In the process of creating a company, some elements are essential to accurately define the direction the business will follow and the goals the entrepreneur aims to achieve. One of these elements is the marketing plan.
In this article — which we have prepared for all those who want to start 2017 by turning their dream of becoming an entrepreneur into reality — you will be able to better understand the role that a marketing plan plays in the development of a company and what the steps are for creating an efficient plan.
In times of crisis , a marketing plan is an indispensable ally when it comes to choosing the right paths and overcoming challenges inherent to any business. Read today’s text and see why.
Learn the importance of a marketing plan
To analyze the importance of a marketing plan in creating a business, we must first observe the concept of a marketing plan.
In this sense, we can define the marketing plan as the management instrument that helps the company achieve a specific goal, such as, for example, launching a new product, optimizing sales or even having greater control over internal expenses.
With this simple definition alone, we can begin to understand how essential a marketing plan is, right? To understand this better, let’s make an analogy: imagine that you are going on a trip.
Without defining a destination, how much you intend to spend and which routes you want to follow, what could be an unforgettable trip can become a huge headache. The same thing happens in a company.
Without clearly defining the objectives you want to achieve and the strategies you will use to overcome challenges and reach your goals, the success of your business will depend solely on luck. Consider your marketing plan as a guide to help your company establish itself in the market and become a successful enterprise.
This guide doesn’t necessarily need to be extensive, but some items cannot be left out. We will soon cover each of them. Before that, however, you should understand how the marketing plan is present in different business models.
Learn about the relationship between marketing plan and business model
Regardless of the segment in which you intend to operate or the business model you choose to open your company, marketing planning will serve as one of the main stages of your management processes. We must clarify this aspect well so that mistakes are not made.
One of the most common mistakes among entrepreneurs is to think, for example, that small businesses do not have the same need for a marketing plan as large companies.
This idea condemns the longevity of many SMEs, since actions taken without a strategy can be costly and, in most cases, small businesses do not have a surplus of resources to redirect the company.
Regarding the marketing plan, what changes are market variants or the implementation model, but not its importance. To understand this better, we can analyze the universe of franchises .
Unlike other segments or other business models, in which the entrepreneur will need to develop the marketing plan on their own, when we deal with franchises they generally already have an existing base plan and market studies that will certainly facilitate their trajectory.
In any case, understanding the stages of a marketing plan is crucial, since new objectives will need to be continually set in the reality of any company. See now what the main ones are.
Understand your company’s internal environment
Know yourself. We can adapt this wise advice to the business world and say that the first step in developing a valid marketing plan — that is, one that can direct your company towards ambitious goals — is to understand the internal environment of the business, whether or not it has already been launched on the market.
In this sense, the entrepreneur will need to analyze everything from financial issues — such as the business’s investment capacity and the company’s working capital — to issues related to people management .
It is necessary to plan in order to know how to calculate the number of employees that the entrepreneur will be able to count on or who will be the employees directly responsible for the company’s marketing planning.
Carefully analyzing every detail of your business will be a beneficial step in helping you to realistically define what your business’s first marketing objectives will be. This will also provide an essential information base for all the management processes involved in the day-to-day running of any business.
Finally, analyzing the company’s internal environment will contribute greatly to the next stage of the marketing plan that we will outline here. We are talking about research into the market context that encompasses your business. Understand the main elements that cannot be left out of this topic.
Study the market context
Analyzing the market context in which your company operates is also an attitude that will provide your marketing planning with solid and realistic foundations. Together with the study of the internal environment, this analysis will show you what your strengths are — those that can differentiate your business in the market.
It is important to make it clear that this step requires willpower and dedication, as analyzing a company’s market context involves observing a series of factors. Here are some of them:
Economic factors
First, you need to visualize the overall economic plan of your region and, ultimately, of the country. What are the population’s consumption levels like? Could the rise or fall of the exchange rate affect your business? Has your segment been affected by the crisis?
