The World economy is growing, and new businesses are popping up all around the world, but out of thousands of such B2B marketing agencies, we only know a handful, and out of that, only a few ever make it to a grand scale. So the question is, what is the secret recipe for success?
Although there are a lot of things involved in a business or a company to be successful, in this article, we will discuss an important topic called a marketing plan.
What is a Marketing Plan?
A marketing plan is a part of the overall business plan. It is a report that focuses on the strategy, ideas, and changes that a business/company will undertake for the next month, quarter or year. One of the most important and crucial aspects of the plan is the strategy. Without a solid strategy, your Marketing plan is half-done or useless.
Difference between Marketing Strategy and Marketing plan
Marketing strategy states what is required to achieve a certain marketing goal, whereas a Marketing plan is more about how one achieves it. The following example will make the concept clear, consider some product A. A company has introduced a new product A and wants it to dominate a new market.
Objective: – Reach new and old customers to adopt the new product
Marketing Strategy: – Win the market by showing customers that product A is better than what other companies are offering.
Marketing Plan: – Spread popularity through commercials, social media, and other sources to develop target a large audience.
Implementation: – Show commercials on T.V. and Instagram to target a younger audience.
How To Make a Good Marketing Plan/ what are the good components of a Good Marketing Plan?
· Executive summary
· Set Marketing goals
· User personas
· Research, all of your competitors
· Set accurate key baselines & metrics
· Actionable marketing strategy
· Set tracking or reporting guidelines
· Make it look professional
Executive Summary
An executive summary is a short introduction to a company’s goals, achievements, facts, and plans. The main aim of the executive summary is to keep the reader hooked and introduce them to the company’s basic ideas and strategy.
It shouldn’t belong, remember the aim is just to introduce the reader, so, keep it short. Do not include specific metrics and figures, talk about why the company is better than any other out there, and why people should,/is choosing this company.
Set Metric Driven Goals
Setting metric-driven market goals are difficult for so as much time as possible because this takes into consideration many aspects of the company.
Be specific about the goal; do not set vague goals such as: – Getting more followers on Instagram. Identify some of the performance matrices that one wants to improve, and by how much. Vague goals will not interest the target user as much as specific numbers do.
User Personas
A company must show what the customer will achieve by using their products and services. For example, consider an E-Learning Website, their main goal is to train students as well as professionals to achieve a higher pay job or improve themselves. So, setting up a User persona will enable the companies to the target audience to experience what they will achieve or what they can achieve after they enroll for some of their programs.
This will take a lot of research and, again, be specific; vague things are not that interesting. Share some success stories or set one up. There is a lot of information that is required that will vary from company to company, so there can be a little generalization.
Accurate Competitor Research
Most companies are operating in a free market system, so competition is inevitable. No matter how big or small your company is, learning about one competitor is essential. Customers must know them as well.
How one’s the company is better than the others out there or how is it trying to get better. It can be about safety, services, or maintenance, information like that can attract customers. Also, knowing about their strategies such as SEO, and marketing can enable your company to increase sales as well. Competition leads to innovation and progress, so keeping up with competitors and knowing about them is necessary.
Key Baselines
Planning for the future is great, but it is really difficult to plan for the future if one doesn’t know their current standings. Understanding where one’s company is really important. How much the company has grown in terms of sales or innovation is important.
All this data can enable a company to predict the future, understand future scopes, who and what works, and identify opportunities.
Customers do like this analysis of growth, and sometimes showing them is a great idea.
Actionable Marketing Strategy
Again without developing a good marketing strategy is essential, without a solid foundation, your marketing plan is pretty much useless. One’s marketing strategy should be elaborate and must specify every single detail. It should involve every single team, employee, and major staff. It should specify their goals. This is the most time-consuming step and makes sure one spends as much time as possible to make an extremely good strategy.
Break your overall strategy into smaller tasks to make it look simple and achievable. A strategy should consider the past, present, and future stand of the company, what one can achieve, and what one cannot.
Results Tracking Guidelines
This can be considered as the conclusion of the entire marketing plan. This section focuses on measuring the success/failure and overall progress of the company. It is up to one to decide the depth of this section.
It should contain at least these three main points: –
1. What to track
2. How to track
3. How often are they going to be measured
You can add many more to this list, but be sure to make it easy to understand and precise.
Make It Look professional
This one varies in all B2B companies and from one user to another user. The main thing to get out of this is to make the plan simple and attractive to look at.
Since most of the staff and customers are going to reference it, it should be easy to understand. That means the content must be such that everyone should understand irrespective of their educational background.
The language used should be in a professional manner, i.e., without error and slang.
Finally, all the above topics discussed are not everything in the book of success, but they sure are going to help one to achieve their company goals in a much more controlled manner than by chance.
