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Planning is a vital piece of your overall marketing strategy. Without adequate planning, it would be somewhat difficult to achieve your marketing goals. Creating the right plan all boils down to having a robust understanding of your business. Aside from that, you need to take a look at some strategic marketing plan examples.
In this guide, you’d figure out what a strategic marketing plan is, and how it works. Furthermore, you’ll discover easy ways to create successful PPC marketing.
Strategic marketing planning involves writing and following your plan to achieve your desired marketing goal. But why create a strategic marketing plan? Well, there are various reasons for the creation of a strategic marketing plan. Some of these reasons could be to boost profits and revenue, increase brand visibility, and improve your brand perception in public.
To achieve your desired goals, the operations and management units have to work together. First off, they have to pinpoint the goal, outline practical steps for achieving it, and assign tasks to relevant units. Aside from all these, you have to come up with ways of measuring your efforts.
Here are six vital elements to consider before creating a strategic marketing plan.
Everything has to be geared towards achieving your company’s objectives and goals. The marketing plan should clearly outline how the company’s goals will be achieved. Furthermore, all stakeholders and team members have to pinpoint how the business objectives will be achieved with the strategic marketing plan.
SWOT analysis should showcase the company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This way, you get to figure out everything that influences your company’s success. And these could be either internal or external factors. As a business owner, SWOT analysis helps you figure out ways of bridging the gap and generating good results.
A product created for everyone will be bought by no one. You need to understand who your product is designed for. Knowing who your target market is will help you concentrate your marketing efforts on the right customer segment. To figure out who your buyer persona is, you need to provide answers to the following questions.
You need to know who your competitors are. Who are the key players in your industry, and what are they doing differently? Answers to these will help you figure out the right things to incorporate into your marketing strategy. This will, in turn, help you come up with the right pieces to incorporate into your strategic marketing.
Furthermore, a competitive analysis helps you identify ways of standing out from the competition.
The next viable step is to come up with the right strategy. What are your strategic marketing goals for the year? You have to clearly outline how your strategies will help you accomplish your business goals for the year.
Metrics are the tools that help you measure your progress in the business environment. You need to define your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and other metrics that would help you measure your success.
By clearly outlining these things, you would easily track your progress. It’s also a sure way to help you know if you need to change course in the middle of your marketing campaign.
These are the vehicles (or channels) that help you reach out to your target audience. If you want to grow your brand, you’d need to know what your marketing channels are. Carefully choose your marketing channels. As a rule, you need to prioritize channels that help you generate the most return on investment. You also need to know what the purpose of each marketing channel is.
Aside from all these, you need to be certain of how your marketing channels support your business goals and marketing strategy.
You need to clearly state what your marketing budget is. Furthermore, you need to track your budget to ascertain that you get the most for each dollar spent. In the long run, tracking your budget helps you eliminate any form of waste.
A strategic marketing plan example shows you easy ways of creating a marketing plan for your business. Here’s a strategic marketing plan example for an online athletic shoe vendor. If the marketer opts for online paid ads, here’s what the marketer needs to have in mind.
Your target audience is people who are highly interested in your product or service offering. To fully understand who your target audience is and what appeals to them, you have to create a buyer persona. Here, your target audience should be athletes, aspiring athletes, and anyone looking for athletic shoes.
Let’s say you sell shoes, your keywords would be “shoes”, “black shoes”, “running shoes”, “athletic shoes”, and other related phrases. These are the keywords you have to bid for during your PPC campaigns. To find relevant keywords, you need to use tools like the PPCexpo Keyword Planner.
The campaign goals could be to boost the website traffic by 30% within the next four months and boost product sales by 10% within six months. Therefore, you should focus on the level of your customer engagement and conversions.
You need to create landing pages and ad copies that highlight the benefits of athletic shoes. You also need to state why people should consider buying athletic shoes.
Monitoring and analyzing your campaign performance can be done by using metrics like clickthrough rate, conversion rate, and clicks. Always be prepared to make the necessary adjustments as you run your campaign.
You need to look out for new growth opportunities. Growth opportunities could be new ways of launching into a new market segment, or expansion of your product line.
To measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaign, you need to keep a close eye on your sales growth and website traffic. All these can be accomplished by measuring the necessary metrics.
The marketplace is an ever-changing ecosystem. You need to keep a close eye on the happenings and regularly re-evaluate and update your campaign. This way, your campaign will keep aligning with your business goals and the changing market.
Tools help marketers to improve their efficiency and get the job done. With the right tools, everything will be seamless. However, the wrong tools pretty much slow down the process. To get the most out of your PPC campaigns, you need to look out for a tool that helps you measure your spending and efforts. And that’s where the PPC Signal comes in.
The tool helps you keep close track of your campaigns. This way, you get to streamline your marketing plan in such a way as to help you generate the most results.
Let’s say your primary objective is to boost your customer engagement and conversion, the tool will help you identify when to tweak your campaigns to maximize results.
Here’s what the PPC Signal dashboard looks like.
By selecting the “Clicks” option, you get to see your signals. The signals show you how your campaign has been performing in the past seven days. From the signals, you’d see that your conversions have been decreasing. It means that your customer engagements are not being converted.
To get further signals, click on the Explore button.
As a marketer, you need to take a close look at the anomaly and come up with ways of overcoming the challenge.
Strategic marketing goals could be:
Here are some persuasive words that appeal to customers.
To create a robust marketing plan, you need to take some cues from the strategic marketing plan example shown in this guide. A marketing plan should offer you ways of achieving realistic marketing goals.
However, having marketing plans is not enough. For your plans to be achieved, you’d have to take action. And that involves committing, dedicating, and investing more time and resources into the attainment of your plans.
Furthermore, you need to get your staff involved in the process. Yes, all hands must be on deck – and that includes having an open communication channel across the units. Crafting a strategic marketing plan is not a one-off affair. It should not be a mere written piece that’s stuffed away on a shelf. It should be an evolving company culture that helps you achieve your goals and objectives.
Now you know how to create a marketing plan, what will you include in your company’s strategic marketing plan?
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