What is a marketing plan and why is it important?

Before you spend a penny on marketing, you first must understand the market and your customers.

Author Max Freer, Founder, OOK Agency

Companies of all sizes have one thing in common – they all start out as a small business. Getting your business off the ground is the first step, what quickly follows is a dozen other jobs like administration, recruitment, finance and marketing.
 

Setting yourself up for success from the offset is critical. Even well-established companies can fail to prioritise marketing. Do not view marketing as a cost, view marketing as an investment in your company to get you closer to where you want to be.

 
I’ve spent a career working in marketing, building, delivering and driving sales and marketing plans for large PLCs as an in-house employee and for agency clients we work with. I describe a marketing plan as a blueprint for launching new products, understanding the intricacies of your market, growing your audience, and promoting your company to the customers who want what you’re selling.
 

A well-designed marketing plan should be aligned to your brand and business strategy. Think of your brand and business strategy as two halves working as one whole, when they work together you can design more effective sales, marketing and promotion campaigns that have impact and reach your customers with targeted advertising and with clear KPI’s set against a plan you can track your business success. Without a plan, you might as well throw your marketing budget down the drain and hope it works out!

 
If you’ve been tasked with creating a marketing plan for your company, there are some basic elements to keep in mind. Though every marketing plan will reflect the specific business and industry it’s been created for, most share a few common features and can be boiled down to just one or two simple objectives. I’ll outline some of the basic elements of a marketing plan and how to write one.

What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is a document outlining a company’s future marketing efforts and goals. It can be as short as a single page or made up of many smaller campaign plans. However large and complex those plans are, the idea remains the same: A marketing plan is created to organise, execute, and eventually measure the success of a business’s marketing strategy.

Types of marketing plans

Marketing plans come in as many different shapes and sizes as there are different kinds of business, but they can be broadly placed into one (or more) of a few different categories. Here are some of the most common you’ll encounter:

• Annual marketing plans. These types of marketing plans arrange campaigns according to when they’re expected to launch, rather than the content of the campaigns themselves. It’s a useful way to get an overview of a marketing strategy for the upcoming year, and to measure success continuously as time passes and measure your ROI (return on investment).
• Content marketing plans. . This is a more content-focused way of approaching a marketing strategy and highlights the specific channels and audiences you want to reach. Content marketing plans can look very similar to annual marketing plans but are less concerned with the ‘when’ and more with the ‘what’ and the ‘how’.
• Product launch plans. Launching a new product or service requires a specific kind of marketing plan. The main goal is to successfully introduce the new product to the market. But these plans also include the strategies, tactics, and content needed in the buildup to the launch itself. We used this planning approach when we successfully launched Talk Cancer Teesside, a workplace marketing campaign to promote a new service.
• Social media marketing plans. Social media channels are such a vital part of a company’s marketing goals but be clear having just social media is one tactical execution of a marketing plan rather than the plan itself. We advise creating a separate social media marketing plan dedicated to creating advertising and promotional content on digital platforms targeting the end user.

What is the purpose of a marketing plan?

A marketing plan lays out your business strategy for acquiring new customers and selling more products and services. But it also serves as a way of analysing exactly how successful your marketing efforts have been so far. Knowing this information helps steer ongoing campaigns in the right direction, aligns your marketing with your company’s brand and values, and ensures that future campaigns are better targeted and more effective.

 
To understand why a marketing plan is important, just consider what would happen without one. Your budget would be spent based entirely on guesswork about where your potential customers can be found and what they’re looking for. You would have no idea which of your campaigns contributed to increased sales figures. And, you’d have no baselines from which to build more effective campaigns in the future for example, measuring which channel delivered the best CPI (Cost Per Inquiry). If you do not set KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) against your plan and budget, how do you measure your ROI (Return on Investment)?

 
Taking an agile approach to your marketing plan is about being resilient.
Don’t confuse agile strategy, with bouncing wild ideas into your marketing, stay focused- move the goalposts too much and your plan will quickly fall apart. Allow your strategies time to settle in, use a SMART model to help you reach success.

 
Max Freer is a Creative Brand Strategist based in Northeast England. She is founder of OOK Agency a UK based purpose-driven freelance brand agency where her work focuses on brand, marketing and campaign management. Max has 30 years industry expertise working with recognised UK Media organisations, national and international brands.