Guide 8 min read
What is a marketing plan?
A marketing plan is an actionable outline of the marketing activity you will undertake in the short to medium term. Before you get stuck-in to running some marketing campaigns, plan out what exactly you will be doing, what you need to achieve, and how you are going to measure success.
If you have staff or freelancers who will be running some or all of your marketing, your marketing plan is a great way to keep everyone on the same page.
What to include in your marketing plan
1. Business overview
In this section clearly explain what your business does, what your business wants to achieve, and your current position.
Mission statement
Start with your mission statement and proposition. This helps you keep all of your activity on track and gives a firm sense of who you are and why you do what you do.
Your mission statement is an easy to understand sentence explaining what your business does, and its overarching purpose or ‘mission’.
For example if you have launched a new catering business, your mission statement could be:
● “We are the sustainable catering company making progressive vegan food everyone’s first choice”
Your proposition gives a little more details and should read like:
● To [target audience], our product/service is the [category] that provides [key benefits] because [reasons to believe].
For example:
● “To event venues and party planners in the south of Scotland, our service is the premier vegan catering service that provides fine-dining, seasonal, vegan food made by our award-winning chef from produce grown in our regenerative farm”.
Overarching business objectives
Make a note of your overarching business goals to ensure all marketing objectives help your business reach this goal.
For example, for the catering company above, one of the business goals could be:
● To be the preferred vegan catering choice for all luxury venues in Southern Scotland, serving 25 venues by the end of next year.
Where are we now?
Next, add an overview of your SWOT analysis. A SWOT analysis allows you to carry out a structured assessment of your business to identify what your business does well, what you need to improve, how to maximise coming opportunities, and defend against the challenges that your business faces.
In a SWOT analysis, look at all of the internal and external factors that are impacting or could impact your business, including your own products and practices, your competitors’ activity, customer trends, your marketplace, legislative changes, supply chain, etc.
Internal factors
● Strengths - What is your business best at? What do you do better than competitors? What works well just now? What do you get good feedback on? etc
e.g. our food is very good and wins awards. We are the biggest vegan caterer in the area.
● Weaknesses - What is holding your business back? What do you need to do better? What do your competitors do better than you? Are there any inefficiencies?
e.g. dependency on seasonal events, we struggle for space during peak season
External factors
● Opportunities - Are there any gaps in the market you could fill? Are there any upcoming changes that will benefit you? Do your competitors have any shortcomings that you could maximise on?
e.g. there are new events being held in the area with a large number of tourists expected. A new large wedding venue has opened in the area.
● Threats - Are there any new products or competitors entering the market? Are consumer trends changing? What is stopping us from growing? Are there any legislative changes coming up? Are costs in the supply chain changing?
e.g. Some people have negative opinions about vegan food which can put customers off. The number of people looking for a vegan caterer in the area is limited.
● Strengths vs opportunities: Consider how you can use your strengths to maximise your opportunities.
E.g. We could propose a deal with the new venue to be preferred caterers for both large and small events.
● Strengths vs threats: Consider how you can use your strengths to reduce the threats.
E.g. lead on quality and awards in messaging to persuade more potential customers, offer taste tests at fairs, local venues and events.
● Weaknesses vs opportunities: Consider how you can reduce your weaknesses to take advantage of opportunities
E.g. hire a portable food van to increase space and cater outside events. Use van to sell food year round.
● Weaknesses vs threats: Consider how you can minimise weaknesses and avoid threats.
E.g. Increase awareness and improve opinion by catering more local, small events and getting more people to try the food. Create a ‘traditional favourites’ menu, with vegan versions of popular traditional dishes.
Brand Overview
Add a summary of your brand strategy. Your brand is the unique identity of your business that sets it apart from your competitors and makes you recognisable to your customers. It’s important that your brand is consistently represented across all of your marketing activity, from your website and social activity, ads and marketing materials and all customer contact.
Include a descriptor of your brand position, list your brand values, and define your tone of voice.
2. Your marketing objectives
You must set firm objectives for your marketing activities to keep them on track, and listing these is a key part of your marketing plan. They will drive all of your marketing activity, so it’s imperative that you set clear goals to keep activity focused as you move forward.
