How To Developing An Effective Marketing Plan pt1
The key to success with any business is knowing how you are going to market your products and services to your target audience, so if you struggle in this area in today’s blog post I will lay out how to equip you to develop an effective marketing plan.
Developing a marketing plan has many moving parts so this blog is going to be broken into 2 parts. So let’s start with the most simplest question. What is a marketing strategy?
Simply put a marketing strategy is a plan of action designed to promote a product or service.
Key Elements
Before a strategy can be put in place there are some key elements that you must know in order for the plan to be effective.
- Target Market
- Mission Statement
- Budget
- Goals & Objectives
- Tactics
- Type Of Strategies
Let’s dive into the list above and get clear on why each component is important.
Target Market: Your target market is the key to your marketing efforts, if you don’t know who they are you will waste time, money and energy trying to market to everyone. The term target market is key because you are targeting the people who the product/service is for.
Example: When looking in the milk aisle at the grocery store, there is not just milk but many varieties of it.
- Low fat
- 2% Milk
- Lactose free
- Almond Milk
- Oat Milk
- Soy Milk
- Organic Milk
My point is each company knows that there is an audience that needs it’s product, and they place their ad in publications and forums where those people are.
You would not place an ad for a juicy hamburger in a vegan magazine and many times entrepreneurs who don’t know who their target audience is make this mistake.
Before any marketing strategy can begin you need to know who the product or service is for.
What’s Your Mission Statement
Your mission statement should include your values, ethics and what makes your product unique and how you plan on carrying out that mission via your products /services.
When you look at Jessica Alba’s brand The Honest Brand, her products are about being chemical free and safe to use. Here is the company’s mission statement.
The Honest Company’s mission is “to empower people to live healthy, happy lives. We’re committed to creating effective, safe, delightful, accessible, responsible products.
Your mission statement is important because it drives how you relate to your target audience how you plan to serve them.
Determining Your Budget
If you plan to put ad spend behind your marketing strategy then you need to determine how much and where your efforts will bring the best ROI (return on investment, this is where your data and analytics will be of vital importance because you will have a sense of direction where to put your money to get the desired result.
Not having any data to go off of is what I call testing, and this is where you may need to pad the budget because during testing you are looking to see where you get the biggest ROI.
If you are developing a marketing strategy and you don’t have any money to put in ads, this is where your creativity has to come in.
This is where content marketing and email marketing come into play, you have to produce content that is relevant, timely and consistent and through that you will draw your target market to your offers.
Having an email autoresponder in place like, GetResponse, Mailchimp or Mailerlite so you can capture their email address as you bring them into your sales funnel via your free and low cost offers.
Goals & Objectives
When developing your marketing strategy there needs to be a goal as well as a timeline to achieve those goals.
Let’s say you’re a fitness trainer and you have developed a fitness training program that your customers can purchase and access online. This course has various modules that focus on different parts of the body and includes a recipe guide that they can download and you add a training or exercise each month, which makes your product a monthly membership.
Your money goal is to bring in 5k a month, and you’ve priced your product at $99 then you would need 51 subscribers to bring you to $5049 per month.
The key is to determine your money goal and how many people you need to opt-in to reach that goal.
When you price your products or services according to your goals the easier it is to reach that goal when put it in front of the right audience.
Why do you think some entrepreneurs charge $2ooo for a course?
If their money goal is to make $100k then they only need 50 people to opt-in, however they make sure to market it to the right audience so they can reach that money goal.
This is why it is important to have a goal in place so you can determine how you need to get there in the shortest time possible.
Tactics Is Not A Strategy
Many entrepreneurs get mixed up with strategy vs tactics thinking they are the same thing, however when you have an effective plan in place they go together.
A tactic is the steps you put in place to execute the strategy.
In order to ensure the plan is being implemented you put in place your email autoresponder, call to actions that get new subscribers on your email list, challenges or webinars to introduce a new product or service.
In the example I gave about the fitness trainer, they know their goal is to make 5k a month and they need 51 subscribers to meet that goal.
The next thing to put in place is how are they going to accomplish that goal, will it be through social media posts, ads, a podcast, video or webinar. These are the tactics that they need to determine what will be the most effective in reaching their goal.
Types Of Strategies
There are more than one strategies to implement within a marketing campaign you need to determine what type of strategy will be most effective in your campaign.
Will you use storytelling in your strategy or PDF’s, case studies, white papers, video,or podcasts. Other known strategies that work well are product, pricing and service strategies
Product Strategy: How is your product perceived in the marketplace, regarding value, features and function. Here is where you can get clues from your competitors so you can compete with how your product is perceived.
When you look at Apple and HP computers each has a perceived value as well as a different target market, but the point is they are both computers so what is the perceived value your product brings to the marketplace?
Service Strategy: Customer service is the life-blood of your business and many entrepreneurs make claims to give excellent customer service, but fall short in keeping that promise. How can you compete with an iron-clad service strategy where your competitors are falling short?
Pricing Strategy: When competing on price, you must understand that value and perception are in the equation. When you look at brands like Louis Vutton, Hermes and Chanel, these are considered high-end luxury brands and they carry the craftsmanship to support the price tag.
Customers who purchase from these brands are not concerned with price, they are concerned with status which makes these brands command a higher price tag.
Louis Vuitton uses segmentation in 4 different areas.
Geographic: Louis Vuitton has locations in China, Tokyo, New York, Brazil, India & Russia Louis Vuitton focuses on those locations & audiences who know the art of fine living.
Demographic: Louis Vuitton targets both men & women with high income from 16-80yrs who are wealthy and have disposable income.
Psychographic: The psychographic aspect of Louis Vuitton uses lifestyle and social status travel and wealth.
Louis Vuitton appeal is for fashionistas and trendsetters who feel the need to show their status through their purchase which makes them feel connected to the culture.
Usage: Louis Vuitton markets heavily to those who are frequent users of the brand, buyer information is collected and these consumers are sent seasonal catalogs and special invites of the brands collection.
When you buy from this high-end brand you’re buying into a status of wealth, lifestyle, travel and art.
Bottom line it’s all about how you position your product or service in the marketing place, creating your strategy takes time and testing you may not hit it out of the park on the first go around, and that’s why you go back and tweak it.
This is the first part of how to develop an effective marketing plan.
Stay with me as I go further into this topic in the next blog post, and if you have any comments or questions concerning this topic please leave them in the comments below.
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