If you want to market your company effectively, you'll need a marketing strategy and a marketing plan. That means establishing what you want to achieve and how you’re going to achieve those things. When you’re creating your strategy and plan, you should always bear your business goals in mind. So, how should you use these goals to determine how you’re going to approach your marketing?
Your marketing strategy should include high-level marketing goals, based on the goals within your overall business plan. It should also explain why marketing will help you to achieve your business goals and contain key information, such as your user personas, details about your competitors, and the marketing guidelines that your company uses.
Your marketing plan should then lay out what you're going to do to achieve the goals detailed in your marketing strategy. It should also set more specific targets. While that may sound complicated, here's how this can work:
Business goal: To successfully launch a new product.
Marketing strategy goal: To promote this product to your target market using inbound marketing techniques in order to generate sales.
Marketing plan goal: To generate a specific number of sales within six months of your product's launch date by:
Building a dedicated landing page for it on your website
Publishing posts relating to it on your blog
Talking about it on your social media accounts
Creating product-specific pay-per-click (PPC) digital ad campaigns
Launching product-driven email marketing campaigns
You can create similar breakdowns to achieve other goals, such as increasing brand awareness, boosting sales, or cutting acquisition costs.
Ensuring that your objectives are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely) will help you hone your efforts and monitor your progress. The marketing plan goal that we mentioned above, for example, can quickly be adapted to meet all these criteria. It's already specific, measurable, and timely. If you work out exactly how many sales you could reasonably expect to make within six months, based on market research and your previous experience of launching products, you can also make it achievable and realistic. What's more, you could tweak the bullet-pointed marketing methods (e.g. launching product-driven email marketing campaigns) to make these SMART goals too.
If each step in your business plan is accompanied by a step in your marketing plan, every marketing activity you undertake will propel you further towards achieving your company's aims. Staying focussed on your business goals allows you to keep your costs to a minimum and maximise your chances of success. Ensuring your business and marketing plans are consistent will help everyone in your company to work to achieve the same things – and that will make it easier for them to work collaboratively.
For more information about how utilising this tactic could benefit your company, talk to one of our experts today. We can help deliver a goal-oriented marketing plan that boosts your company's results throughout the coming year.
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