Digital World
Without a marketing strategy, you lack focus. And without focus, you will, quite simply, fail to reach any of the goals and objectives that you have set. Failure to plan is planning to fail.
A marketing plan is the advertising strategy that a business will implement to sell its product or service. The marketing plan will help determine who the target market is, how best to reach them, at what price point the product or service should be sold, and how the company will measure its efforts.
A marketing plan is a comprehensive document or blueprint that outlines a company’s advertising and marketing efforts for the coming year. It describes business activities involved in accomplishing specific marketing objectives within a set time frame.
Marketing is not a standalone, one-off activity. It is made up of several different components that are necessary throughout each and every stage of a business’s endeavors – from long before a sale is even made, to long after. With so much going on, it is essential to have a strategy in place.
A marketing plan also includes a description of the current marketing position of a business, a discussion of the target market and a description of the marketing mix that a business will use to achieve their marketing goals. A marketing plan has a formal structure, but can be used as a formal or informal document which makes it very flexible.
It contains some historical data, future predictions and methods or strategies to achieve the marketing objectives. Marketing plans start with the identification of customer needs through market research and how the business can satisfy these needs while generating an acceptable level of return.
It forces you to think about which areas of your business you can change or improve on, to help you meet the needs of your target market, add value and differentiate your product or service from your competitors. The areas you need to make decisions about are: The elements of the marketing mix include the following:
Product (or Service) Your customer only cares about one thing: what your product or service can do for them.
Price. Many factors go into a pricing model.
Promotion
Place
People
Packaging
Process
Your marketing strategy is critical to your long-term success. But this is not a set it and forget it exercise. As your business changes and evolves, your marketing strategy may have to as well. So, how often should you evaluate your marketing strategy?
No huge changes within the business. In that case, your marketing strategy should be evaluated, I think every year and there may not be much that you need to update, but just double-check. Is our target market still on track? Are our ideal clients within that market still where they need to be? Are we still focusing on the right types of ideal clients? And is our message to those people the right one?
Look at your target market and your messaging to make sure that those things are still supporting your business the way that they should.
The second scenario is when there are changes in your business. Now, changes can come in a lot of different forms. Maybe it’s new products or new services that you’re introducing. Might be new markets that you’re going to get into.
Make some updates with your potential ideal clients and your target market. You might just be revisiting. When these changes happen, you are going to want to revisit target market and messaging elements of the fundamentals and of your strategy.
When changes are happening in your business, if there are changes that you know are happening and are going to happen and you can plan for them, well, then you should be planning and making adjustments to your strategy ahead of time. If things are changing out of your control, for example, the pandemic, well, then those are changes that you’re just going to make as they’re happening or as quickly as you can after the changes have happened.
If you can plan ahead of time, you want to plan ahead of time. If you can’t plan ahead of time, I think you want to make adjustments and corrections as quickly as you can.