5 Ways to Improve Your Marketing Plan

In today’s marketing landscape, you know as a business owner that having a marketing strategy in place is vital. However, the landscape is constantly evolving with new tactics and strategies being formed regularly.

As marketing itself evolves, it only makes sense that your business should evolve too. Learning how to improve your marketing plan can only benefit your company when it comes to that all important bottom line. In this article we will take through exactly what a marketing plan is, why it’s important and 5 tips that could help you improve your marketing strategies today.

What is a Marketing Plan?

A marketing plan is a report that will allow you to clearly define the marketing strategy of your business for the coming year, quarter or month. A marketing plan will typically include.

• A description of your current market position.
• An overview of your business’s marketing and advertising goals.
• A timeline of how you plan to implement your strategies.
• A description of your business’s target market and specific customer needs.
• Key performance indicators (KPIS) you will track and when.

Why is a Marketing Plan Important?

A marketing plan will allow you as a business owner to create a clear picture of your ideal customer, your advertising goals and a timeline for your business to enact your strategies. Allowing you to target your ideal customer with more ease which will reduce costs and increase your chance of turning leads into sales.

Now with this in mind we will take you through 5 ways to Improve Your Marketing Plan.

The 5 Ways to Improve Your Marketing Plan

1. Build The Target Audience

The first and possibly most important step of any successful marketing plan is knowing exactly who your audience is? Knowing what ‘group’ your ideal customer belongs to is critical. Also, what interests do they have? What appeals to them? Where are they located? What’s their favorite social media? These should all be factors to consider when getting to know and targeting your specific audience.

Once, you know who your ideal customer is, you can begin to build targeted campaigns around your audience’s interests. Use the keywords they’ll be searching and make advertisements that will explain how your product or service solves the problem the audience has.

Learn from your competitors, look around the space that your marketing strategy takes place in, what are your competitors doing that you’re not and visa versa.

2. Use Social Media

Using social media profiles can be an excellent way to connect and interact with your audience in a professional manner, whilst giving that all important personal touch. Have conversations, answer questions and build a community.

Keeping your account up to date and accurate is a must, if anything changes about your business your social media should reflect that too. Running regular competitions is another great way to engage with your audience. Be creative and offer prizes that your ideal customer may want.

Posting regularly showing what your business is up to by posting products and sales. Try to keep your content fresh, interesting and engaging. This will help drive traffic up and keep your business or brand in front of your customers eyes!

3. Focus on Top Customers

Pareto’s principle or the rule of 80/20 should be noted. A quick explanation. In business, pareto’s principle is that 80 percent of your customers bring in 20 percent of sales, whilst the remaining 20 percent bring in the remaining 80 percent of sales.

Therefore focusing on the most lucrative 20 percent should help maximize your overall sales revenue. Instead of spending too much time trying to please everybody, strive to build relationships that will last with your top customers.

However, this doesn’t mean neglecting the other 80 percent. Concentrate on keeping your repeat customers happy and engaged.

4. Stay in the Loop

Many Business owners have been caught up with an outdated style of thinking when it comes to marketing. Unfortunately these old techniques have shown minimal results and could actually hurt your overall marketing plan.

Staying ‘in the loop’ as far as digital marketing solutions are concerned is actually a fantastic strategy. Researching different options can expose you to new ideas that could save your campaign from going stale.

5. Don’t Stop Believing

Putting in solid effort with a focused long term goal is the only way forward. Massive overnight success usually doesn’t happen overnight. It will take time to see tangible results, so keep pushing forward and don’t stop believing!

Maintain a consistent schedule, post regular quality content and most importantly interact with your customers. Don’t be disheartened because a strategy didn’t work, trial and error is a big part of every success.

Taking the proper steps to correct these errors, preventing you from making the same mistake twice. Overtime by getting your message to the right demographic, you’ll begin to see some good results!

Bonus Tip: The Review

Today we’ve got an excellent bonus tip for you! Before people buy anything today, they look at the testimonials. They want to know the product they’re investing they’re money and time into is quality and let’s face it. They’ll want to know if what your business is offering is better than what your competitors are offering.

Today’s bonus tip is get customers who have already purchased from your business to leave you a review.

Put your reviews in multiple places to ensure your prospective customers have a great opportunity to see them.

Wherever it may be, Google, Facebook your own website making sure you garner great reviews, whilst responding in a positive critical manner to potential negative reviews.

To Conclude: 5 Ways to Improve Your Marketing Plan

In today’s ever evolving marketing landscape having a marketing plan that works for your business or brand is an increasingly important factor. Recognising who your target audience or ideal customer is whilst setting out clear goals and time scales to achieve them, should help give your business the leg up when it comes to improving your marketing plan.

If you would like more information or help to improve your marketing, take a look at our Knowledge Hub.