Creating a solid marketing plan is essential for any business looking to grow and succeed. With a clear roadmap in place, you can establish effective strategies, allocate budget and resources properly, and measure success as you work towards your goals.
While marketing plans can take many forms there are several key steps you need to follow in order to develop an actionable and impactful plan. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll walk through the entire marketing planning process and provide tips for creating a plan that delivers results.
Step 1: Analyze the Current Market Landscape
The first step in developing your marketing plan is conducting thorough market research. Before determining where you want to go, you need to understand where you currently stand. Market analysis will provide key insights into:
- Your target audience and customer demographics
- Market trends, growth potential, and opportunities
- Your competitors and their positioning
- Challenges or roadblocks you may face
Approach your market research from different angles for a complete picture, Useful methods include
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Surveys – Send out questionnaires to existing customers and prospects to gather feedback. Gain insights into their challenges, motivations, and more.
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Focus groups – Bring together a small group of customers or target users and facilitate an open discussion around your product/service. Uncover detailed thoughts and perspectives.
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Interviews – Reach out to customers, industry experts, and other knowledgeable contacts for one-on-one conversations. Ask specific questions to dig deeper.
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Competitive analysis – Research competitor offerings, pricing, messaging, marketing activities, and more. Identify their strengths and weaknesses.
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Market data – Review industry research reports, growth projections, and other hard data. Understand sizing, trends, key segments, and opportunities.
Once your research is complete, analyze your findings to identify potential opportunities or gaps in the market. This data will inform your strategy moving forward.
Step 2: Define Your Target Audience
With market research completed, you need to define your target audience in detail. Really get specific on the core demographics, common challenges, and motivations of your ideal customers.
Develop detailed buyer personas that humanize your targets and deepen your understanding of their needs. Useful elements in your buyer personas include:
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Basic demographics – Age, location, gender, income level, education, family status
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Job details – Job title, role responsibilities, seniority level, industry, company size
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Goals & challenges – What they aim to achieve, problems they face, pains they wish to alleviate
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Behavior patterns – Where they get information, how they make decisions, who influences them
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Objections – What prevents them from purchasing, concerns they may have
With clearly defined personas guiding your work, you can create messaging and campaigns tailored specifically to resonate with your audience.
Step 3: Set Concrete Marketing Goals
Now it’s time to define your specific marketing goals and KPIs that align to your overarching business objectives. Be sure to focus on clear, measurable goals that can be tracked over time. Examples include:
- Increase website traffic by 25% year-over-year
- Grow email subscriber list to 10,000 contacts
- Generate 500 new qualified leads per quarter
- Boost social media engagement rate to 5%
When setting goals, use the S.M.A.R.T. framework:
- Specific – Clearly define what you want to achieve
- Measurable – Quantify your goals and establish metrics
- Actionable – Ensure they are within your ability to accomplish
- Realistic – Challenge yourself but keep goals attainable
- Timebound – Set a specific timeframe for completion
Well-defined goals will drive focus and accountability throughout your marketing plan execution.
Step 4: Identify Marketing Strategies and Tactics
With your targets, objectives, and KPIs in place, it’s time to detail the strategies and tactical plans you will implement to achieve success. Key elements to outline include:
Messaging and Positioning
- What key messages will you communicate to resonate with your audience and influence their behavior?
- How will you position your brand and offerings compared to alternatives?
Products/Services
- What existing products/services will you focus on promoting?
- Are there opportunities to develop new offerings to fill gaps in your portfolio?
Pricing
- Will you maintain existing pricing models or is there room for optimization?
- Are there opportunities for tiered pricing, packaging, or promotional discounts?
Promotions Mix
- What marketing channels will you leverage and what tactics will you deploy across each?
- How much budget and effort will be allocated to each channel?
Campaigns & Content
- What specific campaigns will you execute and what content will you create to fuel them?
- How will you align top-funnel awareness campaigns with bottom-funnel lead gen programs?
Sales Process
- How will your marketing strategy integrate with and support sales team efforts?
- Are there any optimizations you can make to your sales workflow?
Think through each element of the marketing mix as you develop your plan. Identify any gaps in your current strategy and areas for potential improvement moving forward.
