5 steps to creating a successful marketing plan

Success is subjective; everyone knows this

But when it comes to being a successful digital marketing agency and working in digital marketing as a successful business, a solid plan is for sure the key to boosting sales, driving that all-important engagement and building a brand your customers return to, again and again.

Whether it's to increase ROAS, boost social media presence or drive sales, a solid marketing strategy helps you achieve those goals. It will also be your roadmap through each step and help you monitor performance and ensure that you are on track at every stage of your plan.

But, what are the steps and stages that you need to plan for? Well, below are our five tips when creating a successful marketing plan.

Why should you create a marketing plan?

Yes, it's a big question, but when starting a successful marketing plan, you need to ask yourself Why? What's the purpose of your business, and why should your customer choose you?

You can do this is by identifying your mission statement and business promise.

What is the customer-based problem you're trying to address or the niche in the market that you've spotted that you hope to resolve? What type of experience should a customer expect to receive?

Once you know the answers to the above questions, you can create a strong brand message that will resonate with your target customer.

Define your goals

When thinking about what you wish to achieve within your business, it's essential to sit yourself down and identify tangible goals that are feasible for your budget, the scaling capabilities you have, the pain point you're trying to solve for your ideal audience.

Yes, think ambitiously about your goal. For example, everyone wants to become a well-known household name worldwide brand, but it's crucial in the beginning stages to think realistically.

Look at what you want to achieve by the end of the year and the next five years. How can you realistically achieve this?

Our tip is to think about your top 3 goals and ensure they SMART goals- specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.

For instance, if your main goal is to grow your audience, you'll need to work on brand awareness, which is a whole marketing strategy in itself. This helps you define the approach of your ads, your targeting, and the channels you might use to get your message across.

Identify your audience

After defining your goals, now you need to target and define your audience. After all, you need a visual who has a want and need for your product or service.

A common technique used and what is recommended is creating audience personas.

You should aim to create 3-4 personas based on the types of people you attract and want to target. A complete persona will contain the person's background, career, values, goals, reservations, interests and decision-making tendencies.

All the information gathered is relevant to your target customer, and from this information, you can begin to understand which marketing channels they're most likely to use. From here, it's possible to narrow down the most relevant channels for your brand and the audience that you'd most like to target.

Compiling your journey map

Now that you know your target audience, the following standard recommendation is to compile all this information to understand how your target customer interacts with your online presence. Is it through a Facebook Ad, word of mouth, Google Search or Instagram?

The more information gathered, the more detailed your journey map allows you to explore more options for compiling your digital strategy to monitor what resonates best with your target audience.

For example, if you're working on your brand awareness campaign, you see a particular audience segment performing better than another.

Now you can start identifying the attributes that make up this audience, which will assist you in growing this relevant and engaged audience for future marketing efforts.

Analyse the evidence

Once you have started putting your plan to action, it's time to gather feedback.

There is a plethora of information and ways you can monitor your businesses performance in the digital space. Whilst this is an advantage, it can be overwhelming.

If you find yourself overwhelmed, it's best to refer back to your goals; from there, you can understand what numbers are the best way to measure your success.

Did you increase conversations? Did you increase engagement? Did you attract more subscribers?

By having this information and touching base with where your audience interacted with your brands, you can look for what is working and what isn't.