Marketing is one of the main pillars that companies rely on to achieve profits, so if you are a marketer or an entrepreneur, you must know how to write a professional marketing plan.
The marketing plan is of great importance to:
- Executives in a company or for-profit organization.
- Members of the marketing team in any company.
- Beginner entrepreneurs who want to market their projects.
So if you are one of those people or have the same interests, you have come to the right place, where you will find all the information you need to write a marketing plan.
In the next few minutes you will learn about:
- How to write an executive summary for a marketing plan.
- How to accurately formulate your marketing objectives.
- How to do a comprehensive analysis of your competitors.
- How do you define the different personalities of your customer (Buyer Persona).
This is in addition to some other important information that you should know in order to write a professional marketing plan, all this information you will find arranged step by step with practical examples.
Before you start figuring out how to write a marketing plan, you should know that we are not going to discuss what a marketing plan is and its importance, it is assumed that you know this information.
If you do not know it, I advise you to read the article: What is the marketing plan and its importance ? In this article, you will find all the information you need, but now let me tell you how to write a professional marketing plan in a simple way.
1- Write your business executive summary
The executive summary is the introduction to the company’s marketing plan, which should briefly explain some important information in the plan itself, such as:
- Put the company in the market right now by showing some quick stats.
- A quick summary of the company’s general goals.
- The most important marketing objectives that the company seeks to achieve through the new marketing plan.
- Evidence of the company’s success (success stories – comments from customers – evaluation of the company by a specialized agency)
With all this, you have to remember that the executive summary is in the end a summary, so it should not exceed one page, and preferably not exceed 4 paragraphs with some quick statistics.
Practical example of an executive summary
Let’s give a practical example of a tourism company (let’s call it the butterfly), which works in providing online tourism programs through a company’s website. The executive summary of this company may be as follows:
The Butterfly Company seeks to provide a unique tourist experience for every tourist, through various tourism plans that include transfers and accommodation in more than 70 cities around the world.
During the past 12 months, the Butterfly Company was able to expand in 5 new cities, which made the company reach the seventh place in terms of the most organized companies for foreign tourist trips in North Africa.
Because of providing excellent customer service, the Butterfly Company obtained an average rating of (4.6) from users of the Global Company Ranking website for evaluating tourism companies.
During the next 12 months, the company aims to:
- Achieving revenue more than last year by 12%.
- Expansion into 4 new cities around the world.
This is how you write a practical, clear and simple executive summary that anyone can understand, whether inside or outside the company, and thus you will be on the right path to writing a successful marketing plan.
2- Write down the goals and metrics that you will rely on accurately
In order to know how to write a professional marketing plan, you must know exactly the goals that you want to achieve during the time period of the plan itself.
In the previous step, we set just general marketing objectives, but we are now within the same marketing plan, so these objectives must be more detailed and specific.
The metrics upon which the success in achieving these goals will be evaluated must also be clear, and if they are not clear upon consideration, they must be mentioned in the marketing plan in the text.
Practical example of marketing plan objectives
Let’s continue on the same previous example of the Butterfly Company for Tourism Services, whose marketing objectives may be as follows.
1- Increasing the number of monthly site visits to 3000 visits from search engines by:
- Improve SEO efforts.
- Writing new articles on the site at a rate of 5 articles each month.
2- Increasing the percentage of conversions on bookings on the site to reach 2.5%, by modifying the design of the booking landing page and improving the targeting process.
This is how the marketing objectives are set precisely and in detail, detailing the overall marketing objectives of the company itself (increasing revenue by 12%).
When you write goals in your marketing plan, keep the following in mind:
- Objectives should be logical and based on current company data.
- You do not need to detail everything in the plan, for example, “ SEO efforts ” are not detailed, remember that the marketing plan should be small and focused, and these efforts are known to all marketers.
- These objectives must be shared in advance with the relevant departments to confirm their feasibility, and to develop additional needs for their implementation if necessary.
- Objectives are one of the most important parts of the marketing plan that almost all departments of the company are interested in, because they affect them directly, so they must be clear and specific.
Now I have finished a very important part of writing the marketing plan, which in turn will draw the rest of the plan itself, and define the different roles of the rest of the relevant departments.
3- Write down the personality traits of your customers accurately
This step of writing a marketing plan is very important for many reasons, yet some marketers or executives overlook it.
Buyer Persona is important because:
- Determining the most important audience sectors that the company focuses on (university students – working women over 30 years old).
- Determine the problems and pains experienced by these characters.
- Determining the type of content that must be produced in order to address this audience.
- Determine the most important marketing channels that this audience depends on so that the marketing department can focus on them.
Keep in mind that a successful marketing plan should work to bring the ideal customers to the company, not just anyone who might be interested and click on an article link or an ad on social media.
In order to draw the characters of your ideal clients you must collect the following data about each character:
- Name (a default name for each character).
- Age
- sex
- Geographical location
- Function
- Average monthly or annual salary
- Marital status
- Personal habits (sports – reading – video games).
- Your favorite social media platforms.
- Places you may frequent (gym – libraries).
- General interests (weight loss – travel – environment – human rights).
- Personal goals (salary increase – job promotion – having children).
The more accurate this information about the character you draw, the better. This information is very useful for the marketing department, especially for advertising professionals , because it helps them to target accurately.
How to get this information
There are many methods followed by various companies and organizations in obtaining the necessary data to know the identity of customers, such as:
- Conducting opinion surveys for the company’s existing clients.
- Keywords that customers rely on in searching for the company’s services.