Step 5: Build Your Marketing Budget
A detailed budget is a critical component of any marketing plan. You need to allocate appropriate resources across all of the strategies and initiatives you intend to deploy.
Some key considerations when defining your budget include:
- Labor costs – Account for staff and/or agency fees for campaign execution
- Paid advertising – Research costs for digital, print, TV/radio etc. based on targeting and placement
- Production expenses – Factor in design, video, events, etc. based on required assets
- Tool costs – Account for any software, services, or data you may leverage
Build in all costs associated with each program and be sure to include a buffer for any unexpected expenses. Establish a process for ongoing budget management and tracking during plan execution.
Step 6: Monitor Performance and Optimize
The final critical piece of marketing planning is establishing processes to monitor, analyze, and optimize your efforts on an ongoing basis. Key steps in this process include:
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Setting up tracking – Ensure you can capture all required data and metrics from each program.
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Reporting – Generate regular reports to review performance across all goals and KPIs.
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Analyze results – Identify what’s working well and what’s underperforming to focus improvement efforts.
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Optimize efforts – Adapt initiatives that aren’t delivering desired results and double down on what works.
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Refine budget – Shift budget from poor-performing programs to those driving growth.
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Update plan – Use insights gained to iterate on your plan as the year progresses.
By continually optimizing efforts based on data, you can maximize the impact of your marketing strategy over time.
Key Marketing Plan Templates
To help streamline the planning process, leverage templated frameworks that provide guidance and structure:
Marketing Strategy Framework
Provides an overview of key strategic elements like targeting, positioning, messaging, and more. Great for initial planning.
Editorial Calendar Template
Maps out proposed content themes, topics, and publishing cadence across all channels and campaigns. Ensures consistent content creation.
Social Media Calendar
Plans out social content publishing on a weekly or monthly basis. Supports social channel management.
Campaign Brief Template
Outlines goals, audience, positioning, timeline, budgets, and metrics for individual campaigns. Keeps efforts organized.
Monthly Report Template
Tracks key metrics and KPIs across all programs on a monthly basis. Enables performance monitoring.
Final Tips for Developing Your Marketing Plan
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Involve other teams – Get stakeholders from sales, product, and leadership involved for broader input.
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Start with research – Let data guide your strategy vs. developing plans in a silo.
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Set measurable goals – Quantifiable metrics are essential for tracking progress over time.
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Revisit often – Set reminders to reassess your plan frequently as market conditions evolve.
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Keep it simple – Resist over-complication. Focus on the vital few strategies that will drive results.
With these steps and best practices in mind, you can develop a streamlined, results-driven marketing plan for your business. Treat your plan as a living, breathing document and continue optimizing it based on performance. Doing so will ensure your success both today and in the future.
The elements of a plan
There are nine major steps required to develop a well-crafted, strategic marketing plan: set your marketing goals, conduct a marketing audit, conduct market research, analyze the research, identify your target audience, determine a budget, develop specific marketing strategies, develop an implementation schedule for the strategies and create an evaluation process.
1. Set your marketing goals. Once you’ve decided to market your practice, you need to set realistic and measurable goals to achieve over the next 18 to 24 months. This time span allows you to plan activities around community events that are in line with your marketing goals. For example, you might help sponsor an annual walkathon for breast cancer or speak at your community’s annual health fair. Because of the rapid changes occurring in the health care environment, we don’t recommend planning specific activities more than two years in advance. One way to define your goals is to separate them into the following three categories: immediate, one to six months; short-term, six to 12 months; and long-term, 12 to 24 months. Here are some examples of measurable goals:
- Increase the number of new patients seen in the practice by 5 percent within the first six months and 10 percent by the end of the first year.
- Shift your patient mix by expanding the pediatric and adolescent patient base from 15 percent to 25 percent of total patient visits within 18 months.
- Increase your gross revenue by 30 percent within 24 months.
- Improve your practice’s , which may be measured by “before” and “after” scores on a community survey or by reviews from focus group participants.
It’s important to share these goals with your staff members. They can tell you from their perspectives whether they believe the goals are reasonable. If you want your marketing plan to be successful, your staff needs to support your efforts to achieve the marketing goals.
