Every solo-preneur has a different approach to business. Some like to jump in and figure it out as they go, while others prefer a more structured and careful methodology.
As a marketer, of course I'm biased on which approach will be more effective. I've seen first hand how a well-defined marketing plan can help you achieve your business goals and guide your efforts to attract, engage, and retain clients and customers effectively.
In this blog, we'll delve into the benefits of a crafting and following defined marketing strategy to help you navigate the journey of building a modern online business.
Benefits of A Structured & Strategic Marketing Plan
A marketing plan is a comprehensive document that outlines a business's marketing strategies and tactics to promote its products, services, or brand to its target audience. It includes information like target market, value proposition, proposed marketing campaigns, and success metrics.
A unified, cohesive and organized and systematic approach to achieving your goals will help you to maintain focus, ensuring that each action we take has intention and significance. A well-crafted, well-executed framework to marketing offers numerous benefits to businesses of all sizes and scales:
Clarity and Direction: A clear outline for achieving business goals, noting specific objectives, target markets, and tactics, giving businesses a sense of direction and focus.
Alignment with Business Objectives: Ensures that marketing efforts are aligned with overall business objectives, helping prioritize activities that contribute to growth and profitability.
Better Resource Allocation: Helps businesses make informed decisions about resource use, helping to prevent wasteful spending and wasted time/effort.
Targeted Marketing: Allows businesses to tailor their marketing messages and strategies to specific audience needs and preferences, helping increase effectiveness of marketing efforts and improving ROI.
Consistency and Cohesion: Ensures consistency across all marketing channels and touchpoints, helping maintain a unified brand identity and message, strengthening brand recognition and trust among customers.
Measurable Results: Allows businesses to measure progress, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions to optimize marketing strategies and performance.
Adaptability and Flexibility: Allows for adaptability and flexibility in response to changing market conditions, consumer trends, and business needs, enabling businesses to pivot quickly and adjust strategies as needed to stay competitive.
Competitive Advantage: Gives businesses a competitive edge by differentiating them from competitors, attracting and retaining customers, and positioning them as industry leaders.
Long-Term Growth: Lays the foundation for continued success and growth, helping businesses build brand equity and establish a loyal customer base over time.
Note: While a marketing plan outlines specific marketing tasks, schedules, and resources to achieve marketing goals, a marketing strategy details how a business engages its audience and conveys value. A business plan, on the other hand, is a comprehensive document outlining overall business strategy, goals, and action plans.
Developing Your Marketing Strategic Plan
The template below is a great guideline of what you can expect in from a comprehensive marketing strategy.
THE FOUNDATIONS
Write a brief executive summary.
Set marketing goals and KPIs.
Identifying and understanding and prioritizing goals based on importance and feasibility.
Primary Goal: Increase Sales Revenue and/or Customer Acquisition. Objectives: Improve Conversion Rate, Customer Retention, Generate New Leads, New Launch or Campaign, Improve Customer Satisfaction Ratings
Secondary Goal: Increase Brand Awareness, Online Visibility and/or Presence. Objectives: Gain Followers, Increase Website Traffic, Strengthen Brand Positioning, Increase Customer/Audience Engagement, Improve Customer Satisfaction Ratings
Defining clear and measurable objectives aligned with the business goals.
Breaking down the goals into short-term and long-term milestones.
Research target market and build buyer personas.
Identifying and understanding target customer/ audience/buyer personas (ICP), industry, and unique selling proposition (USP).
Analyze competitors
Conduct a SWOT analysis- Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats
Identifying and understanding unique selling proposition (USP).
Identifying and understanding existing assets and channels, such as website, social media profiles, etc.
Identifying and understanding past marketing strategies and tactics (successes vs failures), as well as current challenges and goals.
Present an overview of marketing strategy.
Define marketing budget and allocate resources.
Identify key contributors responsible for plan execution.
Establish performance tracking guidelines.
