Imagine getting dropped on Mars and needing to navigate your way around the planet. Pulling out your map of Earth wouldn't help, would it? You wouldn't expect to bump into the Atlantic Ocean or traverse the same landscapes, so what use is the map?
You need to create a new map to navigate the brand-new world you find yourself in. The old maps show you how it's done, but it's up to you to chart a new course. The same could be said for the latest marketing era that's dawned.
With the rise of Generative AI and the demise of third-party cookies, the marketing landscape is evolving. Savvy marketers need marketing plans—our maps—to move forward in this new era. So whether this is your first-ever marketing plan, or your first one in the new world, read on for tips on how to create a marketing plan.
What is a Marketing Plan, and Why Do You Need One?
Like a map, a marketing plan identifies where you are and where you want to go. More specifically, it's a guide for how all your marketing efforts will advance your company's goals in the year ahead. There can be quarterly marketing plans, new product marketing plans, or relaunch marketing plans, but we'll focus on an annual marketing plan for our purposes.
Your marketing plan must include the relevant information to answer a deceptively simple question: how will your team use marketing to achieve the company's goals?
In developing an answer, you'll need to answer the following smaller questions:
At first, these questions may seem daunting, especially if you're a small business owner with a limited team and even less time. Recent research shows that 50% of small businesses don't have marketing plans.
But answering these questions and creating a marketing plan will put your business ahead of competitors, maximize your marketing budget, and lead you toward revenue growth. Taking the time now to plan will pay dividends down the road. Ready to get started?
Size Up the Competition
Before selecting your marketing channels and tailoring a message to reach your ideal customers, you need a clear picture of your industry. Understanding what the key players in your industry are up to gives you a better footing to stand on when making your plan.
Think of it this way. If you didn't analyze your competition, you might make the same mistakes they did a year before. Would you want to follow their lead if your competitors rolled out a brand new email campaign and saw engagement decline and revenue dip?
Organizing this research into a SWOT analysis gives you and other decision-makers easy access to critical information to inform marketing decisions for the year ahead. Dig into your competitors' marketing efforts; what are some strengths that you notice or weaknesses (like that failed email campaign)? Are there new opportunities opening up in the industry? Have regulations, new ventures, or declining consumer interest threatened your business?
Answering these questions maps out where the mountains, valleys, and oceans are in your field and puts you in a better position to pack the gear you'll need to traverse these obstacles. Armed with this information, you can set realistic goals for the plan to achieve.
Setting Great Goals
A plan is pointless if it doesn't include worthwhile goals. Why consult a map if you have no destination in mind?
Use the research you compiled from the first step to understand the possibilities. If a competitor achieved a particular goal, like a 5% increase in revenue, consider why that happened and how you stack up. Are they a bigger company starting with more market share? Or are they a brand-new competitor with lots of buzz?
Considering those reasons will help you to develop SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound) goals. You may want to increase revenue as a goal, but it isn't ready for your marketing plan unless it's specific. A 15% increase in revenue in the next year is SMART. It's also what a quarter of marketers have as their goal in the year ahead.
Having SMART goals clearly outlined in your plan makes it easier to identify the next step: Key Performance Indicators.
Use Key Performance Indicators to Track Success
Once you've developed some SMART goals worth achieving in the year ahead, you need a way to measure success. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the metrics you can use to quickly determine whether the actions you've outlined in your marketing plan are working.
Think of your KPIs like your compass. They let you know whether you're getting closer to achieving your goals or need to change course. Let's stick to increasing revenue in the year ahead: what are some smaller goals that let you know you're on your way to reaching that goal?
If you want more revenue, you need more sales. More sales need more leads. If you have more leads, you need more conversions. Each "need" is a KPI to track as the year progresses.
Determining how frequently you'll track these metrics is just as important as identifying these KPIs in the first place. It may make sense to track each quarter for an annual goal, but that might not leave you without enough time to pivot toward the end of the year. Consider when to track carefully, then.
Get to Know Your Customers
If you don't already know who your customers are, now's the time to learn. You can't create a marketing plan without thoroughly understanding who the plan is intended to reach. Who are your efforts geared towards, and why should they care about your business?
Even if you're a brand new business, you can gather information on your potential and ideal customers. You want to know the basic demographic information (age, sex, gender, race, ethnicity, location) and more in-depth information like their occupation, income, or life stage. You can find this information through online data, surveys, competitors, interviews, or focus groups.