- The use of search and information companies.
- Direct communication with clients.
- Search Facebook groups and forums that customers use.
- Searching for some of the profiles of fans of the company’s pages on various social media.
There are many other methods that you may rely on to portray your clients, and there are many tools that may assist you in the research process itself.
Remember that you can create more than one personality for your customers, and even more than one different sector for these customers, depending on the nature of your company’s activity and the labor market.
And to help you master this important step in writing the marketing plan, a complete guide with pictures on how to work your customers’ personality will be presented soon, step by step.
That’s why follow us constantly so that you will be the first to see it as soon as it is published.
4- Make a comprehensive analysis of competitors in the market
We cannot talk about how to write a marketing plan without mentioning doing a comprehensive analysis of competitors, and unfortunately many marketers do not take this step in the right way.
When you perform this step carefully, you will be able to:
- Know your real competitors in the market.
- Find out what exactly they are doing to gain new customers.
- Determine the ideal way to have a place among them in the market, and to outperform them in the future.
There is a lot of information you should collect about your competitors such as:
- The life of the company in the market.
- The size of the company’s capital (the number does not have to be exact).
- The company’s sales volume last year.
- The marketing team you rely on (Does the company rely on external marketing services?)
- What are the e-marketing strategies they rely on ( content marketing – marketing through social media – telemarketing ).
- Their strategy in customer service (e-mail – chat – phone).
When analyzing the different marketing strategies of any competitor, all aspects of this strategy must be studied with numbers and statistics and some examples, if possible.
For example, suppose we are analyzing the marketing strategy of a competitor’s blog, then we will analyze the following elements:
- The amount of traffic that the blog gets.
- The keywords that the blog is targeting.
- The number of different landing pages on the site.
- The type of CTA that is focused on in the blog.
- Topics covered by the blog.
- The strengths of the blog in general.
- Weaknesses that can be exploited, such as (the quality of articles that are not presented in the blog – not relying on email marketing ).
Analyzing competitors may be a bit cumbersome in some areas because there are many marketing channels that can be exploited, but it is a necessary and indispensable step.
Studying and analyzing competitors is not only important in monitoring competitors, or looking for some strategies that your company can benefit from.
But it is also important to monitor the movement of the market in general, to know the different trends that can be exploited, and also to identify weaknesses that you may rely on to develop your own products and services.
Also Read: The Complete Guide to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
5- Write down the marketing strategies that you will rely on
Marketing strategies are the practical steps that you will follow in order to achieve your goals from the marketing plan, and if you read the article “ What is the marketing plan?” The one I mentioned earlier, you will know the difference between them in detail.
The marketing strategy depends on all the previous steps, and also depends on the capabilities that you have. The more of these capabilities, the more diverse marketing strategies you can rely on, such as:
- Content Marketing.
- Social media marketing.
- Video Marketing.
- Marketing through public relations.
- Influencer Marketing.
Every marketing strategy should contain:
- General ideas of strategy.
- Complete information for the implementation of each strategy (eg number of articles to be published – type of articles – how articles are distributed).
- The time plan for implementing each strategy.
- Persons responsible for implementing each strategy.
Defining the marketing strategy is one of the most important steps in writing a professional marketing plan, and for this reason, God willing, we will prepare a complete guide on creating a marketing strategy step by step with examples and images.
6- Determine the marketing budget
The marketing budget is the most important factor in implementing the marketing plan, although sometimes your company may rely on free marketing channels (such as search engine marketing), but these channels may not be completely free.
When shopping through free channels, you may need to:
- Get professional visual effects or create your own.
- Obtaining some information that you may need paid tools and services to obtain (such as SEO tools ).
- Relying on Freelancer to carry out some different tasks (such as designing a professional logo ).
This is in contrast to paid marketing channels (social media ads – sponsoring some important events – influencer marketing) and others.
Determining the marketing budget depends on:
- The company’s total budget.
- The operational budget that the company will need to implement the new marketing plan (purchasing some equipment – increasing the staff).
- The company’s desire for development and growth.
That is why while writing the marketing plan, the budget must be taken into account, because it will affect the various marketing decisions. You may have to postpone some marketing goals if the budget does not allow.
7- Write down the main roles of the different work teams
This step may not be necessary for some companies that consist of simple and well-known work teams, because everyone knows their specific role and does not need a ticket.
Determining roles also depends on the quality of the objectives, as there are many marketing objectives that may require certain tasks from the production department or the customer service department.
For this, communication must occur between all the departments responsible for implementing the marketing plan, and the role of each department in it should be defined in detail to prevent any problems.
8- Make a good marketing plan design
The marketing plan, as we mentioned, should be simple, and at the same time highlight the important numbers and information that each department of the company needs.
Also, sometimes the plan itself is shared with some third party, so the plan must be well and attractively framed.
The best way to design a marketing plan is by relying on infographics that make the process of interpreting and presenting information an easy and interesting process.
In order to be able to design a successful marketing plan, I advise you to read the following guides:
In which you will find all the information and tools you need to design a wonderful infographic simply and at the lowest possible costs, and you do not need to be a professional designer to use these tools.
Because you will find ready-made templates for everything you want:
- Ready-made templates for complete marketing plans.
- Ready-made templates for the characters of your customers.
- Templates ready to display different marketing strategies.
I think you now know how to write a step-by-step marketing plan, and know all the tools and information you need to make that plan complete.
Good luck, and don’t forget to follow the winners so you don’t miss out on the comprehensive marketing guides we publish constantly.
