Welcome to More to Marketing, a podcast on marketing product, and everything in between. I’m your host, Susan, and today we’re here to talk about marketing plan. Now, this is gonna be a high level discussion, but you’re gonna get lots of tips and tricks to understand what the marketing plan is, what needs to include, and what you should be focusing some of your effort onto.
Now the marketing plan is about specific campaigns. A lot of people get confused between a marketing strategy and a marketing plan. Think about it this way. A marketing strategy is the why. The why behind this. Why are you doing this? Why are you doing that? Why are you getting this involved? Why are you going to these customers?
Why is it important to your business? All those why’s. There’s lots and lots of why’s, whereas the marketing plan is, How, how are we going to do this? And you can’t do that for every single y. You’ve gotta break it down into [00:01:00] different marketing plans for your, what I would call campaigns. So that’s how the marketing plan works.
You have different ones for every type of campaign or activity you’re trying to bring to market or trying to deliver. That is your how, and we’re gonna talk about this how document. , there are many phases to the marketing plan, so you need to understand them so that you do the best you can to optimize your opportunities for the future.
The first one is the actual product or service. What are you actually bringing to market? What are you actually gonna be focusing this campaign on? What is it about? Niche differentiation, value add. What is it? What makes it special? What makes it stand out? What happens out there in the world to make it so special that you must sing about it?
Two customer base. The persona personas are so important and I don’t think enough people do things with personas, so we’ll talk a bit about that. Three, the competitor [00:02:00] analysis and just industry analysis in general. Not just swat, there’s more to life than just swat. Everyone, four resources. Who’s gonna do the how?
There’s a big question mark there. Five goals and KPIs. How do you know something successful if you don’t measure it? If you don’t know what you wanna do, you don’t know what good or successful or great looks like. Because if you’re gonna do this again in the future, How do you improve? You need to have a benchmark.
You need to have an understanding about what you wanna achieve. Then last but not least, number six, timing and media. Now, in this case, media is talking about your actual marketing mix out there for if you’re going to be going into above the line, advertising, below the line, are you gonna be focusing on your base?
All those kind of bits and pieces. Now one clear thing is with marketing plans, sometimes when you put them into market, it does take a [00:03:00] bit of time. And depending how big the program is, it might take six to 12 months to recap your benefits. So do keep that in your mind, depending on how big you’re going, depends on how much it’s gonna take.
Phase one product or service, what is your gap? Is there a gap in the market at all or isn’t there? Are you just a copycat? What is your value add? What makes you different? This special? What are you actually bringing to market? What is your PERC or service? As part of when you are bringing your product to life, you should have actually answered the question, what were you trying to solve?
So your campaign that you’re bringing about with your marketing plan should help answer that question. It should make it really simple for customers to realize, or prospective customers, I should say, understand why they choose you. And that should be really clear in everything that you deliver so that they know that’s what you’re synonymous for.
They know that’s what you stand for, and then your brand gets that recognition. [00:04:00] As part of this, you need to be able to understand what gap you’re filling in the market. Is it simply that, uh, it’s a color? So if I go to Henry Ford, which is, this is a really basic example, but he only did black cars, but you wanted to help the purple people.
Well, having that car in purple would help the purple people. So that’s identifying a gap in market cuz not everyone wanted black. There was a gap cuz there was people that wanted purple. I’d like a purple car by the way. Uh, I’ve got a red one now. The other thing that you need to be able to understand about that product or service is that you might actually identify a new prospect.
So if I use baby wipes as an example here, Baby wipes aren’t just for babies. They’re targeted for the parents, the carers, whoever it is, looking after the child to clean up the child, however, You can easily put another label on that that could target it to another prospect, which is probably people that like makeup or [00:05:00] people that like a nice cleansing wipe because a lot of the time it’s got water, it’s got aloe vera, it’s got other things in.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be called a baby wipe. It could be a nice refresher wipe. Or, um, night after wipe. So you can have the same product but stick a different label on it. And you’ve identified a new prospective market and a gap with your existing product. So just another way to look at that one there, but keep that in mind when you’ve got your products or services out there.
You might think one target, but you find out it’s another. And that’s also what research comes in foot two, so you understand who is actually buying your product. Might not be who you identified, but really you need to know your u s. Your unique selling proposition, what makes you special? What makes you sing out?
What makes you special? It could be that it makes someone feel so fabulous. It could be anything and everything imaginable, but you need to be able to sell that in the story and tell people it, and be clear and be authentic about it. [00:06:00] That will help you identify. Who you are trying to solve the problem for, and they’ll be able to see it.
