Xramile

1.Summary

If you’re aware enough of your products, have a good background knowledge of your customers and the markets you’re planning to cover, and have been in the field for about a year, it might be enough for you to create a marketing plan using a few tools or some templates to help you. A marketing plan is in 8 elements:

2.MARKETING STRATEGY:

his examines your value proposition, the route to market, and your approach to the ‘7 Ps’. A strategy is more than a plan, a plan is more like a timeline for your actions that will be defined by your strategy. When a strategy is more like the approach you’re adopting to reach your goals, and the stations you’ll pass on your route. And consider these five tips:

• Read more about marketing strategy before you create one. Or watch YouTube videos of specialists in the field
• Read about marketing plans as well to differentiate between the plan and the strategy
• Read the stories of big names in your field, and learn from their mistakes. At least watch some YouTube videos for experts, such as Neil Patel.

3.MARKETING OBJECTIVES:

These objectives should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely. Materialistic objectives like sales and profits, or moral objectives like fulfilling the company's values or having a bond with your loyal customers, both types of the objectives should be realistic and measurable. And consider those tips:

• Why would you want 1 million followers on your business social media channel? To be popular may be, but being popular is more relevant to an influencer that wants companies to pay for his video ads. When it comes to your objectives, To Sell 5000 Pieces is more relevant to your business, achievable, attainable, realistic and timely.
• Look back to your previous achievements, at the campaigns or sales you’ve run earlier, how did you achieve them? And copy the successful elements that made it work.

4.TARGET MARKET:

Include details of your target market here, as well as the results of primary and secondary market research. Prioritise them based on how realistically these markets are available to you and how easy it is to sell your products in them.At the beginning of your business, it’s irrational to seek a market that requires long procedures and complicated certifications for selling your products.

• Put together a list of 3 reasonable markets that are profitable and available for your products to fit in.
• Choose markets in which you have prior experience and are familiar with the buyer persona.

5.CUSTOMER PROFILES:

This covers the specifics of your target customers. Knowing what your customers need and things they’re looking for is halfway to your success. Let’s take an example.

What Diamond Foundry does is sell diamonds, but these are man-made diamonds. They still meet all the same requirements as a diamond that you would find on the Earth, and the human eye can't tell the difference, and even if a diamond specialist looked under a scope, they wouldn't see any difference.

But here is the difference. A Diamond Foundry can produce that diamond for pennies on the dollar versus having people go mine for them and find them in the field.

So, Diamond Foundry decided that they wanted to sell these diamonds at a truly affordable price to help people out. Can you guess what happened to their revenue sales? It tanked. Do you know why?

No one wanted affordable diamonds. They felt that if something was affordable, it wasn't going to be good. Even though that's not true, that's what their customers believed. Their business started growing, and it grew really fast, and things started to work out.

Can you guess what change they made? They increased their prices. They made more sales by charging more money for their product. In other words, if you don't know your customers, what makes them tick, what makes them buy and why; you won't grow your sales, your traffic or accomplish any of your goals.

6.COMPETITOR ANALYSIS:

This section provides a brief analysis of your competitors. Studying your competitors makes you more specific in your marketing plan, and makes you able to choose the gap your products will fill in the market, and the competitive advantage that will make customers choose you over your competitors. Consider those tips:

• It’s not about crushing your competitors, but it’s about covering the aspects they’ve failed in.
• It’s also about offering your products for a market demand that you’ve acknowledged and decided to have it as your market share.
• Here’s tools to use in your competitors analysis:
  -Ubersuggest
  -Pathmatics
  -BuiltWith
  -Buzzsumo
  -SocialBlade
  -WebArchive

7.MARKETING CHANNELS:

This covers the channels you intend to use to promote your product or service. Scialmedia is considered, but you should know that it's not the fastest, nor the most effective. Begin with your network, your own relations, people who trust you and know you already, and from them expand your promotion circle. That’s the fastest and shortest channel to promote any product or service. And here are some tips:

• Also put social media into your consideration. It has almost become the primary marketing channel for any business after COVID-19. Everyone is searching for their needs online, and especially on the social media channels.
• Don’t be distracted by a lot of marketing channels. Choose only 3 top priority channels to start with, and expand later.

8.IMPLEMENTATION:

This section examines how you will realise your marketing objectives, by taking into account metrics, budgets, timeframes, and responsibilities. It’s applying this plan with its steps that you’re taking towards achieving your objectives and walking with your plan like a boss.

Last but not least, here’s your gift, a free marketing plan template to download: https://www.thinkbusiness.ie/app/uploads/2015/12/ThinkBusiness.ie-Marketing-plan-template_v2.docx https://www.thinkbusiness.ie/app/uploads/2015/12/ThinkBusiness.ie-Marketing-plan-template_v2.docx

Sources and references: https://www.thinkbusiness.ie/articles/free-marketing-plan-template/ https://www.youtube.com/c/NeilPatel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNAE8g2tytA https://www.thinkbusiness.ie/articles/free-marketing-plan-template/ https://www.youtube.com/c/NeilPatel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNAE8g2tytA