Last updated on February 6th, 2024
From big to small, businesses need an effective marketing strategy to build brand identity and attract customers. If you have never been a part of effective marketing strategies, creating one may seem challenging. The most successful company marketing plan covers every aspect right, from understanding customer personas to the customer journey, touch-points, budget, and more. In this blog, we will be sharing valuable tips to create outstanding strategies, best marketing plan examples, and more to maximize your results.
What is a marketing plan?
Before we discuss the ways to make your marketing plan outstanding in 2024, let’s understand what a marketing strategy is.
A marketing strategy is a tool that marketers use to get their target audience interested in their products or services. While branding builds a brand’s rapport and influences customer perception, marketing strategy, on the other hand, helps businesses identify their goals, find and understand their potential customers, and develop a unified tactic to reach out to them.
The five Ps of marketing strategy
Your marketing strategy should cover the 5 Ps, which include:
Product: What are you planning to sell — product or service?
Price: What are you going to charge for your products or services? The price is dependent on competitors, internal costs, market condition, quality, and more.
Place: Where do you want to sell your products/services from? Or, where does your audience reside? You need to consider logistics, distribution channels, service levels, and more in this.
Promotion: What marketing tactics you’d use to sell your products? It includes ad campaigns, email newsletters, social posts, and more.
People: A company cannot run on its own. It needs people including, employees, stakeholders, partners, customers, and suppliers.
Once, you get an idea of all these, you can create a fail-proof marketing strategy for your company.
How to make your marketing strategies outstanding
01. Create a content calendar for valuable content
Since you already know who you are targeting and where you can find potential customers, it’s great to make a content calendar. Your marketing business plan gets streamlined with a calendar.
You can download a content calendar template or create one using a calendar maker. Using the calendar, you can list down all major business updates, holidays, events, products launches, and more. This will help you streamline your posts and ads with the right type of content.
When your calendar is ready, create a valuable content marketing plan. Develop informative blogs, infographics, videos, or podcasts for the target audience. This will help you build your authority and credibility in the market among your target audience.
You can take inspiration from Wikipedia. Whatever content is posted on the site, people trust it and find it valuable.
02. Research your niche market
Before setting out to build your strategic plans, ensure you have researched your market well. You should find out your niche market and its ideal customers by analyzing their financial, educational, cultural, and other backgrounds. It will take time to gain insight into who is the most interested person from all of the buyers interested in your offerings of products or services.
If you need to learn how to research, access some market research guides authored by an experienced marketer. You will have new ideas to take your brand to the right people.
Not researching your niche may ruin your market planning, just like Segway. The company introduced its products with the idea of replacing walking. On the contrary, people ignored its products because people didn’t want to give up on walking, cycling, or running.
It shows that the company failed to do the market research. They just built a product and thought people would like it. So, don’t repeat that mistake; instead, do your research and get insights first.
03. Document your strategy
Whichever marketing business plan you create, document it to avoid miscommunication with stakeholders. Documenting your marketing strategy will help keep everyone on the same page.
Big companies using growth marketing strategies always share documents with their employees and vendors. This reminds them of the goals and methodologies to use and saves time and money.
04. Build partnerships
Building partnership is the best way to push your marketing campaign ahead and yield benefits. For startups, collaborating with partners boosts word-of-mouth campaigns and improves the quality of the content. Besides, marketing partners also help in exposing your brand to a new audience base, that too, within your budget. Another benefit is the cross-promotion. With the right partnership, you can reduce your marketing overheads and gain good returns.
For example, the partnership between James Bond movies and Land Rover Defender. The movie helped the brand sell its 2014 Land Rover Defender 110 Double Cab SVX for £365,000, about 940% higher than its standard value. The car appeared in the movie Spectre.
The movie and the car brand gained mutual benefits from this partnership. If your budget doesn’t allow you to go for a big-fat collaboration, you can count on micro-influencers and partners for mutual benefits.
05. Sponsor
Nowadays, brands sponsoring a cause or non-profit initiative are the foremost choice of customers. So, include CSR activities in your marketing plans. Giving away your marketing materials to NGOs or non-profit organizations with the company logo printed is an intelligent way to cross-promote. This adds an extra hand to your marketing efforts while supporting a good cause.
If your marketing budget allows, you can sponsor small community events around your area, including art shows, holiday celebration, podcasts, or webinars on hot topics. These activities help spread the words about your company.
Walt Disney, Unilever, Apple, Starbucks, Adidas, Lego, and Microsoft are some of the companies known for their CSR activities. You can take inspiration from them to start sponsoring a noble cause.
06. Ask for reviews and testimonials
Reviews and testimonials are helpful in branding. They work as a great business marketing plan to boost trust. People look at reviews and testimonials to determine whether you are a trustworthy business.
The reviews and testimonials reflect other customers’ experience with your brand. Based on their experiences, potential customers decide to put their trust in a brand.
You can ask your existing customers for reviews and testimonials. Create a database of existing customers and ask them to share their experience via a review email. Besides, you can encourage them to rate your products and services on social media and other review sites like Google, Yelp, Trustpilot, and more.
According to a study, 49% of customers trust reviews and personal recommendations. A positive review can turn a visitor into a regular customer.
Here’s how you can encourage customers to review your business:
- Make an in-store sign to inspire Yelp or Trustpilot reviews.
- Send a feedback email to customers and ask them to give you a rating and write a review.
- Ask your followers to review your products or services on social media pages.
- Show popups for a quick review.
07. Set your marketing goals
Any marketing planning without setting goals is useless. So, add some achievable goals to your marketing strategy. This will help you and your team accelerate business growth. Goals also help you outline the required tools and steps.
You can take inspiration from these marketing goals:
- Adding 100 followers on social media (within a few weeks)
- Improving brand awareness
- Getting more organic traffic from Search Engine Optimization
- Getting 100 email subscribers (within a few weeks)
- Improving sales
Each of these goals will give you something to strive for, something that’s measurable and achievable.
08. Utilize valuable marketing resources
Your marketing strategy should utilize valuable marketing resources for better outcomes. Marketing materials like a digital business card, custom logo design, people, advertising channels, marketing budget, and others need to be utilized in such a way that it helps realize your goals.
That’s where marketing resource management steps in. It helps your marketing team accelerate processes, lower costs, save time, and achieve better results.
Conclusion
Being a business, you always think about various ways to stay in the cut-throat competitive market. No matter how good your products or services are, your marketing strategies must be outstanding, armed with the latest technologies and the latest SEO and Google algorithm. Even a small business can compete with large organizations if its marketing strategies are well-thought-out. Giving away something that helps to give you word of mouth is not a waste as it was considered long ago.