How To Write a Marketing Plan

A marketing campaign is a series of steps designed to achieve a specific result. Think of it as the big picture that includes detailed, step-by-step guidelines for one particular goal you want to achieve. Marketing campaigns are broken into two parts:

1. Strategy - This is the planning step where you determine your target audience, your message, what marketing tactics you’ll use, and how you’ll measure results.
2. Execution - This is the action step where you follow through on your plan.

Planning Your Marketing Campaign Strategy

Planning a marketing campaign is a lot like planning a vacation. You can’t move forward with the details of booking your flight and hotel or creating a basic itinerary until you know if you’ll be in Orlando or Paris. The same is true for your marketing campaign. You can’t determine what you should say, how you should design your ads, and which publications to advertise in until you commit to working with a particular target audience and define specific campaign goals around that target audience. Here are the five essential steps to any marketing campaign:

1. Determine Your Target Audience - A target market is a group of people who have specific want or need for your product or service, have the ability to buy your product or service, and are willing to pay for your product or service. These people share common characteristics and traits that enable you to identify them.Think of it this way, if you don’t know anything about the people that buy your services, where would you find them? You’d spend lots of time, effort and money marketing to everyone when only a tiny percentage would even see your message, and of those, only a smaller portion might buy from you. You’d spend much more money trying to acquire a client than you’d make providing your services for them.
2. Set Campaign Goals - What should your marketing campaign accomplish? These should be S.M.A.R.T. (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely) goals rather than simply “getting more clients” or “making more money”.
3. Determine Your Marketing Message - Your marketing message must address the needs, concerns, and motivations of your target audience while describing how you are different from others. A good way to do this is to craft a Unique Selling Proposition (USP). Your USP answers the burning question in your prospect’s mind: “Why should I choose you?” and tells people who your target audience is, what you’ll do for them, why that’s different from what others are offering and why that solution matters to your target audience. Your USP is dependent on your target audience. You’ll never be everything to everyone - but you can be an expert for a niche group of people - and that’s what you should strive for.
4. Determine Your Action Steps - How will you reach your target audience? What will you offer them? How should they respond? When creating an action plan, think of marketing in terms of a process rather than a one-step operation. It’s rare that you will run an ad and lots of people will flock to your business or have your phone ringing off the hook.The best way to get your target audience’s attention is by educating them about solutions to their problems. You can do this by writing articles, blogging, publishing a newsletter, giving talks at local events, podcasting, writing a newspaper column, and so forth.Once you’ve created basic content, you can use this in all your traditional advertising and promotions campaigns. For instance, instead of advertising that prospects can call for a free consultation, have them visit your web site to download a free report and sign up for your free monthly newsletter.As your prospect reads more about solutions to his problem and hears from you each month because he’s subscribed to your newsletter, he becomes more familiar with you. The more he reads from you, the more he gets to know and like you - and you haven’t even met him yet! When he’s ready, he’ll call you, and at that point, he’s virtually already sold on doing business with you.
5. Determine How You’ll Measure Results - Build in ways to keep track of which inquiries come from which promotional methods. For instance, RingCentral.com makes it easy to set up unique 800 numbers. If you are running two ads, give them unique 800 numbers so you know which inquiries come from which ads. You might also tell prospects to ask for a particular person (ask for Jane in one ad or ask for Steve in another) when they call. Or if you offer a free report, change the title in each of the ads so when prospects ask you for it, you know how they found you.

Executing Your Marketing Campaign Strategy

It’s easy to get so caught up in the planning stages of your marketing campaign that you never commit to action. You’ve probably heard the phrase “paralysis by analysis,” which refers to getting so caught up with all the factors involved in creating the master plan that you never feel confident moving forward.

The truth is that no matter how long you brainstorm about every conceivable possibility that might happen, something won’t go according to plan when you finally do execute. Marketing is a learning process, not a one-time deal, and the only way to know for sure whether something will work is to test different marketing messages, different publications, different titles, and so forth.

It’s fairly scientific. Just as scientists design models and frameworks for understanding the world and then create real-world tests to see if their models hold up, you do the same thing with your marketing campaigns. You identify all the different variables in the equations (your target audience, your marketing message, your design, your title, your offer, etc.) then start testing to see which variations work the best.

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