Market Research or Segmentation: Conducting thorough research on the industry, target audience, and competitors. Identifying and targeting specific segments within the broader market.
Keyword Research: Comprehensive analysis and identification of relevant and high-impact words and key phrases based on location, niche, industry for the purpose of optimizing online content to enhance search engine visibility and attract target audiences.
Competitor Audit: A thorough cross-channel examination of similar brand's digital presence through social media, SEO, content marketing to gain valuable insights, enhance strategy and stay competitive in the market.
INBOUND & ORGANIC STRATEGIES & SOLUTIONS
With Inbound Marketing, clients find you through your online presence, ideally leading them to make a purchase, follow/subscribe, or contact you directly.
The benefits of organic (unpaid, naturally occurring) marketing: to attract and engage audiences, to build trust, credibility, and connectiong, leading to increased brand awareness, lead generation, and customer loyalty,
Brand Development: Creating or refining (or overhauling or updating) the brand identity, including logos, taglines, and brand guidelines
Brand Strategy: Outlining the brand's values, positioning, and target audience to guide all branding efforts.
Brand Messaging: Crafting consistent and compelling messaging that communicates the brand's story, mission, and unique selling propositions.
Brand Positioning: Establishing clear guidelines that dictate how the brand should be presented across various channels, ensuring consistency in visuals and messaging.
Brand Design: Creating visual elements such as logos, color schemes, typography, and imagery that represent the brand's personality and values.This is especially helpful in designing website and materials/collateral that reinforce the brand (website, business cards, letterheads, packaging, and other simple visual assets for marketing materials. )
Content Marketing: Creation, development and distribution (social media, email, SEO outreach) of valuable and relevant content (blogs, videos, lead magnets/guides, etc) to attract and engage the target audience.
On-site SEO: Optimize website content to enhance its search engine rankings and visibility, including headings, meta tags, and links
Guest blogging
Off-site Search Engine Optimization: Improving a website's authority and relevance through external factors like backlinks, social signals, and online mentions, contributing to higher rankings and greater visibility on search engine results pages, Optimizing online presence for local search queries to attract customers in the client's geographical area.
Social Media Marketing: Utilizing social media platforms to build brand awareness, engage with followers, and drive traffic.
Account Set Up or Optimization: Establishment and optimization of social media profiles, receiving contacts/messages
Strategy: Content Planning, Posting Frequency, Thought Leadership, Contests, Giveaways, etc
Influencer Marketing: Collaborate with industry influencers to reach a wider audience and gain credibility.
Community Building/Engagement: Participating in online forums, groups, and communities relevant to the client's industry to establish authority and generate leads. (Ex: FB or LinkedIn Groups)
Website Design & Development: Designing and creating a starter website for optimum search visibility, user experience and conversions.
Website Optimization: Successful launch or redesign of the client's existing website, website's contact form
Email Marketing: Nurture leads and maintain customer relationships through subscription opt-ins, targeted campaigns, drip campaigns, newsletters, etc
Public Relations: Developing and managing relationships with journalists and media outlets to earn press coverage/ backlinks, enhance brand credibility and create a positive public image.
Technical SEO: Optimizing the technical aspects of a website to improve its crawlibility, indexing, search engine visibility and performance (site speed, etc)
Experiential/Event Marketing: Creating immersive brand experiences through live events, activations, and interactive engagements to activate, or reinvigorate the brand, connect with consumers on a deeper level and drive brand awareness, engagement, and loyalty. Ex: leading workshops or webinars
Lead Generation: Implementing strategies to attract potential customers and convert them into leads
Referral Marketing: Word of mouth is still a top strategy! Referrals are highly effective because they come with a level of trust, making clients more likely to hire you. Encourage satisfied customers to refer others to the business through incentives or rewards.
Gated Content or digital products such as eBooks or whitepapers,
Analytics & Reporting: Utilizing data analytics tools to track and measure the success of marketing efforts to learn where to focus or readjust.