Once you've compiled a hefty backlog of information about your ideal customers, you can create composite customer personas that we'll focus on in the later portions of your marketing plan. These personas represent broad swaths of your potential customer population and present an essential understanding of why each persona chooses (or doesn't yet choose) your brand. Without personas, you can't personalize your marketing efforts, which can reduce your marketing budget by as much as 20%
Select the Channels Best Positioned for Reach
Once you've developed a handful of customer personas, you can determine the best marketing channels to reach them. Selecting channels is a critical component of your overall marketing strategy—it's what many consider the point of a marketing plan in the first place.
You want to select marketing channels that your customers use regularly. Otherwise, no matter how perfectly crafted it is, they won't see your message. Thankfully, a wealth of data is available to help guide you towards channels that make sense.
For example, if one of your customer personas is an educated white male over 65, YouTube is one of the places you're most likely to meet him. Likewise, placing content for them on Facebook wouldn't make sense if you're looking to reach a younger persona because just 33% of teenagers report using the platform.
While the inclination may be there to opt for digital channels first, that's not the end all be all. Like CMG's growth marketing manager Quest Garigliano says, "I think marketers and business owners put all their eggs into the digital basket, while traditional advertising methods took a back seat. In 2024, we see an opposite trend…marketers are looking for additional ways to stand out in their market. All this to say…never take the foot off the gas when it comes to traditional advertising like broadcast TV and radio."
Selecting a mix of digital and traditional marketing channels is the path forward, especially with the decline of third-party cookies. Including QR codes in TV ads is a textbook case of how to combine traditional and digital marketing channels. It's not just good practice. It can boost revenue by as much as 3% without requiring more marketing spending.
Without the data that third-party cookies provide, a marketing plan should incorporate opportunities for gathering first-party data. Unsurprisingly, inbound marketing like Search Engine Optimization/Blogs and Email Marketing are some of the highest return on investment channels this year.
Choosing which channels you'll use and for which personas puts you in the best position to craft marketing messages that work.
Messaging that Moves People
You've done your deep research, have goals in mind with the metrics to track progress, and identified the channels most likely to reach your personas. Now, the creative work comes in:
"Messaging. It's easy to focus on things like calls to action and USPs, but at the end of the day, it's about just being a human being. I think it's important as marketers to ask ourselves, 'Would this messaging resonate with me as a consumer?'" says Garigliano.
Your marketing plan must include the messaging you'll use to drive your potential customers to take action. Depending on how different your customer personas are, you may need as many messages. As Garigliano says, you want to create compelling messages that resonate with you as a consumer. If you aren't like any of the customer personas you identified, find people who are, and test out potential messages to find the ones that work.
To help get started, think about your competitors and try to answer the question of why a persona should choose you over them. What values does your company share with that persona, or how do you solve a particular problem of theirs better than anyone else? Let these questions guide your messaging brainstorm.
Create an Executive Summary For Rapid Deployment
At this point, your marketing plan is almost complete. The only remaining step is identifying who will need to see the plan and what they need to know if they only have five minutes with your plan. With that in mind, you can create an executive summary highlighting your marketing plan's most important insights.
This isn't a space for many numbers and shouldn't take up more than half a page. It should be a quick summary of the essentials. Your executive summary should include the goals, some information on successes and failures of the past year, the competition, and the high-level metrics you intend to track. This will give other decision-makers a reason to keep reading or enough information to know what's expected of them.
Feeling Stuck? Bring In the Experts
The marketing landscape has changed, and it will continue to do so. Data privacy, generative AI, and looming external factors put enormous pressure on marketers and business owners tasked with marketing efforts.
Putting together a helpful marketing plan in this new era can be impossible. Whether you've been creating marketing plans your entire career or realized you desperately need one in this new ecosystem, you don't need to go it alone. Power your marketing plan with CMG Local Solutions' record of success.
For Garigliano, what separates CMG, "is that we have the power of traditional advertising methods AND cutting-edge digital marketing strategies to offer our clients. However, our ability to look at your business holistically makes the biggest difference… Our team learns your business inside and out before we start offering quick fixes. "
Contact us today for help writing a marketing plan to achieve your goals in the year ahead.
