Posted by Everyone knows that they need a market plan to grow their business, but very few Enterprises understand its importance. A marketing plan will help you grow your business more consistently by clearly giving facts and objectives on how to win and keep customers. Starting every year with a marketing plan is one way of ensuring that you are investing your marketing resources properly. With a good marketing plan, one can easily define their goals, identify their target market, know the right product for the market and understand the competition. The easiest way to capture and communicate everything that you need about the market is by using a marketing template. Below are the steps to creating a marketing template.
Step 1: Determine how you will create the Template.
Nowadays, there are different ways of keeping your marketing efforts and metrics organised. We are in the digital era, and everything has moved from the traditional paperwork filing to the use of computers. You can decide to create your readable marketing templates using word or excel depending on its contents. Marketing templates in excel are easier to organise, especially when it involves a lot of table works and calculations. No matter the application you use, there are applications that you can use to convert documents like when you use c# to convert xlsx file to CSV.
Step 2: Define your business.
In this first step, you define your company, and the products or services offered then describe how you differ from your competition. This is called station analysis, and it is an overview of your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Strengths and weaknesses are internal factors for opportunities and threats are outside factors.
All these factors help in analysing your product features and determining how they distinguish it from other products in the market. You should also decide the type of customer who is most likely to purchase the product depending on your unique selling elements such as quality and lower pricing.
Step 3: Define your target audience
The target audience is described in terms of age, sex, and geographic location. Business-to-business marketers can define their prospects based on the business sizes, type of business and their location.
Ask yourself questions like what is the age bracket of my customers? How often do they purchase? What to do they value? Determining your target audience will guide you in planning feature Media and public relations campaigns.
Step 4: List your marketing goals
This step is about what you want to achieve with your marketing plan. The goals you choose should be smart and should also be aligned with the overall goals of the business. Smart goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound.
- Specific: It is easier to achieve a specific goal because everything is given into details. Increasing the customer base is not a specific group because it does not provide a clear illustration, but growing the customer base from 20000 to fifty thousand is clearly explains your goal.
- Measurable: a measurable goal must have a metric with a target that indicates success. For example, increasing profit by 5%.
- Achievable: An achievable goal is challenging but realistic. You cannot predict a 20% growth when the company only has a capacity or 5%.
- Relevant: A relevant goal is within the functionality of the business. For example, you cannot choose a marketing platform that will not work for the company.
- Time-bound: a time-bound goal has a date when it should be achieved. For example, increase profits by 5% in the next financial year. There are short term goals and longtime goals depending on the time given. Short-term goals are goals attainable within a period of weeks to a year. Long term goals, on the other hand, is higher than a short-term goal and take years to achieve.
This is a guest post by Patrick Watt. Patrick Watt is a content writer, writing in several areas, primarily in business growth, value creation, M&A, and finance. Other interests also include content marketing and self-development. Say hi to Patrick on Twitter @patrickwattpat
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