareness and loyalty. Your goal is to strategically position yourself in front of your main customers. This article will help you promote and sell to the customers ones who are willing and able to buy your product.

Before we get started, copy the Marketing Messaging Template to your Google Drive and begin planning how you will market your product or service.

What are the different types of marketing options?

Your marketing plan will include a “marketing mix” to help you to define your marketing options in terms of price, product, promotion, and place so that your product or service meets a specific customer need or demand.

  1. Product: A product can be either a tangible good or an intangible service that fulfills a need or want of consumers. The type of product also partially dictates how much businesses can charge for it, where they should place it, and how they should promote it in the marketplace.

  2. Price: Price is the cost consumers pay for a product. Price will impact profit margins, supply, demand and marketing strategy.

  3. Promotion: Promotion includes advertising, public relations and promotional strategy like digital and traditional marketing elements.

  4. Place: Place outlines where a company sells a product and how it delivers the product to the market. Evaluate what the ideal locations are to convert potential clients into actual clients.

Digital Marketing is the act of promoting and selling products and services by leveraging online marketing tactics such as social media marketing, search marketing, social media pages and campaigns, search marketing, email marketing, blogging and others. The number 1 rule in digital marketing, and marketing in general, is to make the right offer at the right time and in the right place.

Digital marketing puts you in front of your customers so your best prospects can see you, learn more about you, and even ask questions to learn more about you and your products or services. It also provides a global version of word-of-mouth advertising. Online reviews, testimonials and stories can show new customers everything they need to know about your brand before they decide to give it a shot for themselves. Some digital marketing mediums are:

Traditional Marketing is a conventional mode of marketing that helps to reach out to a semi-targeted audience with various offline advertising and promotional methods. It’s a form of marketing that we have been exposed to at one point or another and includes business cards, flyers, brochures, print ads, press release, letters and call script.

Traditional marketing puts you in front of your all your customers at a specific location (or through a specific medium), but you won’t have control of when they see it. It also limits you to have little or no interaction between the customers and the medium used for marketing. Some traditional marketing mediums are:

Once you read about each marketing medium, decide which you want to use for your business.

How do you market to and reach your customers in a personal way?

After you define your target customer types, you’ll want to spend most of your time reaching out to and developing strong relationships with those segments through tactics and messaging that will be most effective for each group. We’ve created a basic outline to help you track each customer type and how you’ll like to market your product or service. Follow these steps to create your marketing approach!

  1. Segment your customers into different customer types

    • Define and describe each customer type

    • For each of the group you’ve identified, define why your business is important and relevant to them

  2. Attract your customers

    • Define how you will reach your target customers: flyers, brochures, social media pages, blogs etc.

    • Define when you will reach your target customers: are they more active on certain day of the week, or time of day?

    • Set financial triggers to help you decide to grow or stop a specific marketing strategy. For example, if you notice that a lot of customers are coming to your website after seeing an Instagram paid ad, perhaps it will be worthwhile to increase your Instagram budget.

    • Define specific things will you do to reach and get your target customers’ attention

    • Define phrases or keywords that you use to describe the business

  3. Convince them that your business is what they need

    • Define what techniques you will use to ensure that interest in your product / service translates to a sale

    • Structure messages to inspire each customer type to buy from you

    • Look at the lists all of the problems you laid out and make sure you’re hitting your mark!

  4. Create content

    • Create what you need to promote your business and make sales (i.e. website, email marketing campaign, flyers, business cards, payment processor, etc.)

Why is it important to have a marketing plan?

Targeting your audience is important because it allows your business to precisely reach customers with specific needs and wants and to deliver a much more relevant and less one-dimensional experience. Once you define how you will target your customers, you’ll know exactly which persona(s) you are speaking to when you write any given blog post, email or sales page, (or even create a new product). And in turn, you’ll have much more success. In the long run, it will benefit your business because you will be able to use your resources more effectively and make better strategic marketing decisions.

Pro Tip

The easiest and cheapest way to begin marketing your business is through word of mouth and through social media. So create a business social media site, post content regularly and ask your friends and family to share it!