As any entrepreneur knows, starting a business is both exhilarating and challenging. Our businesses have to evolve with a constantly changing marketing landscape, and we have to keep ourselves and our teams competitive. At the same time, we need to build a company culture with our vision as the foundation of our efforts. As we navigate the complexities of bringing our vision to life, one indispensable tool that can pave our way to success is a well-crafted strategic marketing plan.
In this article, we’ll explore the significance of strategic marketing planning for entrepreneurs, and highlight the key components. Over the next several posts in this series, we’ll dive deeper into each part of a Strategic Marketing Plan, providing tactical “how to’s” so you can apply these steps to your business.
What Is a Strategic Marketing Plan?
Strategic marketing planning is the compass that guides our business through the competitive landscape, ensuring that every action is purposeful and aligned with overarching goals. It is the blueprint that transforms our dreams into actionable steps, connecting our business with the right audience at the right time. It also allows us to understand our audience and customers, identify and learn from opportunities, measure success, and optimize our approach so we can continue to grow our business.
- Understanding Our Business Goals
Before delving into the intricacies of a strategic marketing plan, entrepreneurs must have a clear understanding of our business goals. What are we aiming to achieve? Whether it’s increasing brand awareness, driving sales, or expanding into new markets, our marketing plan should align with these objectives. It’s also important to understand the internal and external factors that can impact our goals, and who should be responsible for accomplishing the goals for our organization.
In the next article, we will dive deeper into how to build our business goals, both short term and long term.
- Knowing Our Target Audience
A successful marketing plan is rooted in a deep understanding of our target audience(s). Who are our ideal customers? What are their needs, preferences, and pain points? Tailoring our marketing efforts to resonate with our audiences ensures that our messages are not just heard but make a connection.
In a future article, we will explore strategies we can employ to understand our target audiences and customers.
- Crafting Our Unique Value Proposition
What sets our business apart? Our unique value proposition (UVP) is the secret sauce that captivates our audience. We need to clearly articulate what makes our product or service unique and how it addresses the needs of our customers.
In a future update, we’ll explore the 5 questions business leaders must ask in order to identify our UVP and develop it for success.
- Building Comprehensive Marketing Channels and Objectives
All Strategic Marketing Plans need to have messaging broken out into the channels we plan to use to reach our audiences, as well as objectives for each channel. Video is different from audio, which is different from print. Understanding who our audience is, what media they consume, and where and when they are most receptive to our messaging, is critical to develop a channel strategy with measurable objectives.
In the 4th part of this series, we’ll explore the various channels available to businesses for owned, earned, and paid media.
- Let’s talk about Budgeting
“If you build it, they will come.” If only it were that easy. We all know business doesn’t boom just because it exists. It takes hard, strategic work to find our customers, inform them about our products and services and why we are better than the other options out there. Once we have their business, we need to keep them satisfied and coming back for more.
This takes a marketing budget, which we use across the different channels of marketing and allocate to specific elements of our business: Product, Place, Price, and Promotion. We’ll dive deeper into these Four-P’s of Marketing in our 5th article and how to allocate budget to them appropriately.
- Measure Twice, Cut Once
How do we know what’s working if we aren’t measuring it? Measurement is an often-overlooked and highly undervalued part of marketing, but one that is so critical to driving business insights, understanding, and strategic path forward. It helps us understand what is working – and just as important, what is not working.
We’re going to talk more about the metrics available to marketers, some measurement tools commonly used by businesses, and techniques for understanding how our marketing efforts are performing in the 6th part of our series.
- Messaging – What Are We Going To Say?
Our final article in this series is about messaging, brand tone and creative strategy. Is our brand serious, jovial, fun and bubbly, technical, or some combination? How do we make sure we’re speaking our audience’s language, and appealing to what they want to hear to make them interested in our services and products? And, finally, how often are we speaking to them in the channels we’ve allocated our marketing budget to?
Our messaging strategy will help answer these questions and more, and put us on a path to successfully building relationships with our customers.
Putting It All Together
In the dynamic landscape of entrepreneurship, a strategic marketing plan serves as a guiding compass, ensuring that every action contributes to our business goals. By understanding our business, knowing our audience, and crafting a comprehensive marketing strategy, we can create a powerful narrative that resonates with our customers. Remember that strategic marketing is not just a plan; it’s an ongoing dialogue with our audience, a journey toward building a brand that stands the test of time.