Your marketing purpose
Note down your purpose - i.e. outlining WHY are you doing this marketing?
Write down need statements, relating to the specific challenges you face, that start “we need to use marketing to….”. For example:
“We need to use marketing to….”
● drive immediate sales in the short term
● drive more feet through the door of our physical premises
● raise awareness of our business, service or product
● find and generate new leads from potential customers.
S.M.A.R.T
Next, you must set actionable objectives for your marketing campaign. To be focused and achievable, these objectives must be S.M.A.R.T (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant and Time-driven).
“To drive 3000 visitors per month to our ecommerce shop and achieve 10% enquiry rate, and achieve 500 online sales within the next 6 months”.
For more details on SMART goals see our article on setting objectives.
3. Audience overview & key messaging
To be effective, all of your marketing activity must be targeted to your potential customers. Before you begin, you must understand who your audience are and what they want, so you can select the most effective marketing channels and present them with the most persuasive messaging.
The best way to do this is to segment your audience into similar groupings (e.g. for our catering example this could be party planners, engaged couples in Scotland, venue event managers, etc) and then create some audience personas (also known as ‘pen portraits’) for each.
Include at least one audience persona for each audience segment, in your marketing plan.
Audience personas
Audience personas represent a group of your ideal customers and provide detailed information about these fictional customers.
They should include detailed information about your customers including:
● who they are
● how they interact with media
● what they want from you
● what you have that they want
● what messaging you should use that will persuade them (“reasons to believe”).
For more information on personas see our guide to Advertising.
Goals and messaging by segment
Create a table to map out all of this information, to help plan what goals you want to achieve from each segment, which mediums you’ll use, and what messaging you need to use in your marketing communications with them.
Your table should include:
● segment name (e.g. engaged couples)
● descriptor / overview of segment (e.g. couples getting married in South Scotland in the next 2 years)
● what they want from you (e.g. ‘delicious, modern vegan food, served capably’)
● your goals from them (e.g. booking enquiries and wedding contracts)
● key channels and platforms you will reach them on (e.g. wedding fairs, wedding magazines, venue staff, Google search, social ads, display ads on wedding related websites).
● persuasive messaging (e.g. award winning food, locally grown, bespoke menu creation, professional service).
4. Competitor activity
There are always learnings from analysing your competitors' offering and marketing activity and looking at them through the eyes of the personas you have created.
Check all of their key platforms and advertising, such as:
● website and social media platforms
● search engine listings, search ads, Google Business Profile listing, etc
● review sites and customer reviews
● email marketing
● press coverage or ads
● local/tv/radio or any other forms of advertising.
● What are they doing well? (E.g. they have great listings on Google as they have a lot of well optimised onsite content.)
● What isn’t working so well? (E.g. their Facebook and Instagram pages are unengaging.)
● What channels are they using to promote their business? (E.g. SEO, PPC, Social, Press ads, event stands.)
● How could this insight help you? (E.g. create a strong social media presence, create informative onsite content, etc.)
Then look at how you compare, whether that’s your website, your social platforms, any marketing activity you’ve run in the past, etc. Is there anything you can take inspiration from? Do you need to update your website? Are they using any channels you didn’t expect?
Assessing your competitors’ activity can give you some great learnings and ideas to take forward, but remember it’s for insight only. Don’t obsess over what they do differently, and never just copy a competitor’s approach or content.
5. Your marketing mix
Make a note of your marketing mix - also known as your 7 P’s: Product, Place, Price, Promotion, People, Processes and Physical Evidence.
● Product - What products will you be promoting to your segments? What does your product offer that your customers value? What are the features and benefits? Do you need to change your product to meet customer needs?
● Pricing - How will you be pricing your product or service? Will you be coming in higher or lower than your competitors, and why? Will you have different pricing strategies for different groups, i.e. for B2B vs B2C?
● Place - How and where do you sell? Do you use different sales channels? Where can people buy your product or service? How will it be delivered to them?
● Promotion - What channels and messaging will you use to target your audience? (More on this below).
● People - Who will be working on your marketing? Do they have the correct skills? Do they know the details of your plan?
● Processes - What formal procedures do you have in place to ensure consistent service? Do you have business resilience and contingency plans?
