5 Tips To Create A Marketing Plan That Can Bring Leads

There are two major expenses in every business; one is the salary of employees and the other is marketing. As a business owner, it’s always a desire to ensure that whatever your marketing budget is spent in one of the most productive ways possible. But there are many businesses around that keep spending on marketing plans without any proper plan, as a result of which they walk away with very little success.

Moreover, even if some of these companies find success, they fail to scale their strategies and goals to drive consistent growth. However, the landscape of marketing is evolving every passing day with the consistent formation of new tactics and strategies. If marketing itself is changing so rapidly, it only makes sense that businesses should be flexible and clear enough to cope with these changes.

In this article, we will discuss some tips about how in this constantly evolving marketing space, businesses can create plans to bring leads consistently and reach the goals sooner. To start with, let’s understand what a marketing plan is.

Understanding Marketing Plan

A marketing plan is an operational document that highlights the strategies that a company will use to advertise its product, services, or brand to generate leads and reach the target market. It allows these companies to define a clear picture of their ideal customer, their promotion goals, and the most important thing, i.e., the timeline in which all the strategies will be implemented.

The terms marketing strategy and marketing plan are often used interchangeably because the formation of a marketing plan is based entirely on comprehensive strategic frameworks. There are many cases in which companies include both strategy and plan in one single document, specifically smaller companies that do not run more than 2-3 campaigns in a year. A marketing plan outlines activities for marketing on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis, while the marketing strategy helps in determining the overall value proposition.

Marketing plans, more often than not, will allow you to target your ideal customers with ease, which means the chances of your converting leads into sales will always be on the higher side. With that in mind, let jump right on the tips that you can follow to create a marketing plan that will not fail in lead generation.

Critical Tips To Create A Marketing Plan

There’s a saying that if you don’t know where you are going, any road can take you there. Such is the case with marketing too, if you don’t have a plan, you won’t know where you’re heading and will never be able to reach your goal. Here are X tips to help you out:

Document Business Goals and Budget

Before the marketing teams start working on tactics and execution, the leadership groups must be clear with the business goal for at least 1-3 upcoming years. When the marketing group knows the direction in which the business should run, they’ll be able to create better strategies to bring more leads by showing what’s coming in the future to the potential customers.

At the business level or even otherwise, the goals should always be developed in SMART format to ensure that it appears to be accountable. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound. Here the goals are represented as:

• Increase the revenue generated by X-product by 40% to $3 million in the next financial year
• Increase revenue from distributors by two times in the next 12 months
• Increase overall profit from 15% to 25% by the end of the year

As you set your marketing goals, it is also essential to ensure that your yearly budget for the market is also formed appropriately. A good way to go for this is to reserve 6 to 12% of gross revenue for marketing, where the expenditure is higher in the initial phases while building a foundation for your business.

Include Concise Executive Summary

When you’re documenting the marketing plan, an executive summary is an important section that must be included. As its name suggests, it is a brief overview of the marketing plan. It describes, in one or two pages, the crucial results of the research you conducted for developing the plan. Moreover, it also provides an overview of your brand objectives, marketing goals, and related activities. The aim of an executive summary is to highlight the most important pieces of information from your short and long-term marketing plans.

It helps businesses understand the needs of the target customers which makes it easier for them to allure new leads. When you know what the exact needs of your customers are, you market your products by targeting those needs. In case you find it challenging to draft the whole summary by yourself, you can always look for an executive summary template available online, as it makes life considerably easier.

Conduct SWOT Analysis

What every business ultimately wants is a consistent traffic of high-quality leads that helps in fueling the new sales which drives business growth. Businesses do not want their technical customers to be annoyed by them, they rather want these customers to be satisfied with the quality of service they are getting. Moreover, they want to achieve all this on a tight budget too.

To be fair, it’s not impossible to achieve this on a tight budget. It is possible and many major companies have even done it before. But the one thing that should always be done in order to achieve all this easily is by using a SMART marketing approach. You should always follow an approach that can create strategies and execute plans by staying aligned to your business goals, and it can be by doing the SWOT analysis of your current plan. Document strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats with respect to your competitive position, current positioning/messaging, target markets, target audiences, the maturity of your offerings, and much more.

Determine Your Target Persona

It is probably one of the hardest things that you’ll have to do while forming a marketing plan. If you have a small business, the chances are very high that you know who your biggest paying clients are and how your company approaches them in order to convert them from being a lead to a customer. As the company grows, however, knowing the unique situation of each prospect will be unrealistic, as a result of which one message will not work with all the leads generated through your marketing plan. Here, you’ll have to create customized buyer personas for your marketing approach.

Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers based on demographic data, online behavior, and your educated speculation about personal histories, motivations, and concerns. The first step that you should follow when creating a buyer persona is understanding who your potential buyers could be. Once your list of buyers is complete, you’ll have some classification to do. The ones who have similar goals and needs can be merged together. Moving further, you can prioritize these personas with respect to who provides you the highest stream of revenue, who has the best relationship with the company, and what is the size of the persona group.

Work on Marketing Goals and Activity Plans

Now that you are armed with a good budget, perfect executive summary to allure leads, SWOT analysis to understand where you lie, and prioritized buyer persona, it’s now time for you to form your marketing goals and plan how you’ll assign tasks and report on your KPIs. It’ll ensure that your team is aligned around your top marketing priorities.

To do this, each member should confirm they understand which part of the plan they are responsible for. It’s recommended to use a task management app like Asana or Todoist to keep track of goals and sub-tasks. A great tip is to connect these tools to your email client and/or Slack to help you navigate incoming messages at the same time that you’re tackling your inbox. That way you can switch to deep work, like marketing copy and customer feedback.

Through this, your teams and customers will be well aware of the direction you as a company is heading towards.

After all the planning comes the time for the most important part, i.e., developing an activity plan to execute what’s been planned so far. One of the most effective ways that you can follow is converting the marketing strategies into an execution plan and then using a well-defined campaign structure.

When the time and budget are limited for your marketing plan, a campaign approach will lay the bigger picture in front of you. You’ll see all the possibilities of leads coming. These campaigns can be anything from a major product launch to creating activities like gamified pop ups to increase web traffic and leads. 

Bottom Line

A marketing plan is the advertising strategy that a business will implement to sell its product or service. A good marketing plan has the potential to generate tons of high-quality leads, as it helps determine what your target market is, the best way to reach them, and how to measure these efforts as the business moves ahead. You can follow the tips mentioned in this article to create a marketing plan that’ll never fail to bring leads.