Creating an effective marketing strategy starts with having a thorough marketing plan! As a business owner, you’re always focused on growing your business by achieving your goals.
A marketing plan is one of the best ways to stay on track and really understand actions you need to take at various stages of the customer journey. The idea of creating a marketing plan may sound a little overwhelming, especially if marketing isn’t really your wheelhouse. But it’s easier than you think—and so worth it to create.
What Is A Marketing Plan?
Your marketing plan is going to guide all of the strategy and execution for your marketing as a whole.
More importantly, an effective marketing plan focuses on:
- Your target audience
- What you offer and how it serves your audience
- Your core mission
- Business values and your overall vision
- Messaging and strategy for your marketing
- Objectives for your marketing (aligned with your goals)
When you’re hoping to implement an effective marketing strategy, you need a blueprint—and that’s what your marketing plan is here for! It’s a practical, hands-on document that will keep you focused, on track, prepared, and strategic in your marketing throughout the year.
Why Is Having An Effective Marketing Plan So Important?
In your business, you have a strategy and you hope to create results. Your marketing plan bridges the divide between those two steps by outlining everything that needs to be done (and why and how to do it).
An effective marketing plan focuses on helping you reach your audience in the right way (and at the right time)!
Instead of feeling like you’re throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks, your marketing will have an overarching, targeted strategy that’s aligned with your audience, messaging, and goals. This helps create amazing results in your business!
Plus, you’ll be so much more motivated to be consistent with your marketing when you know that it contributes to a bigger picture. It’s easy to become bogged down with all things marketing on a day-to-day basis, but an effective marketing plan helps you understand how everything slots into your business as a whole.
Want some more details? Here are four essential reasons to create a marketing plan for your business.
You’ll Know What To Focus On
With a to-do list that feels a million miles long, business owners are balancing a LOT. That’s why being able to focus on what matters (and have a clear-cut plan in place) is essential.
A really effective marketing strategy planned out ahead of time gives you a blueprint for execution throughout the year. Since everything is already planned out and aligned with your bigger vision, it’s easy to execute consistently and focus on what works best and matters most.
Many entrepreneurs tend to get overwhelmed by all of the options available for marketing, and that overwhelm can lead us to feel paralyzed. Your marketing plan will keep your eyes on the prize so that you can stay consistent and move forward.
Everything you’re working on is 100% aligned with the direction you want your business to go. And that’s so motivating!
Related: Prioritizing Your Marketing (and life)!
You Get To Plan More Efficiently
Being able to stay focused means you can plan your time more efficiently. You’ll know exactly what needs to happen and when which makes it easy to execute.
But an effective marketing plan also lets you delegate successfully! Since you know what has to happen, you can create SOPs and make sure that everything is getting done, even if you aren’t handling the execution yourself.
You’ll be able to budget appropriately and plan out your month, day, and week according to plan.
An Effective Marketing Plan Makes Consistency So Much Easier
When you’re able to plan ahead like this, it makes it so much easier to be consistent! Showing up consistently is the key to effective marketing, and having a plan in place makes consistent execution a breeze.
If your business doesn’t have a marketing plan, you’re probably a little inconsistent or all over the map when it comes to marketing. But for better results, you need to be consistent!
Plus, your marketing plan keeps you focused on what works best for your business and resonates most with your target audience. You’ll feel less stressed when you know that everything is strategic and for a reason. A marketing plan lets you be so much more proactive than reactive.
You’ll Feel More Clarity and Know What To Do Next
The businesses in this world that are the MOST successful have a plan. They know where they need to show up, what they need to say, who they’re speaking to, and why they’re even doing this.
That’s what a marketing plan is for! Effective marketing starts with clarity, and a plan gives you the step-by-step of what to do next and why. It’s strategic, clear, and often measurable, which really helps you implement what’s most important.
And as you start delegating to a team or outsourcing, don’t underestimate the power of that clarity! You’ll know where to focus your time, money, and energy in an instant.
3 Things to Include in An Effective Marketing Plan to Ensure Success
Now that you know why it’s important to create a marketing plan, let’s talk about how to do it. There are three main components that every effective marketing plan should include: awareness, consideration, and conversion.
Let’s explore each of these layers a little deeper, and then cover some bonus tips to help you create the most effective marketing plan possible.
Each of these sections corresponds with a stage of your audience’s customer journey, and this helps you target your marketing accordingly.
Related: Focusing on the Right Things (in Your Marketing)
1. Awareness
The first stage is awareness. In this stage, your marketing has to be focused on prospective customers who aren’t familiar with your business yet.
You’ll want to plan out what you’re going to do to reach new prospects and where you’re going to find those prospective customers or clients. This should include strategies like organic SEO marketing, blogging, and more.
2. Consideration
Next comes the consideration stage. What are you going to do in order to entice your prospects to consider your offer?
This is the section of your marketing plan where you’ll educate and engage your existing audience. It’s all about nurturing relationships with trust, value, and leadership!
Think about what information a prospect would need to know in order to really consider your offer. Then, strategize the most compelling ways to deliver that information to your target audience. Email marketing and social really come into play here.
3. Conversion
The final stage is conversion. This is where your prospects convert by making a purchase.
Think about where you can make this happen. What CTAs (calls-to-action) will prompt your prospects to take action and become clients?
Consider the timeline, too. How long will it take for someone to move through your sales funnel and go from prospect to client? Webinars, demos, and more are all important strategies at this stage.
Bonus Tips To Help You Create An Effective Marketing Plan
Once you’ve covered your awareness, consideration, and conversion stages, you have the foundation of an effective marketing strategy. But how do you take things a step further?
Those three stages and the activities associated with them should happen throughout the year. They’ll be on a constant loop as people enter and move through your sales funnel. These buckets will help you guide the planning you do for marketing, think about campaigns and tactics for each stage, and tie everything back to your target audience effectively.
Your effective marketing strategy can also include a retention and referral stage. At this point, your leads have become clients…and it’s time to focus on marketing that nurtures those relationships and prompts repeat purchases and referrals. Email marketing works amazingly for this!
An effective marketing strategy really needs to focus on your audience and the journey that they move through. When you reach the right people in the right way at just the right time, you’re going to experience amazing results!
Ready to take your marketing to the next level with a strategic plan? I’m here to support you! Get in touch and let’s create an effective marketing plan for your business (and focus on execution) together.
