Reference no: EM133033374

Marketing Plan

A marketing plan is your road map for finding and keeping customers. By planning your marketing step by step, you give your company the best chance of success in today's competitive marketplace. From establishing a strong brand to understanding your ideal customer to creating a compelling buying experience, the time you put into planning now will pay off many times over in the months and years to come.

Part 1 Define your brand

What is your vision statement?
This is typically two or three simple sentences that explain what you want to achieve, your core values and how your brand reflects them.
What is your value proposition?
What value does your organization provide to customers that no one else can?
What is your positioning statement?
How do you want to be perceived in the marketplace?

Part 2 Identify your customers

Create three personas or imaginary individuals. They should correspond to the most important customer segments you want to attract. For example, a coffee shop near a university might be going after students, parents of young children and the local business crowd.
Your personas will help you visualize the customers you are targeting and develop brand messages and marketing tactics that will resonate with them.

What is their demographic profile?
Age, sex, profession, income, social status, education, etc.
What are their values, attitudes, interests, needs and lifestyle choices?
What is important to them?
How do they like
to do business?
Online or face-to-face?
How much do
they spend?
What kind of products
do they buy?
What do they want
in terms of features, functionality and cost?
Where are they located?
Why would this person buy your product or service

Part 3 Understand your competitors

You must understand what your competitors are doing and how their products or services stack up against yours. Analyze your competitors' websites, product documents, brochures and catalogues. Talk to their customers about their needs. And don't overlook the opportunity to learn more by talking directly to the competition.

Where are they located?
How long have they been in business?
What are their target markets?
What are their unique selling points, competitive differentiators?
What are their strengths, weaknesses?

Part 4 Analyze your business

Now it's time to take a hard look at your own business. You do this with a classic SWOT analysis-defining your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.
Strengths
What characteristics does your business possess that give it an advantage over others?
Weaknesses
What places your business as a disadvantage versus others? Address these weaknesses immediately.
Opportunities
What conditions or situations in the marketplace or in your competitors' offerings could you exploit to your advantage?
Threats
What conditions or situations in the marketplace, or activities by your competition, could work against you?

Part 5 Define your difference

You're ready to craft a unique selling point (USP), a description of what makes you distinct in the marketplace.

What is your USP?

What is your elevator pitch?
Further reading:Your elevator pitch: How to present your business in 60 seconds

Succinctly explain who you are and what you bring to the market that no one else does.

Part 6 Map your customer's journey

Your goal is to deliver the right messages, to the right people, at the right time. It's essential to communicate your brand consistently throughout your customer's entire journey with you-from discovery to purchase to after-purchase support and repeat business.

Part 7 Create your action plan

You've done the hard work of defining your business and its market. Now it's time to bring it all together by planning the marketing tactics you will use to attract and keep customers. Describe how you will promote your product or service, remembering that not every tactic makes sense for every business. Consider what will resonate with those customer personas you completed in Part 2, given your budget and human resources.

What is your marketing budget?
How much can you afford to spend this year?
Who is on your marketing team?

Who is responsible for what?

What is your pricing strategy?

How will you distribute your goods or services?

How will you create or update your website?
DESIGN(Further reading:5 steps to launching your new website)
How will you get a modern, attractive, effective website?
CONTENT (Further reading:10 tips for attracting customers with great online content)
What kind of content will you produce? Who will be responsible for regularly producing and managing it?
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION(Further reading:SEO basics for entrepreneurs)
How will you optimize your site so your content ranks high on search engine results?
What is your social media strategy?
Further reading:7 ways to turn social media fans into customersand ourfree social media eBook
What platforms make sense for your business? Who will plan and manage your communities and respond to questions?
What is your email strategy?
Further reading:Using e-newsletter to achieve marketing success: 5 tips
What will be your email marketing strategy (keeping in mind Canada's anti-spam law)
What is your advertising strategy?
PAY-PER-CLICK(Further reading:Learn to win with pay-per-click advertising)

PRINT/TV/RADIO(Further reading:How to avoid pitfalls in advertising your business)

What is your public relations strategy?
Further reading:7 low-cost marketing strategies to implement now
Public relations includes efforts to woo editors or journalists to cover your business, and also having an action plan to protect your brand in a crisis scenario.
What is your after-the-sale strategy?
Further reading:6 easy steps to create a customer loyalty program
How will you ensure customers remain loyal and happy for the long-term?

Part 8 Monitoring, measuring and improving

To measure the return on investment from your marketing plan, you must track the effectiveness of your activities. Generally, you do this by monitoring customer conversion metrics (e.g., sales, quote requests, e-newsletter sign-ups, eBook downloads, etc.) and by gauging the impact of specific tactics and campaigns. If something is not working, you must adjust to improve.

How will you measure the effectiveness of your marketing activities?

How will you adjust to improve?

Attachment:- Marketing_plan_template.rar