Building a Successful Strategic Marketing Plan

Why is it so important to have a marketing plan? You have a budget. You know tactics that work. Why do they need to be developed into a plan?

The short and simple answer: you need to measure what you’re doing to be sure it’s effective and adjust where necessary.

A strategic marketing plan is the framework for how you’re going to reach your business goals. Think of it as a marketing and sales blueprint.

Before putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboards) to develop a marketing plan, there are a couple items that should be completed:

• Research
• Data analysis

Once the above are complete, then you can start building your marketing plan, which should:

• Identify your business goal(s)
• Define your target audience(s)
• Determine effective tactics to reach your audience(s)
• Determine how and/or who is implementing those tactics
• Include how you will measure effectiveness

Now that you have a general outline of what a marketing plan should include, how do you go about creating an effective one?

That’s exactly what we’re going to focus on in the next few weeks with this series. Each week we’ll tackle one of the above components of a marketing plan, with examples included! 

This post first appeared on the Measured Intentions blog.