How to Create a Marketing Plan

Writing a marketing plan may seem overwhelming but it's an important step in getting the results your business needs. With a marketing plan, you will be able to answer key questions about who your audience is, how to reach them, how to inspire them to take action, and how to measure success.

A marketing plan covers the promotional strategy needed to achieve the sales goals you outlined when creating your business plan. This includes your strategy for digital marketing, which has given businesses more ways than ever to reach their customers and raise awareness of their brand. The digital component of your marketing plan is crucial given that there are around 284 million web users1 in the U.S. — and the number of ways to reach them is growing all the time.

Strategic marketing can help you find customers you wouldn't otherwise have reached, build a relationship with them, establish an authoritative and trusted online presence, and drive sales. Plus, a marketing plan makes it easy to assess which marketing opportunities are in the best interests of your business — and which aren't.

Before you dive into marketing your business, here's how you can create a strategic marketing plan.

1. Know where you are

A good starting point is to assess where your business is now. Gather data about your website visitors, customers, and social media followers so you can begin to understand who's already connecting with you. It's also useful to conduct a SWOT analysis2 (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) so you understand what's working well with your existing marketing, and what's not.

2. Identify your audiences

If you're aiming to reach everyone, you might not reach anyone. The most effective marketing is targeted.3 By focusing your efforts on the people most likely to be — or become — customers, you help your brand to stand out and your marketing to get more engagement. A good place to start with targeting is to create customer personas. These are fictional representations of your target customers, which include demographic information (age, gender, education, and so on). Customer personas also identify the typical pain points and challenges those customers are looking to solve with your product or service. Most businesses have several customer personas. A good starting point for creating your persona is Hubspot's Make My Persona4 tool.

3. Set SMART marketing goals

Once you understand your baseline, it's time to set goals for what you want your marketing strategy to achieve. Typical goals include:

• Improved brand awareness.
• Increased lead generation.
• Improved product awareness.
• Better customer retention.
• Increased sales.
• Expanded sources of revenue.

When you create your marketing plan, be sure to make your goals SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound).