Marketing plans that detail strategies are at a tactical level. They are more objective, as they focus on a set of specific actions, but they cannot be separated from the strategic plan, which must guide their decisions.
Here are some examples:
- Digital Marketing Plan .
- Content Marketing Plan.
- Social Media Marketing Plan .
- Relationship Marketing Plan.
- Product Marketing Plan.
- Social Marketing Plan.
- Internal Marketing Plan (endomarketing).
This type of plan can be used in larger companies, which have dedicated sub-areas and teams in the Marketing sector for each strategy. But it is also adopted when a particular strategy is fundamental to the Marketing and growth of the company at that time.
If the Strategic Marketing Plan defined, for example, that the company needs a loyalty strategy to improve its results, it may be necessary to develop a tactical plan specifically for this.
Marketing campaign plan
Marketing plans that focus on special database specific campaigns are usually at an operational level. They work in the short term and must be very objective when carrying out actions.
Look at some examples:
- Mother’s Day Marketing Plan.
- Buen Fin Marketing Plan.
- Product Launch Marketing Plan .
- Event Marketing Plan.
Once again, the definitions provided by these plans should not be disconnected from the strategic and tactical plans. If the company’s main objective is to increase sales by 30% that year, the Buen Fin campaign should contribute to that objective.
What are the stages of the Marketing Plan?
Now, let’s unravel the structure and define what the relevant data is and how steps to create a broader, more complete Strategic Marketing Plan that can be adapted to other types of plans.
So, let’s see what are the steps to prepare the Marketing Plan!
1. Company diagnosis
Building the plan starts by looking business sale lead inward . It attempts to summarise the current situation of the company, looking at the business structure, number of employees, sales volume, turnover history, resources, current positioning and management objectives.
In addition to describing the business, it is also important to do a deeper analysis of the company’s strengths and weaknesses and the opportunities and threats in the environment that may influence its performance. The SWOT analysis framework is the most appropriate tool for this step.
The company’s own analyses ensure that the plan is appropriate to the business reality and fits within its budget, as well as aligning it with strategic planning decisions so that it meets business management objectives.
2. Analysis of the business environment
In the second step, it is time to look outside. The business environment analysis should collect data from the macroenvironment and the microenvironment , in order to investigate the factors that may affect the company’s performance during the period of execution of the Marketing Plan.
- demographic;
- economic;
- environmental;
- technological;
- political-legal;
- sociocultural.
In this case, Porter ‘s 5 Forces framework helps to think about the main factors that energize the microenvironment:
- rivalry between competitors;
- the bargaining power of suppliers;
- customers’ negotiating capacity;
- threat of new competitors;
- threat of new products or services.
All these factors can be combined to build future scenarios (optimistic, neutral or pessimistic) and design strategies that strengthen the company in each one.
In this way, the Marketing Plan is designed to anticipate these factors in the business environment, whether positive or negative for the company.
3. Competitive analysis
Among the actors in the microenvironment, one of them deserves to be highlighted: competition.
Find out about your competitors’ performance , the audience they serve, how they communicate with people, how they advertise their products, and what their results are like.
As a competitive intelligence tool, competitor analysis in the Marketing Plan allows:
- search for information for your strategies;
- anticipate market trends and competitor movements;
- identify your position and market share ;
- identify positioning opportunities and competitive advantages .
You might think that you can’t get data from your competitors because it’s confidential. But there are tools that allow you to spy on your competitors, monitor their movements and find out what they’re doing (all in an ethical way, okay?). Google Alerts, SEMrush and SimilarWeb are some examples.
4. Definition of audience and buyer persona
After analyzing the market and competitors, you have a better basis for defining the target audience of your strategies.
The target audience is a group of consumers with similar demographic, psychographic and behavioral characteristics, to whom you will direct the strategies of the Marketing Plan.
To define it, you must divide the market into segments with common characteristics and identify the consumer groups whose needs your business meets. Then, the brand value proposition , which is present in the Marketing Plan strategies, must be aimed at this target segment.
From the description of the target audience, you can also create the Buyer Persona which, unlike the target audience, delves into the behaviors, values, expectations and pains of the audience, synthesized in the construction of a character that represents the company’s ideal client.
At this point, you can also track your buyer persona’s buying journey . Think about your customer’s journey from consideration to purchase and the key behaviors, questions, and pain points at each stage.
This way, you can map out the ideal content, channels, and approaches for each stage of the journey. To put it conceptually: strategies address the target audience, but they speak to the person. Do you understand the difference?
While the target audience brings a generic description for segmentation and positioning purposes , the persona has a more complex and in-depth human profile, which is used to outline content and relationship strategies.