And then they’ll also help you define your niches. So it’s very important to understand your U S P customer base. Phase two did touch on this a moment ago, and it’s great to understand your actual target market because really marketing funds are limited. You don’t wanna waste your time and efforts somewhere where you’re not gonna get returns.
So it’s really great to understand. I always recommend staying off with if you are lucky and you already have an existing base, understand. Maybe even do a survey out to them, um, asking them simple questions or find out, um, why they’re actually dying from you in the first place, what attracts ’em to you, and then find out who’s paying the most and why.
There’s a lot you can learn from that. And you can also go out and look for lookalike prospects as well, which will help you save money in the long time when you’re doing your marketing funds. Marketing segmentation though is fundamental for all of this. And if you don’t understand market segment, Might have some problems.
So, we’ll, we’ll do a quick little [00:07:00] dive into this. So your very first segmentation when you’re looking at making segments, uh, for your bases or prospects is one behavioral. So you wanna group these in categories like this, spinning habits, loyalty, brand habits, et cetera. Then you get your psychographic, which is your personal traits and beliefs, your core values and hobbies.
So this is great. For example, if you’re doing something like with a unique group, uh, they might be fashion, they might be, um, into alcohol. They could be all different kinds of ways here that you could actually break this down and you could find more about these people from their psychographics.
Geographic physical location can make a difference of some products and services too, and how they can actually be able to be categorized for customer bases because they might not be able to get to you, or it might be how you deliver it. Four demographics. So these are your identifiable traits. You should have this, but um, it’s got other things as well.
So religion, education, [00:08:00] income, ethnics, gender, those kind of things can also help specifically if you’ve got some targeted types of products that might be only for one type of individual group. So it’s great to be able to understand that for market segment. Now, once you’ve got all this together, you can actually start seeing the customer base and actually maybe even coming up with customer personas.
Now, customer personas where you actually put a name. To a segment they recommend no more than five. I would do probably two to three myself. Sometimes one, if it’s just something really basic. But the customer segment’s all about who is that person that is a key buyer? Who is that key decision maker? What do they look like?
Who are they? So I give them a name. So it might be Jane, she might be 25, she might be located in the Sydney Eastern suburbs. Finances, well, she’s X, y, Z, and then she’s got a family of y. Um, and then you go into the personal [00:09:00] motivations and goals around what your productal service is. So for example, if I was doing one for a such a uni project I did recently for, for Telco, it was.
I want to ensure I have a telco service where I can travel anywhere within Sydney and always have coverage, uh, or I always wanna have a telco service that is best value for money and caters to the needs that I have. Eeg, I love to use X, Y, Z of data every month. Those kind of things help you build up what your persona looks like to then understand who to market, and you might even get some insights about your products that you might or.
Mine or might not wanna build as well because you might actually have some discoveries that you find out of this too. I find a lot of mine out from, uh, actual voice of customer, which is where you actually listen to what your customers are saying. I might get that from my call sender managers from product review sites, from feedback directly from customers, [00:10:00] uh, surveys into customers.
But it’s very vital for me to be able to understand what my customer needs so that I deliver what they want so that they get the best experience. But prospects are great, but we want them to be customers. Now, in this customer base, it’s also good to understand what a customer looks like when they’re going through the marketing funnel, also known as a sales funnel.
Now, you can picture an actual funnel, one of those things that you shove into your car to pour oil into. So at the top of the funnel, you’ve got awareness, it gets a bit skinnier. You got your interest bit skinnier. You got your, I’m considering it. And then natural funnel piece that drops in. You see that little bit liquid go through, that’s your purchase.
So the reason why it gets narrower or narrower, narrow is because you drop off people along the way. It’s very rare to get a hundred percent the whole way through. It’s usually drop-offs, and that’s something we like to be able to measure and look. It really gives some really good insights in case you’ve got things, so [00:11:00] you’ve got a website, you can understand where you’ve got drop offs, you understand what might be happening in the cart, that you might have problems on your side, or improvements you can make.
It’s really good to be able to understand that and the purchase journey and decisions that have been made and why. Now, this funnel itself, let’s go back up to the very top awareness. That’s your organic or paid events, uh, social media. It’s how they find out about you in the first place that you haven’t done a lot to, to gain it, but they’re now getting awareness of you.
You could have actually done a bit, you could have done a major campaign. That’s how they found out about you. So Well, it could be both ways there. Interest. Number two, this is, well, they, they’re actually shown interests. They’ve come to the website or they’ve gone into the store or they’ve some kind, some kind of connection starting to happen here.
