Marketing Strategy: Effective Steps to Build A Successful Marketing Plan

Today’s businesses spend billions of dollars on building and executing their marketing strategies. Annual marketing expenditure is the most significant expenditure for most companies, after employee salary. Therefore, it is paramount to ensure all the goals behind your marketing endeavors are achieved so that all your efforts and expenses will not be vain. A well-planned marketing campaign can help you do that. 

While making a marketing strategy, you will gather information about various aspects such as campaign goals, buyer personas, budget tactics, and deliverables. By bringing all this vital information together, you will be able to map out the tactics and strategies in an organized manner, which will later help you measure your strategy’s success. 

In this guide, we will focus on making a well-defined and effective marketing campaign that can derive maximum ROI. Read on to know the best tips to build a marketing plan. 

What Is A Marketing Plan? 

Marketing is a strategic roadmap to define and execute a business’ marketing maneuverings and measure its success over a stipulated time. It can include methods for different teams or focus on a single marketing channel such as offline marketing, digital marketing, etc. 

Usually, a business’ marketing plan consists of the following details – 

• A brief description of the business’s marketing and advertising goals. 
• An overview of the current marketing goals and objectives. 
• A timeline to achieve the determined marketing goals. 
• KPIs( key performance indicators) that the business will be focusing on. 
• Description of the consumer persona 

Steps for Building An Effective Marketing Strategy 

Situation Analysis

Before you start building your marketing plan, it is essential to understand the current situation of your marketing strategies. Carry out a SWOT analysis and determine what your strengths, weaknesses and opportunities, and threats are. 

Along with your business’s current analysis, you should also get an understanding of the competitive market. Think about the factors like ‘how the competitive products are performing with different consumer bases’, ‘their mission’, ‘how you can improvise competitors’ strategies’, etc. 

Finding the answers to this question will help you figure out how your competitors are targeting their consumers and how the customers are reacting to their strategies. 

Identify your buyer personas.

Almost every marketing strategy is directed towards the customers because the ultimate goal of every marketing endeavor is to convert potential customers and maintain existing ones. Therefore, making a buyer persona is essential before curating the final strategy. 

The buyer persona usually consists of your potential customers’ age, sex, income, family size, etc. Different departments like product strategy, sales, consumer relations should discuss and mutually create a buyer persona or multiple personas.  

Determine the KPIs for this mission

As mentioned above, once the marketing plan is executed, it is crucial to analyze its performance, and to do so, you will need KPIs, i.e., key performance indicators. 

KPIs are metrics that help you measure the performance of different elements of your campaign. 

These numbers will help you understand whether your marketing plans are working in the right direction or not. They should be discussed with all the department heads and business leaders. 

Analyze your tactics

After you ascertain a buyer persona and identify your KPIs, the next step is to pen down the goals based on the target audience and current situation. Following that, you will have to decide which tactics channels will fit perfectly with those goals. 

E.g., suppose your objective is to enhance your social media reach by 10% within two months. In that case, your tactics can be influencer marketing, active engagement in the stories and comments, posting regularly on different social media platforms, etc. Once you determine the tactics, it will be easier to move on to the next and last step of the process that is setting up a budget. 

Set your budget

Before you execute the plan, you need to set up a budget and evaluate how much money each tactic will cost you and whether the expense will be worth it or not. 

Continuing the above example, if you want to increase social media, “social media Ads” is one of the main tactics for that. However, if you do not have the required funds for it, you might not achieve the objectives. 

Therefore it is essential to align your budget with your tactics. Along with the necessary funds, you also need to consider the time required to apply each tactic and the assets or tools you will require to implement the marketing strategy. 

 Concluding Thoughts 

We hope that the above-mentioned basics of building marketing can help you get started on your journey. For detailed information and highly effective strategies, it is best to get in touch with a professional specializing in the sector you want to target. E.g., if your goal is to improve your digital presence, you can contact a digital marketing agency, and they will help you optimize your marketing plan.