- Marketing can increase your income, introduce new providers or improve your practice , among other things.
- A strategic marketing plan requires you to define your practice in terms of what it does for patients.
- Every goal, strategy and action in your marketing plan is subject to change as you evaluate your progress.
2. Conduct a marketing audit. A marketing audit is a review of all marketing activities that have occurred in your practice over the past three years. Be as thorough as possible, making sure to review every announcement, advertisement, phonebook ad, open house, brochure and seminar and evaluate whether it was successful.
3. Conduct market research. The purpose of market research is to draw a realistic picture of your practice, the community you practice in and your current position in that community. With this research, you can make fairly accurate projections about future growth in the community, identify competitive factors and explore nontraditional opportunities (such as offering patients nutritional counseling, smoking-cessation programs or massage therapy). Your research may even bring to light some problem areas in your practice as well as solutions you can implement right away. (See “A guide to market research” to find out what kind of information you need to gather and where to find it.)
Conducting market research is often the most time-consuming step in this process. However, it’s also one of the most important steps. It’s from this research that you’re able to find out what your practice does best and what you need to work on, what the needs of your community are, who your practice should be targeting and how you should go about it.
4. Analyze the research. Next, you need to analyze the raw data you collect and summarize it into meaningful findings that will be the foundation for determining which marketing strategies make the most sense and will get the best results for your practice The research will identify the wants and needs of your current and potential patients and will help you to define your target audience (for more on target audiences, see step 5, below). This is also a good time to look back at the goals you’ve chosen. Based on your research findings, you may need to modify some of your goals.
A strategic marketing plan requires that your practice be defined in terms of what it does for patients. The research analysis will reveal your practice’s strategic advantages. After looking closely at your own practice as well as your competitors’, you can ask yourself some key questions: What are the similarities and differences between your practice and your competitors’? What sets your practice apart from your competition? Is your location more desirable than your competitors’? Do you offer a broader scope of services than the competition? Is there a service you provide that no one else in the community currently offers? Your competitive edge may lie in your style of practice, the range of services you offer, the ease of making an appointment or the way you and your staff communicate with patients.
Why should you market your practice?
Some physicians still feel that marketing is at best unprofessional and at worst unethical. In fact, good marketing is no more than educating your patients and your community about your expertise and services, and there are a wide range of reasons for doing it, not all of which have a purely financial basis. However, if you do want to determine the value of each new patient to your practice, calculate the average of the revenue that 10 new patients generated during their first 12 months with you.
You might consider marketing your practice for any or all of the following reasons: to increase your income, expand your patient base, discourage competition, improve your practice , promote current and new services, introduce new providers, enter a new marketplace or gain or retain market share. Whatever your motivation, make sure to get your staff involved right from the start. Share your reasons for marketing with them, and ask them for their ideas. If your staff is not involved early, it will be difficult to convince them to support the marketing plan and take on any additional work that comes with it.
How to Create a Marketing Plan | Step-by-Step Guide
FAQ
What is a marketing plan and example?
How do I create a marketing plan?
Conduct a situation analysis. Define your target audience. Write SMART goals. Analyze your tactics. Set your budget. 1. Conduct a situation analysis. The first step I take when creating a marketing plan is conducting a SWOT analysis. It helps me uncover the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats facing my business.
How do I structure my marketing plan?
To structure your marketing plan, we recommend utilizing the Smart Insights RACE Growth System, an easy-to-use strategic marketing framework that helps you identify opportunities, strategies, and actions to help you drive growth, at each stage of your marketing funnel.
What is a marketing plan?
Simply speaking, a marketing strategy presents what the business will do in order to reach a certain goal. A marketing plan outlines the specific daily, weekly, monthly or yearly activities that the marketing strategy calls for. As a business, you can create a marketing proposal for the marketing strategies defined in your company’s marketing plan.
Should you create your own marketing plan?
Creating your own marketing plan is no small job. You put hours into customer and competitor research to find the channels likely to have the biggest impact on your marketing goals. You can check out marketing plan examples, but when it comes to creating your own, you can save time with a template.