Do you wanna start nurturing? That could be through emails, social media responses, cuz you like to stalk them. That’s what I call it. Uh, newsletters, targeted ads. It could be some kind of communication that’s more one way, but they’re interested. They’ve signed up for it, [00:12:00] they wanna know more. Three consideration.
So they’ve been doing their research, they’re now actually seriously putting some time in. So this is where referrals high, um, rankings when it comes to reviews. Free trials might even persuade them, discounts case studies or stories just to get them over the lines so they understand what you’re delivering and what they’re gonna get.
Cause they wanna benefit. And you wanna secure that purchase. And the fourth one as we spoke about, is purchase. So the prospect has become a customer, they are now converted. That’s amazing. But this doesn’t end the funnel. The funnel actually has a couple of other steps and that is you want them to become a referral and you want them to repeat by, so you wanna be able to keep them in the life cycle journey going on.
So it’s very important that you continue that down a different. And that’s what we call customer lifetime value. So now that you understand your base, you [00:13:00] understand your target audience for your campaign that you got in your marketing plan, you’ve now got your marketing funnel. You understand all that?
You got your market segment, you’ve got your purse, yeah, your customer persona going, what’s next? Phase three, analyzing, understanding research, internal and external. And this can help with some informal decisions and formal decisions. , you can also start doing some, um, really good market analysis in the industry as well.
But there’s really two types of, um, when you’re looking at different products out there that you really gotta consider when you’re doing research against competitors for your campaign, and that’s gonna be your direct competition. So what can, what’s the same or similar? or what is an indirect or close substitute, they’re the two areas that you should be checking out when you’re doing your competitor analysis.
You wanna see what people are gonna consider, what’s the customer actually going to consider during this journey, and you wanna be able to understand it and hopefully [00:14:00] mitigate it with whatever you bring to market in your fabulous marketing. This also helps you understand the actual strengths and weaknesses of yourself, but also your competitors.
So you can build a story around that. It could be some great social media pieces. It might be part of your marketing material itself. The reason why we look at the marketing of what our competitors are doing in their strategies that they’re doing there is because that’s where our customer base is cross.
Customers are rarely a hundred percent loyal these days, so most of the time we’re stealing off each other all the time. So it’s good to understand what they’re doing and what you can do to make things better. It’s important to also make sure that you don’t just do your research once, that you don’t do your competitive analysis once.
You’ve gotta make sure you’ve got your finger on the pulse. Cause the market changes all the time with what competitors are doing and new competitors to market. And also, like I said, those indirect or close substitutes. So at a minimum, I’ll do it at AOP time if you can quarterly, depending on if you’re gonna be [00:15:00] doing some big major campaigns.
SWAT is a good one to include just to make, just cuz it’s, it’s usually pretty quick if you’ve been keeping in touch of everything and just keeping in touch with the market. But I highly recommend at least swat, a key reason is the output. The output of these means that you can implement it into your plan, understand what your computers are doing, and have mitigations, so you’ve got the threats and the weaknesses covered off.
You’ll co also capitalize on your own strengths and the available opportunities in market and develop that really targeted marketing campaign for this plan. The industries, some industries are oversaturated. When you’re looking at industry analysis, I look at if it’s saturated or not. If you’ve got the niche in which one it is, it might be multiple in your differentiations, and what makes you stand out from the crowd within those competitors, and I’ll write it against all of them.
I’d also look at what’s trending. So if you can, and if you’ve got the opportunities, try and join some of those, uh, future [00:16:00] trending communications because you never know what the new product or new wave is gonna be and how your product might be implemented. But how do you do a competitive review and how do you do your own against it?
So there’s some key headlines here. I’ll read them out. So the first one would be your brand overview. Who is it specific value? What do they bring? What’s so special about them? Their targeted demographics versus the real demographics location, the products and services, the quality. What grade is it at?
Reputation, what’s the review saying out there? What is the apps, um, app store saying market growth? What are the opportunities? Is saturate is a future, uh, blue ocean going on there? What’s going on? Company culture. Uh, social channels, where are they? Where they’re talking, where are they engaging with people?
What are their ad campaigns looking like? What’s their pricing strategy? Do they ever have any discount, don’t they? What else do they do there? How do they actually go to market with all this? And what’s their general strengths and weaknesses? So with all of this, you can actually pull together a really great [00:17:00] understanding of not only your strengths and weaknesses, your opportunities, your research areas, gaps, niches, et cetera, but also your competitors and how you rank.
