Why is a Marketing plan so important?

Hey marketing enthusiasts. I have been working on a thorough Marketing Plan recently and thought you might find it useful if I gave my summary on why a comprehensive Marketing plan will ensure business success. My main passion is Digital Marketing, so that’s the topic I talk about below, but this plan applies to Marketing as a whole and any of its subsidiaries.

Having a strong Digital Marketing plan sets the foundation for business success. Clear objectives, missions and visions on all levels set the tone of the business for the short, medium and long term. Detailed research must go into your target markets, audiences, competitors and own business to ensure a sound foundation to your plan.

The overall objective of your Digital Marketing plan is to identify sustainable and profitable competitive advantage year on year. As Marketing in general is responsible for delivering value to stakeholders as well as your audience, a comprehensive plan should be developed to satisfy their interest too; this could be delivered through an executive summary or presentation. With all customer touch points being a part of Marketing, key sections of your plan should be communicated to the whole business; this will ensure that everyone is working together to deliver what you hope to promise your audiences.

So what should your Digital Marketing Plan include? Well all plans are different, but these are the topics we find most valuable:

1. Introduction to the plan
2. An Executive Summary

2.1 Current Position
2.2 Key Issues/Challenges​

3. Organisation Vision, Mission & Values
4. Marketing Vision & Mission
5. Situation Analysis

5.1 Customer Touch Points
5.2 Learnings from Last Year
5.3 An Overview of Today’s Market
5.4 Current Target Markets
5.5 Current Audiences
5.6 SWOT Analysis
5.7 Competitor Research
5.8 Internal Departmental Relationship Analysis​

6. Assumptions
7. Organisation and Marketing Objectives

7.1 Short Term (1-3 Years)
7.2 Medium Term (3-5 Years)
7.4 Long Term (5 plus Year)​

8. Resource and Budget Requirements

8.1 Resource breakdown
8.2 Budget Breakdown​

9. Activity Plan

9.1 Marketing Mix
9.2 Campaign Management
9.3 Display Advertising
9.4 Social Media
9.5 Any Other Activities e.g. Radio Advertising etc​

10. Tracking and Evaluation
11. Appendix

To assist you with creating and presenting your plan, we have created some free Digital Marketing templates for you to download.

 

Great post SimplyDigim! Unfortunately, not many will go through the process of creating
a good marketing plan. All too busy chasing the latest traffic gimmicks and empty promises.

I am a strong proponent of operating an online business just as you would an offline business.

 

Thanks for your thoughts. Agree about online and offline business operation, think you are spot on.

Unfortunately you are right about the marketing plan, it can be a lengthy process, but I believe if you are serious about getting ahead the invested time is worth the return. Hopefully the templates will help speed things up

 

Nice reminder! Marketing plan is so important for any online or offline business. Success and profit comes from a really good and really well marketing plan

 

Completely agree, gives everyone clarity and sets them off in the right direction!

 

You need a plan. If you don't have one, GET ONE. If not you will probably end up like 98% of other online marketers, just aimlessly wandering around, reading, posting, not getting any work done.

Best of luck,
Justin

 

I agree that a number of Marketers try and short cut this vital process, so this is good to hear guys.

 

Oh my head is spinning looking at that marketing plan. I like to keep things reeeally simple.

1. Who's my market?
2. How do I reach them?
3. Provide them with something they need or want.

Done. Haha...of course it's a little more involved than that.

 

Yeah it's a lot of work! But worth the investigation, you can find out some interesting stuff about your main competitors.

I like simple too; I stick to 3 core principles for Digital Marketing: Be found, Be Clear and Be memorable...this has proved successful for me in the past

 

Because without a plan people tend to:

1. Go beyond where they should
2. Forget things
3. Spend too much time on one thing, at the expense of another.

 

Yeah, it definately sets the foundation!

 

thanks for your detailed post about marketing plan. only plan is not enough but good plan can drive you to the extreme success. so your post is really helpful.
thanks

 

Marketing plan is like a framework which make a strategy to accelerate the marketing in order to maximizing profit. Without any proper planning a person can not focus on the goal.

 

I think that takes too much time, and we all know that time is money

 

Time is money, but investing time in the right areas, a strong Marketing plan being one, brings the biggest return. Without the plan, which doesn't always need to cover everything above, how do you know if you are heading in the right direction? Even if you know that, how do you know if you are getting there in the most efficient and effective way? Your Marketing plan will ensure you stay focused on adding sustainable, profitable value to your audience and stakeholders. That's how you make money.

 

Actually that's pretty spot on. The hard part is actually doing the work.

 

This is interesting to hear all your views.

The 3 questions are a good start, but for me there is lots more to understand and answer; for example how do you create a competetive advantage without understanding your mission, vision, situation, competitors etc?

 

Exactly exploit the 98% of the retards who can't be arsed doing jack shit. Become the 2% who bank 90% of all the money in this industry and leave the rest of the losers to scrub up the nickles let behind.

 

thanks for your thoughts, it's pretty well structered

 

Your welcome, it seems most people agree on the importance of a Marketing plan. That's good news!