Within a global market that is becoming more and more competitive, marketing strategies and plans become essential tools to stand out from other companies. Acquiring positioning both on the Internet and in physical establishments is a goal that many companies (no matter how small) set themselves when devising a marketing plan that adapts to their basic needs and objectives.
Marketing departments carry on their shoulders the great responsibility of planning and carrying out actions that, in the short or long term, can satisfy these needs. Below we invite you to learn what a marketing plan is, what is the importance of having one and what are the best techniques to create it.
What is a marketing plan?
A marketing plan is nothing more than a document that incorporates, from a schematic sense, all the steps to be followed by a company to comply with its marketing strategies, based on its sales and representation objectives in the market. However, it should be noted that marketing today is much more than the direct relationship between advertising and sales. It represents a prodigious communication channel between companies and clients and therefore, all their efforts must be focused on defining which public is most interested in their value proposals.
Marketing plans are characterized by collecting and working based on market studies that various specialists in the area prepare in a personalized way, to know what the current trends and situations are in the market, that is, what the most recurrent behaviors of buyers are and what external agents influence them. Therefore, marketing plans are used with the purpose of establishing how companies (from their particularities) can incorporate and subtly influence (through their products and/or services) social dynamics.
What should a marketing plan include?
A marketing plan is made up of: the description of the current situation (market study), the analysis of said situation, the marketing objectives set, the definition of strategies for these objectives and the action programs to carry them out. It is about grouping in the same place a sequence of steps that must be followed completely to meet the demands demanded by companies and their industries. To complement and make our idea more comprehensive, Leticia del Corral points out that a marketing plan must include the following elements:
- Main objectives for that year or period.
- Market and company situation.
- Definition of the company’s clients.
- Main campaigns to be carried out and expected objective of each campaign.
- Annual action plan showing when and who will execute the different actions scheduled for that year.
- Budget to be invested in each action.
- Contingency plan in case the actions are not working, what will be done.
Importance of creating a marketing plan for your company
Minimize risks
In marketing, as in any other management activity, any action that is carried out without proper planning involves a high risk of failure or a wide loss of resources and efforts.In the business world, planning becomes an important action to minimize risks, prevent bad decisions and make the most of the resources (human and economic) that companies have at their disposal.
Creating a marketing plan for your company, in this sense, is important because it allows you to always know what the next step that your work team will take will be to meet your set objectives. A marketing plan represents a work guide on which all your marketing actions will be based in the coming months. This programming basically acts as a compass that will prevent you from losing your way halfway, it will keep you subject to a purpose and if you make a mistake, it will have quick solutions previously designed for those cases. Creating a marketing plan helps you have everything clearly calculated and not lose sight of anything.
Measure your achievements and failures
It is well known that what is not measured cannot be improved. In this sense, marketing plans, due to their systematic structuring, allow you to compare how effective or not your actions were, in relation to other plans that you have executed in previous years, with the aim of measuring what your achievements and failures were. Trying to make a project or campaign succeed without relying on a marketing plan is like trying to navigate a stormy sea without a fixed direction.
This, without a doubt, is detrimental to justifying the impact you want to achieve on your audiences and will not allow you to evaluate where you went wrong if you did not have the results you wanted. Without a marketing plan, you will never know how you have achieved your results and therefore, you will be much more exposed to market upheavals.
In this way, creating a marketing plan for your company is important because it helps you quantify your triumphs and failures, in terms of profitability ( ROI ) and the impact of your relationships with your potential clients (IOR). Given the dizzying transformations that occur in the market, creating a marketing plan will help you know at what point it is necessary to change or not, a certain action.
Budget consciously
A marketing plan provides you with a clear vision of the final objective and what you want to achieve on the way to the goal. For example, obtaining 10,000 followers on Instagram in the first quarter of the year can be an optimal goal for your marketing plan. What financial resources and how you will use them to achieve those 10,000 followers (or other set goals) is the great challenge that you must set with concrete actions within your plan.
That a marketing plan allows you to know what budget you have for each stage and future action is of great importance so that you can plan your resources for the year more objectively. It represents an anchor point to justify your long-term expenses and investments and consciously plan your budget.
With your marketing plan, you have the advantage of collecting the necessary data to calculate how long it will take your team to cover each stage, which gives you an idea of the time you should use to do so, what personnel you should allocate to achieve the realization of your goals. objectives and what financial resources you can have. Your company administrators will be able to work in parallel to that plan and help you correctly manage your income.
A marketing plan, as we have already observed, provides you with multiple benefits in terms of resource management, measurement of achievements and strategy planning. It is recommended that at the beginning of each year, creating a marketing plan be one of your main tasks, since this will allow you to have a solid direction from start to finish.