Understanding these aspects will help you define action plans that will be useful when it comes to preventing the impacts of an economic downturn from affecting your company. Furthermore, to draw up marketing plans, we need to analyze your market positioning — and this is only possible with a complete observation of the scenario in which the company operates.
Study of your segment
After a broader analysis of the macroeconomic scenario, you will need to understand how the segment in which you operate is doing in terms of the economy. Depending on the sector you choose to follow, it may be more or less susceptible to crisis scenarios, more dynamic or more static, more competitive or more segmented, etc.
To give an example, we know that the franchise market usually has high levels of growth and overcomes crises , even when economic cycles are really unfavorable.
Competitor analysis
After looking inward (internal environment) and at the broader economic plans, it is time to look outward. Who are your competitors? What do they have to offer? What are your main differentiators and how can your business become more competitive compared to other companies?
These questions cannot go unanswered, since it is from points like these that you will be able to better understand what needs to be done to conquer the market you want and overcome the challenges imposed by the competition.
Location, target audience and direct market
Finally, it is also important to start investigating issues related to the location of your business, the profile of your target audience and who are the potential direct consumers of your products and services.
This step will be essential, for example, when creating assertive marketing campaigns, promotions and actions to attract new customers to your business.
Set goals and objectives
We have reached one of the crucial points of any marketing plan. Knowing how to set realistic objectives that allow your company to dream big is one of the secrets to any company’s success.
There is no point in having absurd growth goals when you know that, deep down, at least at that moment, such goals will be impossible to achieve. In other words, allow yourself to dream, but keep your feet on the ground.
This reasoning will be useful in any strategic planning you need to draw up for your company. Let’s suppose that your idea is to create marketing campaigns to attract new consumers and increase your business’s revenue.
If the company has just opened and its investment capital is still limited, it may be very risky to invest excessive amounts in high-cost campaigns. In this scenario, you can look for cheaper alternatives that can have a high degree of impact and assertiveness.
Good examples are engagement strategies on social networks like Facebook. Depending on their performance, you may even achieve better results than if you were investing large amounts in advertising campaigns.
So, the main secret to defining the goals and objectives of your company’s marketing plan is knowing how to see the reality of your business and set targets that you can achieve with what you already have. After all, it is more advantageous to take one step at a time than to ruin your entire business due to a hasty action.
Establish and coordinate strategies
Once you have defined the initial objectives of your marketing plan, it is time to define the strategies that will allow you to achieve these goals. Thinking again about the metaphor of a journey, if the destination is the goal you want to reach, the strategy is the map that will allow you to follow the path towards it.
Defining good strategies is not a simple task and may involve several steps, such as:
Working together
You know that saying that two heads are better than one? This is especially true when it comes to defining strategies for your company’s core goals.
Although there are times when it will be necessary to implement a more personal and analytical vision of your business processes, when defining strategies it is important not to isolate yourself.
This can make your ideas too closed, without that upgrade of an outside-the-box vision. Listen to collaborators, talk to partners and research what the market is doing.
Brainstorming
One of the most interesting ways to work together is through a brainstorming process. Brainstorming is nothing more than a creative exercise to freely develop ideas based on a predetermined objective.
At this stage, it is important not to worry about excessive rules that could stifle both your creativity and that of your collaborators.
Understanding the problem or objective
For brainstorming to be effective, however, we need to clearly understand the goal we want to achieve. Imagine that your greatest desire is very basic and consists of increasing the business’s revenue. However, there is no single way to achieve this goal.
For example, you can focus on retaining customers who would, in theory, become more avid consumers of your products, or try to attract new consumers and thus increase the reach of your audience. This is only possible by understanding the problem. Therefore, never leave this step aside.
Best Measures Filter
Finally, you will need to filter out the most interesting aspects of the previous steps. Take into account factors such as your ability to execute the strategic plan (your feet on the ground), but don’t forget to aim for great things for your business (your eyes on the stars).
Do the segmentation correctly
Creating correct segmentation for your marketing plan basically means that you need in-depth knowledge of your customers so that your strategies are well defined.
