Marketing Strategy

Have you got a Marketing Plan in place for 2024?

Written by Debbi Young

Strategic Marketing and the importance of Product Positioning

Download the Snap 30 Minute Marketing Plan and turbo-charge your business

They say that by failing to plan, you are planning to fail.

Often spoken in jest, but never truer than in marketing. But if you don’t have a marketing background, where do you start?

Maybe you are worried that it needs a lot of effort and time to do properly. Not true – its much more important to plan something rather than nothing at all.

So here is our quick and dirty marketing plan that won’t take too long to write, but will turbo-charge your marketing effectiveness. There’s even a spreadsheet to help you put it all together that you can download from the link below.

Start with the Customer

Explore your target customer and his needs, and work out your proposition based on this rather than what you offer. And you must do this BEFORE:-

doing any branding
or producing a brochure
or designing a new website
or producing an outbound email
or any other kind of marketing ….

Follow this link to my blog to help you define your proposition or product positioning.

The Marketing Planning Process

There are just three simple parts to my quick Marketing Plan.

First is a written overview of your objectives,
Second is the strategy for achieving them;
and third is a marketing calendar that forms both your budget and a timeline for your marketing activity.

Use the overview to define your Business Objectives and Marketing Strategy:-

Business Objectives

These need to be quantified – for example income/profit/market share

Analysis of past performance – last 3 years for example
State the Value proposition and the benefits that accrue
Identify the target market
Brand identity and Niche

Marketing Strategy

List 5-10 marketing tactics

That worked
That you want to try
With expected outcome
Set a budget to invest in marketing

From these 2 elements of the marketing plan, populate the calendar with activities that will drive your business.

The Marketing Activity Calendar

The marketing calendar should become the driver of your whole commercial activity. It really important that each activity is diarised for implementation and that once its set up that you stick to it. If the unexpected happens, make the changes to the plan immediately and implement that one rigorously instead.

We’ve put together a really simple template for you to use – its an excel spreadsheet and will take about 30 minutes to kick off.