Over the years, marketing has become central to all businesses. Which customers to target? How to prospect? How to build loyalty? All of these questions must be answered in the writing of your marketing plan. This reference document is central to your marketing strategy. It integrates your objectives and especially the actions that you will put in place to achieve them.
#1 – Leverage Environmental Scan
The first step in your marketing plan is to conduct an internal and external analysis. In other words, you will analyze the environment in which your business operates. This step is fundamental to your marketing plan. You will think about the threats and opportunities in your area of activity as well as the strengths and weaknesses of your business in order to see what your key success factors are. This will allow you to better understand how this or that element is your strength or your weakness on the market. It will then be a question of using these conclusions to direct your marketing actions.
A PESTEL analysis may then be necessary and complete the analysis of market threats and opportunities. In other words, you will analyze:
- The environment Policy of your company (aid granted, tax changes, etc.)
- Factors Economic (recession, purchasing power, etc.)
- The elements social (lifestyle changes for example)
- Factors related to Technology (evolution of materials or increasing use of mobile devices)
- Items related toEnvironmental (for example: changes in consumer expectations regarding sustainability)
- Factors Legal related to your business (regulations of the sector of activity for example)
#2 – Define precise marketing objectives
The second step of the marketing plan is to define your marketing objectives.
Before embarking on a strategy omnichannel, it is obvious that you must determine what are the objectives to be achieved: increase in turnover? Development of your notoriety? It is indeed from this that the actions to be implemented will flow. Your set goals should be achievable and realistic.
#3 – Plan your marketing actions
In order to better plan your marketing actions, you can use the 4 P method:
- Product (How does your product meet customer needs?)
- Price(Are you positioning yourself on a discount or on a higher price that provides for the procurement of ancillary services?)
- Place (where do you sell your products? only on the web? in stores and on an e-commerce site?)
- Promotion (how do you reach your customers? which communication channels should be favored according to your target?)
The next step is to evaluate the deadlines. When will it be possible to implement a certain number of actions in order to achieve the defined objectives? It is also up to you to better identify the resources you will need (time, personnel, training, implementation cost, etc.). Finally, the last step consists in verifying that the implementation of the actions has made it possible to move in the right direction. Reporting and statistical analysis are therefore essential.
Discover in video how to better understand the creation of your marketing plan:
In the infographic below, you will find all the steps we talked about above. Divided into 6 steps here, the marketing plan is however approached in the same way as we do above. Note that when you carry out the first step related to the analysis of the environment, it is entirely appropriate to be interested in the opinions, opinions and different content that consumers have been able to generate online on social networks. , on your website, etc. It's not just the numbers that count, although they allow us to better understand the evolution of trends.
