How long is your marketing plan? 10 pages? 32 pages? When was the last time you actually read through it? Most of our clients have marketing plans that are longer than their employee handbook. Being detailed is important, but being practical should be top priority. Having a plan that new employees can quickly understand is essential to ensure your sales and marketing team are always on the same page.
In a previous blog post we talked about the sales and marketing funnel. Having a one page marketing plan helps keep everything simple and easy to understand. So what are the most important things to include?
Target Audience
Understand your target audience. You can’t market and advertise if you don’t know who your message is for. What area are you trying to target? What age are they? Are they male or female or both? Are they business professionals? What job role do they have? Building your ideal client profile is the most important part of your marketing plan.
Your Message
Understand your message to your target audience. What are you trying to sell? Is it a product or a service? What is your goal for your advertising? These are questions that you should ask when building your marketing and advertising strategy. Make sure your message is uniform across all your platforms so you don’t confuse your target audience. Include this in your marketing plan so your sales team and your marketing team are selling your product/service the same way.
Sales Process
Outline your sales process in its simplest form. Detail your lead capture system so your marketing team knows what to do with warm leads that come in. Then outline your lead nurturing system so your sales team knows how to handle the leads. Next, outline your conversion strategy. This might have already been outlined in your sales and marketing funnel so you can just refer back to it. This is a quick and easy way to see your sales strategy at a glance.
After the Sale
Once prospects become your clients, what happens next? Do you just forget about them? Do you send them a feedback form? Outline how you deliver a world class experience to your clients. This can be done by your client and services manager and/or your marketing team. The goal is to make your clients into advocates so they start “advertising” your product to others. Even a simple “thank you” letter every month can go a long distance. Build a feedback strategy to ensure you touch every client at least once a month. This is a great way to improve your customer service score with them.
When it comes to building your marketing plan, one page should be plenty of room to detail the important parts. When it becomes too long, you run the risk of never looking back at it again. For more ideas, we recommend the book The One Page Marketing Plan by Allan Dib. It has many great tips on how to build an effective one page marketing plan. Need help getting started? Schedule a Free Internet Marketing Analysis with one of our Digital Marketing Consultants to start improving your marketing strategy today!
