Imagine that you are going on a trip to an unknown country. The first thing you should have is a map, right? Well that map is yours marketing plan. That's how important it is. Without it you would be lost, you would be stumbling, aimless and most likely you will end up lost and without achieving any results. Same as without a map.
It doesn't matter what sector your company belongs to or what products it sells, if you want to communicate what you do and sell your products you need a marketing plan. clear and realistic.
In communication it is essential have clear goals and effective strategies defined in a document that will help us guide our work in the short, medium and long term. And that document is your marketing plan.
A marketing plan should be:
Before starting to organize the marketing plan, it is important that it meets a series of requirements for it to be effective. These requirements are:
- It must be realistic.
- It must be practical and operational.
- It must be divided into phases (prioritized).
- It must contain achievable and measurable objectives.
Our roadmap
The marketing plan helps us always have control. It is our roadmap to achieve the objectives we have set for ourselves. It includes each and every one of the communication actions that we are going to carry out in the period of time that we have set for ourselves (they are usually annual, but can be longer).
Planning also helps us avoid future problems, since although we cannot predict the future, we can create contingency plans. This concept is closely related to the topic of control. He contingency plan It is a very important part of the marketing plan since it helps us so that, once we have our activities clear, we can think about the setbacks that could arise when executing them and know how to resolve them.
But before reaching this point there are several steps that we must take and that are essential for our marketing plan to be realistic and achievable. We must know our product perfectly, see what our strengths and weaknesses are, analyze our competition and exhaustively define each and every one of our objectives.
And something fundamental when defining our marketing plan and that we must always keep in mind is our target audience. What do we want to achieve with our marketing plan? And who are we addressing?
The objective
We have to be crystal clear about what we want to communicate; what is our objective; what do we want to achieve. If our product or our brand is newly created, we will need to make it known and position it in the market. If our product or brand is already known and what we want is to increase its sales, the plan we design must contain this clearly defined objective and all its actions will be designed to achieve it in a realistic and achievable time with the financial means we have available.
Our target audience
Ask yourself this question: who do I want to address? What is my target audience? How is? What tastes do you have? How does he speak? How he thinks? What do you need?…
Meet our Final client It is essential to develop an effective marketing plan that helps us achieve the objectives we have set for ourselves. In this way we will know how to create interesting content for our audience with appropriate language and messages that arouse their interest.
The more defined and limited our target audience is, the easier it will be to find the correct strategies and the most appropriate messages for them.
Now that we have these two basic concepts clear, it is time to get to work. Take your time and write a document that guides you on the path you are going to take. Start working on your map and never stop referring to it.
If you are interested in knowing a little more about the author of this post, Carlos Moreno-Figueroa, Secretary General of FECE and member of the boards of directors of CEOE, CEPYME and the Spanish Confederation of Commerce, I invite you to visit his profile LinkedIn.
