Elements of a Marketing Plan
Companies should be using a marketing plan to contain one or more of their marketing strategies.
Marketing plans are simply a framework for where all of the marketing strategies will be created, and are used to help companies connect each of the strategies they’re going to be using back to the overall goals that a business has.
On the other hand, marketing strategies are used to describe how a company is planning to accomplish a specific goal inside of its marketing campaign. Companies need to have a marketing plan for their campaigns so they can reach their goals, engage with the target audience, and generate sales.
Mission
The first step that companies need to take when creating a marketing plan is to state the marketing mission for that campaign.
The mission should be specific to the campaign, but it should also be an element of the overall mission statement of the business.
When creating a marketing mission companies should be specific but also leave enough space available to elaborate on how they plan to acquire new leads and accomplish their marketing or business goals.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Every great marketing plan should detail how the company is planning to track the performance of the campaign.
To do that companies need to determine their key performance indicators (KPIs), which are simply the individual metrics that help companies measure the various elements of the performance of a marketing campaign.
These KPIs help companies establish any short-term goals for their campaigns, as well as highlight the progress of the campaign to the rest of the company.
Buyer Personas
Buyer personas are a description of the ideal customers of a business that the business is planning to target.
Descriptions for a buyer persona should include demographic and psychographic information, interests, values, and pain points of the target audience.
Every buyer persona that a company creates needs to reflect directly on the current as well as potential customers of a business.
Content Strategies and Initiatives
Inside the content strategies and initiatives, companies need to detail all of the main points of their content and marketing strategies.
Since companies have a vast amount of channels and types of content that they can utilize these days, they need to choose carefully and explain in detail how they plan on using the channels and the content in this segment of the marketing plan.
The content strategy needs to include the types of content that a company is planning on creating, as well as the quantity of content, and the frequency of publishing.
Companies should also include the channels on which the content will be distributed, and any paid efforts that will be utilized on those channels alongside the content marketing efforts.
Finally, the content strategy should include the key performance indicators and goals that are going to be used to track each type of content.
Companies can include different types of traffic such as social media, website, organic, referral, and email traffic to keep track of them, and they can also include which pages specifically the company wants to drive all that traffic to.
Co-CEO at 5W Public Relations, Dara Busch oversees 5W’s Consumer PR Practice, which includes Travel & Entertainment, Apparel & Accessories, Non-Profits, Home & Housewares, Health & Wellness, Mom & Baby, Beauty & Grooming, and Consumer Packaged Goods.