And with this, you can make your targeted campaign even stronger, and that’s the whole idea of this marketing plan. As you can see, we are building on it and building on it, and building on it to make it as strong as we can with all these pieces of your marketing plan. Phase four, though. Who’s gonna do this?
There is your resources. So resources aren’t just who’s in the marketing team. It’s all and everyone that’s available that can touch and help out. So when we are talking staff here, or resources, it’s uh, your marketing people. Where that department could look like a marketing manager, content maker, visual designer, data analyst, even technology expert.
Cause you need to build some apps and make changes to websites. You got some SEO content there too. Sending SEO expert public relations in case you have to do something there. And [00:18:00] social media. So you’ve got, there could potentially be a lot of individuals involved just there, but there might just be the one person doing most of this as well.
but you’ve also got other people that are involved, like your call center, your floor staff, your managers, anyone and everyone’s involved in some way, shape, or forms. You wanna make sure you have that really good look at who your stakeholders are and how they’re involved. Budget, how much money do you actually have for your campaign?
Is it small budget, big budget? The budget includes resources, your time. Even the marketing mix itself, where you’re gonna go out to, so you gotta make sure you include all those, but you’re gonna think internally and externally, how much can you do internally and how much do you need help from external?
and we’re talking contractors or other organizations jumping in. So you’ve gotta factor that in because like I said, that was a big list of different types of roles. You might outsource a whole part of that. There’s nothing wrong with that. You can get some great companies that go out there and they can do a big [00:19:00] batch of all the artwork you need in a short period of time, and it’s worth it.
So don’t dismiss that. There’s opportunities there to save time because not everyone can do everything. You’ve gotta stop, drop, stop, drop, keeping going. But if you get other people to help you, that’s all help happening parallel, which means you’re not able to achieve your goal because you’re all working together.
Five. But what is that goal? What are those KPIs, phase five goals and KPIs. Now, this is where you really need to have a benchmark. No one knows what success is unless you write it down to start with, so you know what you’re gunning for. And a lot of individuals and teams love goals, so don’t underestimate the importance of putting a goal onto something.
It could be as simple as a brand awareness, like social media mentions, PR mentions, or even just. The amounts of responses you get on like [00:20:00] ticks or thumbs up, whatever it might be, but it doesn’t always have to be a giant number. Sometimes it’s about the engagement in many businesses and products and services.
It’s more about the engagement is worth more than the volume, so don’t just always go for a huge number. Think about quality over quantity. Because quality, a lot of the times for these type of campaigns when we’re talking marketing campaigns here, is because you want them to become a customer, and that’s important because you want to be able to have that conversation, that connection, and build it with them.
So we wanna have some kind of goal where we can monitor and refine it if we need to. There’s nothing wrong with refining things. Sometimes that has to happen cuz face it. I’m sure there’s a lot of businesses out there that had certain goals and then Covid came along and then things had to change. So some things happen that are out of your control.
So refining them is okay, as long as you can understand why and tell other people and [00:21:00] they understand. Most cases, return on investment is a. You wanna be able to possibly see C, so that’s C. A C, which is customer acquisition cost. So you know how much each cost the customers cost you every time that you spent marketing money.
Another one is your landing pages. So it could be your conversion rate, your site traffic, your engagement going on there. Some other ones I’ll just mention here is C P I, cpl, sorry, cost per lead, ccpc cost per click, clv, customer life cycle value. But no matter what you’re doing with your tracking process, make sure you have smart targets.
Uh, talking the acronyms. Smart. So S for specific M measure A for achievable, R for relevant, and T for time. , it’s very important because then you can actually talk to anyone about what you were trying to achieve, did you get there? And when you go for your next campaign, what can you do to improve upon it?
What learnings do you have? [00:22:00] PI’s pro? Uh, performance in reviews are extremely important and you have to have some kind of goal or target set to be able to perform them properly. So even putting down the time you’re gonna go to market, what date did you hit? Did you land on it? What happened in the mean?
And then how you actually performed. That will all help in improvements in the future. Six is your timing. So, uh, just touched on timing and also your media. So timing is everything. It, it really is. You’ve got your milestones that you’ve gotta hit the funds available in your budget. What time do they hit for you?
Are you seasonal product for your marketing campaign that you are pr you are doing here in your marketing plan? Is it a big launch, small launch? And is it a reoccurring event? So a lot of those will take into impact about your timing and also how you’re gonna use your media. Convert, how much money are you actually going to to spend?
