Today’s digital markets are more competitive than ever. Gone are those days when anyone who had a website was going to have high user traffic, now the competition is much greater and to stand out among such a mass of gray, it is important to wear some color.
In that sense, have a social media plan that not only differentiates you from the competition, but also allows you to draw a roadmap with clear objectives, it is of extreme value.
That is why today we are going to teach you everything you need to know about what a marketing plan is and what are the most important aspects that you should take into account when developing one.
What is a marketing plan?
In essence, to know What is a marketing plan It is important to make a brand gain visibility in its respective market. In today’s marketing, visibility is given much more importance in digital media, but you should never do without traditional ones.
The marketing plan of a company is usually reflected in a document in which important aspects are exposed such as:
- Market studies of the sector.
- The objectives to be achieved.
- The strategies.
- Planning to execute the plan.
Each of these points contain a large amount of information that goes from the analyzes to the competitors, the conversion rate of the past strategies or the calendar of publications and advertising campaigns. All of this essentially makes up the marketing plan of any company that considers itself or aspires to be a leader in its sector.
Benefits of having a marketing plan
A good marketing plan It is not simply about creating a roadmap, but also to justify it.
And undoubtedly the best justification for having meticulous planning are benefits such as the following:
- Stimulates the growth of the companyNo matter what industry you are in, planning will help strengthen the authority of any corporation.
- Facilitates the achievement of objectives: by having well-defined goals, it is considerably easier to achieve them in the short and medium term as long as you have an effective strategy for it.
- Generate an accurate view of the competition: By carefully studying the strategies of your competitors, you will be able to get a clear picture of the level of competitiveness in the sector and how good your competition is at getting customers and sales in it.
- Facilitates the choice of strategies: studying the market also includes knowing its past and which were the most successful strategies ever used, which will allow you to decide with greater precision which ones you will choose for yourself.
- Crisis prevention: any marketing crisis that your brand may have, must be seriously considered in the marketing plan, which will allow you to know a reaction in time to avoid them, or at least mitigate them with the least possible collateral damage.
What are the most important points of a marketing plan
In general terms, all aspects of a marketing plan are importantSince all of them have great synergy and it can be said they need each other to guarantee maximum success.
Below we will tell you which are these points that you must work to the maximum to guarantee the success of your planning:
Internal analisis
Before thinking of any strategy, it will be important to analyze and know your own business, so you must perform an internal analysis. For many entrepreneurs this is usually unnecessary, as they think they know their project like the back of their hand.
But this confidence can end up causing important aspects such as:
- Mission and vision.
- What is your target audience.
- What is your buyer persona.
- What are the best ways to distribute your product or service.
- How to effectively and efficiently reach your potential clients.
- What is the productive capacity of the company.
- What is the economic potential of the project.
- Commercial structure of the business.
Once you know these points it is when you can truly know both strengths and weaknesses, in such a way that your future strategies focus on strengthening the former, and mitigating the latter to have a solid business structure.
Industry analysis
This is undoubtedly the aspect in which entrepreneurs are most often focused today, and they are not wrong since Knowing your competition is as important as knowing your own company.
In this sense, the most important aspects that are analyzed at this stage are the following:
- Its positioning in the SERPs and the market in general.
- Main strategies used by the competition.
- Economic potential of the competition.
- Structure and productive capacity of competitors.
- Objectives and vision of your companies.
- Content distribution and production models.
- Customer acquisition strategies.
- Define strong and weak competitors.
Knowing these points will allow you to know how much work you will have to do to overcome each of your competitors in the sector, always being realistic. You cannot go to attack the strongest competitors in the first exchange, but establish an escalation plan in which we overcome the weakest one by one until we have the strength enough to compete with the big fish in the lake.
Definition and segmentation of the target
The next will be to define your target audience and segment it. For it the figure of the buyer person is essential. This is nothing more than an imaginary representation of our ideal client. It differs from the conventional target, which deals with knowing our potential clients in a basic way with information such as age, gender, and your location, for providing more specific demographics and going much deeper into their needs and affinities.
In the buyer person, aspects of our clients must be taken into account, such as:
- Occupation.
- Age.
- Preferences.
- Needs.
- Geographic location.
A company it does not have only one buyer person, but can have dozens of them, but having all of them will be able to better define the best strategies to capture their attention and generate the long-awaited conversion that they have been looking for.
Porter forces analysis
The matrix of the 5 Porter forces developed by the legendary American economist Michael Porter, are a analysis model within the framework of market analysis that allows us to determine the profitability of a sector and its future life time.
The five forces that make up this analysis are as follows:
- Bargaining power of customers. It refers to the ability of potential customers to demand a better price-quality ratio, which will leave less and less profit margin for the company.
- Bargaining power of suppliers. It refers to the ability of suppliers to organize themselves to increase raw material costs, which in turn would increase production costs and reduce profit margins in the future.
- Threat of new incoming competitors. It refers to the probability that in the future there will be more and more competition, which is determined by the two previous aspects; if the clients are docile and the suppliers cheap, it will certainly be attractive for any investor to enter the sector.
- Threat of new substitute products. It refers to the possibility that products or services will be developed in the future that are a better option than yours and end up replacing them.
- Rivalry between competitors. It refers to how difficult it is to reach and stay on top of any sector, which is directly related to the ability of our competitors to develop winning strategies.
Each of the conclusions reached in these five essential points, can be resolved with a certain type of strategies that will help your company to alleviate these difficulties and stay afloat even in the most competitive markets.
Definition of objectives
The objectives are the core of all planning. Obviously every plan is made with the intention of achieving something specific, and that something is what we must know how to consider.
When defining an objective, the most important aspects to consider are:
- Target difficulty.
- How realistic is it?
- How long do you expect to comply?
- How much will have to be invested in it?
- What is the best strategy to achieve it?
The objectives can be several, as long as they are related; that is to say, that each one is raised in order to obtain something greater in the future.
Definition of strategies
Then we have the definition of strategies, which are nothing more than all those actions that we will implement to achieve the objectives that we have raised in the previous point.
In this sense, the most important aspects to take into account are:
- Ability of the company to execute the strategy.
- Investment necessary for execution.
- Test time before starting the measurement.
- Platforms on which the strategy will be executed.
In this section issues such as the social media plan to be executed, as well as the content marketing strategy to be used to achieve the desired visibility.
Measurement of objectives
Once the strategies have begun to be executed, you must wait a few weeks to start with the next phase, which is the results measurement stage. In it what we do is check the effectiveness of all the actions we have carried out, for this we will have to audit all the marketing strategy used, so that we can achieve a balance of status in which we can know with the greatest precision what benefits we have achieved by applying our plan.