● Physical evidence - Is the physical appearance of your products and/or premises on brand? Are all physical customer touchpoints on brand?
Create a large table and make note of each, with any associated actions highlighted and assigned.
6. Marketing activity and channels
This section is the nuts and bolts of your marketing plan. It’s in this section that you’ll collate all of your previous work and plot the exact marketing activity you will be carrying out. You will need to determine which channels you will be active on and what messaging you will be using.
Channels
Map out the key marketing channels you will be using, such as social ads, press ads, search engine listings, industry events, etc.
For more information on which channels best suit your business needs, read the following articles:
● Guide on digital marketing channels
Channel plan
Next, plan out which channels you’re going to use to attract each segment - detailing the messaging you will use and any budget or resourcing requirements.
Create a table with the column titles:
Segment | Goal | Channel | Plan | Messaging | Budget | Resources | KPI | Owner.
You will use this table to plan all of the marketing channels and activity you’ll be carrying out.
● Segment - Which audience segments will we be targeting with this activity?
● Goal - What do we want to achieve from each segment? What do we want them to do? How does this support the marketing objectives?
● Channel - Which channels will we be using to target this segment? (Create a row for each, within each segment.)
● Outline channel strategy - What exactly will we be doing on this channel? How will we be using it? Give details.
● Messaging - What key persuasive messaging will we be sharing on this channel? Will we be running any promotions or offers?
● Budget - What is the budget available for this channel?
● Resources - What resources do we need for this channel? Any additional tools to run or track the marketing activity? Any marketing materials, staff training, freelancer support, specific tech, etc?
● KPI - What exactly do we need to achieve? Which specific metrics will we use to measure success in this channel? How does it map to our marketing objectives? (E.g. for PPC you may track clicks, online form completion, online purchases, ROI, etc, whereas for press ads you may track readership, calls, voucher use, footfall, etc).
● Owner - Who is responsible for this channel? Who will be carrying out the activity?
7. Measurement and evaluation
So far you have included your SMART objectives for your marketing activity, and your KPIs against each channel. It's important that you have KPIs set against each channel so you can evaluate the performance of that channel to determine if your strategy is working, or whether it needs to be tweaked or stopped. But remember your channel goals and KPIs must support your main marketing objectives.
Now it's time to pull all of this together in a measurement spreadsheet to plot some KPIs against your key marketing objectives, and list out all of your KPIs for each channel.
You must factor in time to measure and review each channel regularly to track your spend and results, and also to track your progress against your key marketing objectives. Plotting your ROI on your advertising spend (or Return On Advertising Spend) is a key metric.
Each channel will have different metrics and tracking systems, for example digital channels will produce a lot of data that can be tracked within analytics platforms such as Simple Analytics or Google Analytics on your website, Google Ads, your social platforms for page or ad statistics, your email marketing software, etc.
However non-digital channels, such as press ads, will be slightly trickier to track, and may require the use of specific voucher codes, or tracked phone numbers. It's useful to plan out how you will measure success before you begin, so then you will have a clear idea of how to measure if your marketing activity is successful.
You can also use online tools such as Looker Studio to create actionable dashboards.
Remember, you must ensure that all of your data collection and analysis, and the programs and methods you use for this, adhere to all relevant legislation, including GDPR.
8. Plan implementation
Once you plan out exactly what you need, and who is doing what, you can get started with your marketing campaigns.
Task list
In this section you need to list all of the tasks that need to be done to set up and manage each channel in order, detailing who will be involved and when it should be completed by.
Resources
You also need to plan out what resources you need across your whole marketing activity. For example, you might need freelancers such as designers or ad agencies, or additional staff to support your marketing, you might need to print materials such as brochures or flyers, etc.
Tech
Also include any tech you will need to support your marketing, such as website creation and hosting, fees for third party selling platforms, CRM tools, email marketing platforms, etc.
Budget
Keep a detailed spreadsheet of your total marketing budget, then break it down by the different channels and activities you will be running, including your advertising spend, costs associated with each activity, fees, etc. Also include a breakdown of costs for the additional resources and tech you need. Keep this spreadsheet updated regularly, and check against your Return on Advertising Spend.