So question, a lot of people ask, what is the value that you put onto marketing? How much should you spend to actually acquire new customers? [00:23:00] So rule of thumb out there is a b2c. So business to consumer is about five to 15% of your revenue. And then a B2B business to business is up to 5%. So that’s just on average.
I would increase that if it was a newer product market or a newer business where it’s unknown, you might need a little bit of an injection at the beginning, and then you tailor it down to this. So that becomes. These kind of rates I just spoke about as your every day. Um, however, when you are a more established business, it might be the opposite, where you can actually get away with spending a lot less because you’ve got that base and you’re a lot well known, and people come to you and are expecting things from you.
That is an awesome position to be in. Costs and potential costs. So when we’re talking here about the marketing plan, you’ve got your ad and content creation costs, and that’s for your organic and your paid content and potentially for your ambassador or an influencer. You need a budget for that if you’re gonna be engaging any of those type of individuals.
Social media, most of the time it’s not free for [00:24:00] businesses. You do have to pay for those ads because you might not be as attractive if you’re just doing organic posts and you may actually put some money. Going in and finding a lookalike audience with a partner. So you might have to pony up a little bit of funds there, or a co-op or some kind of other agreement there.
and then you’ve got your scheduling going on there. So again, coming back to timing, cuz you’ve gotta schedule all this and you’ve gotta work with people on all of this. Even trying to get into some display advertising areas, you need to have booked it in advance. And most importantly, make sure you have all this documented in a content calendar so you know what’s happening when and where.
And you can put this back to the relevant spikes that you’ll have in your. Or, um, traffic to site or whatever other metric that you’re watching so you can actually see this picking up and down and is it working, not working? Are you getting the traffic you wanted? Are they going to your Instagram? Are they going to your website?
Wherever you are trying to get them to go or their movements to do, you can track that. [00:25:00] And that’s why it’s great to have that content calendar alongside your marketing plan, alongside your marketing calendar, so that you can see what’s happening when, and that’s great for in the future for more optimiz.
Marketing spend really is that fuel. It’s that fuel to get people to come to you and to grow. And digital marketing budget is essential. You need that These days, everyone, almost everybody is in some way shape connected to digital and. Is how you’re gonna get to your audience. You need to be smart.
Understand the timing of when to talk to them, understand where they are, so you’re talking to ’em with the right media mix, and if you need to have some urgency to any deadlines needed. The other important thing about marketing plans when it comes to timing, And also budgets and overall is your willingness to adapt.
You may need to pivot if something happens in market. If a competitor comes out, um, say your nearest competitor drops a brand new product or a big sale a week before you’re about to launch, and [00:26:00] it really will impact you in a negative way, not necessarily help you along the way. You might need to pivot and change or change your timing or change your messaging.
Um, idea. on your successful campaigns that you’ve done in the past. Learn from the past. That’s how you make things better in the future. Otherwise, you’re just gonna be stuck in the same, right in the same circle. You need to evolve and innovate. , things change all the time, so you need to be willing to change with it.
So having that mindset that you’re happy to pivot and adjust we are required, will make things so much smoother for you and the team and make your product more successful cuz you are now listening to your customer when they need it and why they need it and you are there for them. When you’re delivering those messages, make sure there’s consistency in the messaging.
Make sure that it is aligned with your, your brand, your product, what you’re trying to do, and you have that niche and differentiation out there. Those key pieces will help you in making sure that you are gonna be the best you can. [00:27:00] Continue to research. Always make sure you’re staying relevant cuz you don’t know what’s gonna change.
As I keep harping on about, change is inevitable and if you’ve got your finger on the pulse, you could be the leader there and that means you can gain and that’s what you want. You wanna be successful. You want your marketing campaign to work, you want your products into, well, you wanna hit those fantastic goals that you’ve set so that you can set some even bigger ones for the future and continue that grow and to innovate and to grow and to innovate.
And that’s the beauty of the marketing plan. When you put these six phases together, the product and service, the customer base or those personas and everything, your analytics, uh, and your analysis of the market and yourself, your resources behind it. Putting in some really great goals and KPIs and then having that timing and your media all aligned.
When you combine all those together, you’ll have that successful how, how you’re going to be delivering all of this, how you are going to be amazing, how you’re going [00:28:00] to bring this new innovation. When you put all of these six together, you really will grow and have a fantastic marketing plan. I hope this episode of Modern Marketing has helped you understand the marketing plan.
I’ll be touching on some of these more in detail in the future, but if you have any questions, please reach out and don’t forget to follow modern Marketing to hear more great podcasts and have some future fabulous guests more to marketing.