The customer is the person your business is aimed at, so knowing them is as important as knowing what sets your business apart. To do so, a good strategy is to define the personas that represent your ideal customers.
More detailed and specific than the target audience, the persona takes into account — in addition to issues such as income, gender or region — factors such as behavior, personal and professional desires.
Imagine developing a marketing or sales strategy with such a wealth of detail! Obviously, developing a persona that will actually help with your business’s marketing plan requires a lot of research, but some questions can serve as a starting point:
- What topics interest your audience?
- What challenges does he face on a daily basis?
- How does he seek knowledge?
- What is your level of education?
- Who are the influencers that contribute to your decision making?
Defining a roadmap of questions and carrying out careful research with your customers, whether they are future or existing, will be essential for many of your business’s strategic and growth actions.
Get information about public demand
Have you ever heard of the concept of disruptive innovation? Disruptive innovation is any process of launching a product that meets specific demands of a population and does so so efficiently that it not only outperforms the competition, but makes it obsolete.
Do you want to know how a disruptive innovation can emerge in the market? Of course, there are numerous factors to take into account, but it is undoubtedly necessary to understand the demands of the public in a given segment.
Understanding the demands and, in addition, seeing what the competition’s weaknesses are in meeting them will allow you to gain competitive advantages that can considerably boost your market positioning.
This is another reason why it is so important to know the target audience you intend to serve with your products or services. Without this understanding, not only will it be impossible to outperform your competitors, but you also run the risk of leaving your company at the mercy of the innovation of other businesses in your market niche.
Regardless of the business model or segment you choose to start your entrepreneurial life, be sure to observe what your audience needs and how their desires can be met in the best possible way.
Put actions into practice at the right time
Now it’s time to plan when you’ll put that strategy you’ve worked so hard to put into practice. Again, be realistic when planning the periods in which you intend to carry out a certain action, but make sure you have these points clearly defined.
Having a clear idea of your deadlines and knowing how to respect them is essential. Otherwise, your company runs the risk of always remaining at the idea stage, with a slow or no growth rate and, once again, falling behind the competition.
Furthermore, having the feeling of the right moment will also be important for your market positioning and your own growth. Let’s take as an example common situations in the reality of any company.
A certain marketing action may be very accurate this week but become completely irrelevant days later. A certain contract may or may not be closed due to a lack of perception about the most interesting moment to be incisive in a sales action or when we should give more space for the customer to think about the offer.
Such insight is not something that can be learned overnight. The important thing here is to learn from mistakes and not become a hostage to them.
Project the values that will be invested
The penultimate step of our marketing plan consists of a projection of how much you intend to invest to achieve the objectives set. The key is to know how much you have available and how you will distribute these resources intelligently.
As we said above, the most expensive action will not always be the most effective for your business. Often, simple process changes — such as improving the service provided by your employees — can be crucial when it comes to winning new customers, for example.
In this sense, be more concerned with the effectiveness of resource distribution than with the amount of capital, since, in any case, you will need to adapt your company to the financial reality of the business.
Analyze the results and update the plan
Once you have completed all the steps of your marketing plan, it is time to analyze which of your objectives were achieved. The better your results, the higher the quality of your strategic planning. And vice versa.
Once this identification has been made, the final step is to review the plan and update it according to new market demands and the expansion of your objectives. The review can also correct routes that have been flawed and improve the assertiveness of your business as a whole. Remember: businesses are dynamic and only companies with little ambition remain static.
Remember the end vision of the marketing plan
To review what you have learned so far, it is useful to divide the marketing plan into three main stages: planning, implementation and review. In planning, we include the stages of studying the market, segment, defining goals and strategies.
In terms of implementation, we can include the act of putting the actions into practice. Finally, we review the results and update the plan according to its effectiveness in relation to the proposed objectives.
Now that you have seen all the steps involved in a marketing plan, the process of defining strategies to achieve your goals will undoubtedly become much more efficient. Still, it is worth considering including specialists in your team who are able to maintain the focus on managing your business’s marketing.