OUTBOUND MARKETING STRATEGY
Outbound Marketing involves prospecting and reaching out to potential clients or customers before being prompted or solicitated first.
Examples:
Cold emailing
Direct messaging on social media platforms
Attending networking events to meet potential clients
Sending direct mail or physical marketing materials to target businesses
PAID MARKETING STRATEGY
Paid marketing strategy involves allocating resources to pay for advertising space or placements across various channels in order to promote products or services and reach a targeted audience
SEM- Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on platforms like Google Ads or Bing Ads
SMM- Social media advertising on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter
Display advertising on relevant websites or blogs through ad networks like Google Display Network
Sponsored content or native advertising on industry-related websites or publications
Paying for placement in email newsletters or promotional emails sent to targeted audiences
Sponsored Influencer marketing, where you pay influencers to promote your services to their audience
REFINING YOUR STRATEGY
Time to put it all together! If you want to create a comprehensive and detailed marketing plan, follow this outline:
Executive summary: One or two-page summary giving an overview of your marketing plan
Business information: Key points about your brand, mission statement, and business goals
Key marketing goals: Detailed discussion of your marketing goals and how they align with overall business objectives
Competitor analysis: Main findings of your competitive research (Step 4 above)—their marketing channels, traffic sources, successful products, top webpages, paid ads, etc.
SWOT analysis: Detailed SWOT analysis of your business
Target market overview: Market size, opportunities, limitations, and market consolidation—you can use the Market Explorer tool for this
Customer journey map: Analysis of the customer journey in your sales funnel, including the sources/channels of lead generation
Unique selling proposition (USP): What sets your brand apart from your competitors?
Branding: How is your brand currently perceived? How would you like it to be perceived?
Marketing channels: The platforms you’re planning to use—have goals and action items for each of them
Measurements and KPIs: How will you track the performance of your marketing plan?
Marketing strategy and tactics: Tactics and techniques you’ll use to achieve your marketing goals
Marketing budget: Budget allocation by channel—include reasons if you’re investing more in specific channels
Marketing team: Details like key people, responsibilities, and deliverables
Conclusion: Summary of the plan and reiteration of the main objectives
REMINDER: Don’t overcomplicate your marketing strategy by trying to be everywhere for everyone all at once. Your success stems from this: Knowing where your audience lives, and showing up there. It really is that simple! Spend your time, energy, and budget to reach your audience where they already are. By choosing 1 or 2 primary platforms to focus your efforts on, you can avoid the "shiny objects" that will inevitably come your way. Nurture your audience through consistent branding and consistent communication in a consistent place.
Lastly, don't forget to anticipate potential challenges and address any concerns or objects from stakeholders and constituents. Marketing should. becollaborative!
Wrapping It Up
Of course, strategic planning and implementation is not limited to business; this approach is applicable to various aspects of life, including relationships, travel, financial management, and personal development.
Overall, a well-developed, well-crafted marketing plan is essential for guiding marketing efforts, ensuring alignment with business goals, and achieving sustainable growth in the long term. This can be a game-changer for your business however so many soulpreneurs and small businesses struggle to develop and implement effective strategies on their own. This is why seeking the expertise of an outside perspective can be invaluable.
By investing in your future- tapping into the knowledge and wisdom of an experienced marketing expert, you can gain valuable insights, identify new opportunities, and stay ahead of the competition.
I love using a"roadmapping" or consulting approach to provide value and help clients understand the strategy behind holistic marketing. This also helps build trust and rapport over time, setting the foundations for win-win outcomes for all parties.
Need help achieving your goals or simplifying or clarifying your brand/marketing strategy? Let's chat!
Erin Ratliff is a holistic business coach and organic growth & visibility marketer serving energy-sensitive, earth-loving, heart-led soul-preneurs, self-starters, and founders with the mission of personal and planetary healing.
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